“I dare say he often hears worse things said than I am going to say. But he is an ugly fellow! I am glad he is gone.”
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Volume II, Chapter Sixteen
Liz found two gallons of shockingly hot-pink paint in the basement, a remnant of one of Mom’s manic phases. My nose scrunched when I saw the color, more so when Liz painted a broad slash of it on my bedroom wall.
It was blinding.
Liz’s lips twitched. “Hey, I also found a really dark puke-green paint and a gallon of black. Pretty clearly not from a manic phase.”
Biting my lip, I stared at the paint slash on the dirty beige wall. “Does she ever have a phase during which she buys light blue or purple?”
“In a word? No.” Liz nodded at the paint can in the middle of the floor. “I actually like it. Bold and fun.”
I was less enthusiastic. But I had to sleep here. “Would you paint your own room this color?”
Liz waved her paintbrush in the air, spraying a few drops of paint on Boris’s tail. He kept whirling in a circle, trying to lick it off.
Laughing, Liz somehow managed to corner Boris long enough to wipe off his tail with turpentine. “Jane would kill me. And, yeah, I’d probably go with light blue or purple.”
“Great minds think alike.”
But Liz and I weren’t alike. At all. Mr. Fogarty might be nice, but he was also wacked.
Liz set the brush on top of the still-open paint can. “So what do you think? Hot pink or drive to Menards for light blue or purple?”
She must seriously have nothing to do today. “Menards?”
“Killjoy. What are we going to do with all of this hot-pink paint?”
“Put on sunglasses and paint Mom’s office?”
Liz shook a hot-pink finger at me. “I take back what I said before. Maybe you haven’t changed.”
I smirked. “Not in the essentials.”
A few hours later, after the fumes from the violet paint that now covered my bedroom walls became too much for both of us, Liz talked me into a run to Dairy Queen, claiming she might faint if she didn’t have a cherry Dilly Bar.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that Dad had sicced her on me as my new guard dog, but I didn’t have anything else to do, and it was better than a lock on my bedroom door. Since I wasn’t Liz, though, I didn’t get a cherry Dilly Bar.
I got a chocolate one.
She sprang for it. What the hell. I let her.
“So.” Liz bit off a chunk of her Dilly Bar. “You were going to tell me about reform school.”
I shook my head. “I was going to slog through my Chemistry and Algebra homework, then spend some quality time mangling my D chord.”
She rolled her eyes. “Mary used to bitch about her D chord, too. What is it with D chords?”
I licked my Dilly Bar. “To be fair, my C chord can be frightening, too. My teacher mentioned bar chords but said she’s not sure she has the courage to listen to me trying them.”
“Ha ha.” Liz eyed my Dilly Bar as if she contemplated stealing it the moment she finished hers. Good luck with that. “You make me glad I never tried guitar, but you’re sticking with it. Lack of better things to do?”
Zing. The Liz I knew was back.
I shrugged. “It’s better than talking about reform school. Believe me, you don’t want to know.”
“I wouldn’t mind hearing.”
I jerked at the deep voice behind me. Whirling in the booth, I looked up—and up some more—at Zach. His deadly serious face was an improvement over his angry scowls last night while the band played, but not by much.
“Zach?”
“I also wouldn’t mind a Dilly, but I think I’ll stick with cherry.” He whipped his own cherry Dilly Bar from behind his back. “Join you?”
“Um.”
Taking that as permission, he sat down. “You were about to tell your sister—Liz, right?—about reform school. Don’t let me interrupt.”
It was more than Zach usually said to me, but he also wasn’t usually this cheerful. Had he gotten together with Lauren after last night’s gig? Had he scored a million kisses—or more than kisses—when the only person I’d kissed in forever, and only by accident, was Drew?
I bit off a huge chunk of my Dilly Bar. It was so cold, I started to choke.
Liz and Zach both thumped me on the back. At the same time. Then both started laughing.
Liz swallowed the last of her Dilly Bar and wiped her hands, several fingers of which were still painted hot pink or violet. “I’m Liz, yeah, but do I know you? Zach?”
“I was two years behind you. Mary’s class.”
“I remember now. You’re an artist like Cat. You were at the art show last spring.”
“Cat’s a much better artist, but I try. I also played in the band with Mary until she left for MIT.”
The whole time he was talking, Zach methodically bit off the cherry coating on his Dilly Bar. He now had a round blob of vanilla ice cream on a stick. Bizarre. No wonder he played classical music on his car radio.
It didn’t explain the Cat in the Hat tattoo, though.
“Oh, yeah.” Liz lifted an eyebrow at Zach’s devoid-of-cherry-coating Dilly Bar, so I wasn’t the only one. “You play bass? Mary mentioned you, but I’ve never heard you play. How do you feel about D chords?”
D chords. Guitar. Shit. So much for claiming I’d played guitar for years. Of course, thanks to Cat, Zach already knew the truth, no matter what Liz and Jane claimed to Kirk.
Zach looked at Liz, not me. “On bass, chords are a different concept. I just play roots and fifths. I mean—” He broke off when we stared at him blankly. “Bass guitar is different. We don’t always get a lot of respect.”
Liz nodded. “I know what you mean. My incredibly inspired rendition of ‘Chopsticks’ on piano doesn’t get a lot of respect, either.”
When Zach laughed—even though he’d never laughed at a single thing I’ve ever said—I almost choked on my Dilly Bar again.
I held up a hand before either Liz or Zach, or both, could slug me.
Zach turned to me. “So you do play guitar? Or are you just starting? Jeremy said something, but then he and Cat broke up, and then last night . . .”
I frowned. “What about last night? I was there.”
“No kidding.” Zach licked all the way around his bare Dilly Bar, casually, and not fast enough to keep it from dripping all over the table. “But it’s cool. Lauren is cool. That girl Drew goes out with . . . isn’t.”
I had a million questions, but I didn’t plan to ask them in front of Liz. Probably not even if Liz weren’t here.
She was, though. Silently watching Zach and me as if we were the best ping-pong match she’d ever seen.
But Liz didn’t watch sports; she played them. For blood.
Like now. “Cat has played guitar forever, but she’s always bitched about mangling her D chord.”
I tried giving her a look.
“Do you? Play? Really?”
Zach was annoyingly persistent.
I was just annoyed. And sick of lying and bullshit and covering my ass. And possibly, despite the violet paint now covering my walls, sick of Liz.
I’d have to think about that one.
“I play, but I suck.”
The moment I said it, my breath caught when I realized too late that Zach would make some perverted joke about exactly how I suck. Like guys did. Even in front of me.
“Taking lessons?” He nodded without so much as an eye twitch to tell me he’d already heard I sucked. And not on guitar. “It takes a while to get good. Your sister Mary—”
“Is a child prodigy. Yeah. I know.”
He shook his head. “She’s good, actually, but it took a while. She joined our band when she was still busy mangling her D chord. Like you might say.”
Liz patted my hand. “See? Mary sucked, too.”
“I didn’t say she sucked.” Zach leaned back in his seat, his Dilly Bar now dripping down the front of his shirt. He glanced down, wiping off the biggest blob but leaving several smaller ones. Guys. “It takes a long time to get good. You shouldn’t wait until you’re good to join a band.”
I thought about Cat. About how she’d sung with Zach’s band and been jeered until she fainted.
I wouldn’t have fainted; I would’ve crushed whoever pulled crap like that on me. But still.
“That’s not what I hear from Cat.”
Zach started licking his Dilly Bar so intently, I almost thought he hadn’t heard me. Or maybe he was struggling to come up with an excuse for what they’d done to Cat, but he looked as if red ants were crawling around inside his shirt. “Hey, I don’t like to get involved.”
I snorted. “Right. I saw how uninvolved you were last night when Chelsea started cutting on Lauren.”
Zach’s hand tugged on the collar of his T-shirt as if it was too tight. Maybe from all those red ants crawling around and all. I bit my lip, wishing I hadn’t mentioned Lauren. Wishing I knew why I cared that he was so protective of her and not, say, Cat.
I already knew he didn’t give a flying fuck about me.
He sighed. “The thing is, Cat didn’t join our band. That time they asked her to sing, they set her up.”
Liz glanced at me and nodded.
I frowned, jabbing my Dilly Bar in Zach’s direction. It’s possible a dab of ice cream hit him on the nose. “Did the whole band know? Is that why Cat and Jeremy broke up?”
“Cat didn’t tell you why?”
Liz asked the question, not Zach, startling me.
I whirled on her. “She told you?”
She shook her head. “Not me, not Jane. But I figured you’d know.”
“Not a clue.”
I didn’t plan to tell Zach that Cat didn’t speak to me, even if he already knew. He seemed to know everything.
For once in my life, I didn’t know a damn thing.
Liz and I both looked at Zach, who held up his hands in surrender. His right hand, holding his quickly melting Dilly Bar, had ice cream dripping off of it.
He licked his hand, then shrugged. “Cat told Jeremy that you don’t play guitar, so Kirk reamed out Jeremy when your sisters told him you do.”
I frowned. “Why would Kirk care one way or another?”
He looked out the window so long, I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Finally, he turned back to me. “Let’s just say bands are easier when love interests aren’t involved.”
What did that mean? “But I’m not—”
“Anyone’s girlfriend. Yeah. That’s not reassuring, as it turns out, to some of the girlfriends out there.”
Including Cat?
No way. Jeremy’s hair was bright green this week, which wasn’t an improvement on last week’s burnt orange. Cat was afraid I might want him? She was afraid I’d go after anyone she wanted? Was that why she hated me?
Was she really such an idiot?
“But you were going to tell us about reform school.”
Lost in thought, I blinked at Zach’s words. For someone who had zero interest in me, the guy didn’t let go. “No, I wasn’t.”
Liz kept licking the stick from her Dilly Bar, which she’d long since finished. Finally, she set it on the table, then picked it up again and started playing with it. “I know I’m not Jane, but wouldn’t it help to tell someone about it?”
I smiled sweetly at her. “Someone like Jane?”
Liz laughed, surprising me. “She’d coo and say all the right things, I admit, but she’s not here.”
“Don’t tell me. You locked her to the fridge in your apartment so you could beat it out of me?”
Liz tilted her head. “Tempting. She did eat all the leftover pizza.”
Zach laughed. “How about if I coo and say all the right things instead?”
I just stared at him. And kept staring.
He blinked first. “You figure I suck at cooing as much as you suck at D chords.” When I bristled, he held up a hand. “Not that I said you suck at D chords.”
He didn’t have to. Jazz had finally shown me an easier way to play a D chord, but even that was hit or miss.
“Seriously. You don’t want to know.”
“Why did you cut your hair?” Liz leaned forward on her elbows, totally ignoring the fact that I didn’t want to talk about it, let alone in front of Zach. At least she didn’t make a crack about how vain I’d always been about my long hair, but maybe she was just waiting for the perfect moment.
My chin went out. “If enough girls try to yank out your hair by the roots, you eventually decide you’d rather give them less of a target.”
I didn’t add that our jailers gave us a bare minimum of bathroom time at Shangri-La, that hellhole. I refused to mention bathroom time in front of Zach. He was already looking at me as if he were wondering if leprosy was contagious.
“You weren’t . . . safe?”
Liz’s eyes were bright and shimmery, almost as if she might cry. Liz? Cry?
I waved a hand. “Like I said. You don’t want to know. Compared to everything else that went down, the length of my hair didn’t much matter.”
Liz pressed her lips together. Tightly. Yeah, those were definitely tears in her eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
“Your hair looks good.”
Liz and I whirled on Zach. After a long, weird moment, Liz laughed first. “He’s right, you know. Your hair looks good either long or short.”
Hey, I had a mirror, okay? But I didn’t see any point in arguing. It’d take years to grow my hair all the way back, and Zach would be long gone from my life by then.
Or much, much sooner.
He shrugged. “I don’t see why so many girls wear their hair long. It must be a pain in the ass.”
Running a hand through her shoulder-length hair, Liz laughed again. “You got that right. Shorter makes life easier.” She turned to me. “And like your friend says, it looks good on you.”
Zach wasn’t my friend.
He was Lauren’s friend.
I don’t know why I kept picturing them together, in vivid detail, then blowing up the picture in my mind with a huge crate of explosives.
“So reform school gave you short hair.” Zach took a last lick of his Dilly Bar, then used the stick to start a sword fight with Liz. No, Liz started it. Of course. “Did you get anything else good from reform school?”
I frowned. I put my haircut under the category of “How I Survived Reform School,” not “Good Things That Happened in Reform School.” The latter list had exactly zero items on it.
“I didn’t want a haircut.” Understatement. I’d cried the whole time the barber hacked away at my hair. “The only person who saw anything good about locking me up in reform school for a year was my dad. Period.”
I shot Liz a quick glance, daring her to argue, but she just studied me the way she’d study a rat from one of her lab experiments. None of the rats had a good life, as I recall, except maybe the one Mary rescued and kept in her room until the day Mom opened the door, shrieked, and collapsed in a heap in the upstairs hall.
Liz kept watching me for several seconds. “Mom said your grades went way up in reform school. Was it easier?”
I gave her the Glare of Death, and not just because Zach did not need to know about my grades. Or my hair, although that was already obvious. Or anything else about me.
Finally, I shrugged. “It was harder, actually. Everything in reform school was hard.”
Understatement.
“But you never used to—” Liz broke off and glanced at Zach. “I mean, that’s great. Good teachers?”
“They were all strict, cranky, sadistic assholes.” A lot like Jazz, my guitar teacher, come to think of it. “What’s not to like?”
Zach laughed, softly, stopping when he realized that Liz and I weren’t smiling.
“Hey, good preparation for college, right? Have you taken the ACT or SAT yet? Where are you thinking about going?”
Had he not heard a word of this conversation? I’m a reform-school survivor. No college will want me. I have no future. Period.
“I haven’t thought about it.”
Okay, I had. Of course. Even if I hadn’t had a bazillion empty hours in Shangri-La to think about college, I couldn’t possibly miss all the college chatter in my classes this fall. From almost everyone except Cat.
I’d tried to ignore all of it, just like Cat ignored me.
I glanced at Liz, wondering what embarrassing thing she’d say next in front of Zach. She slid another glance at him and didn’t say anything.
I pointedly checked the clock on my phone. I didn’t need to check it to confirm that there were no texts, no emails, no nothing. “Oh, geez. Didn’t Mom tell us to get our butts home in time for dinner?”
Liz looked horrified. “Dinner? Mom?”
I glared at her, daring her to screw up my escape plan. “She said she was making her Charlie Special.”
The Charlie Special, previously known by any number of names of Jane’s boyfriends over the years, was a monstrosity that might’ve originally been a meat-and-noodle goulash that Mom claimed was her grandmother’s old recipe, but it came out gray and vile. It also tended to overwhelm the bathroom capacity in our house and, occasionally, the nearest hospital ER.
“No shit.” Liz flicked a glance at Zach. “Er, so to speak.”
I nodded. “So we should hurry.”
“In the opposite direction.” Liz finally caught the looks I kept shooting her, though, and sprang to her feet. “Hey, great to meet you, Zach. Maybe I’ll catch your band sometime.” She winked at him. “At least, if Kirk doesn’t see me first and slam the door on my face.”
He grinned at her and nodded, then turned to me. “I’d love to hear you play guitar sometime, too. Even your dreaded D chord.”
“Sure.” When hell froze over. “Maybe sometime.”
We all walked out to the parking lot together before Zach headed to his hideous bright-orange VW Beetle and Liz and I went to the Prius. I waved good-bye to him before climbing in.
“Nice guy.” Liz started the engine. “Have you known him long?”
I could tell she meant to ask if I’ve been going out with him long. Or sleeping with him long. Or whatever.
Buckling my seatbelt, I refused to think about what everyone assumed. “I don’t know him at all.”
“Hmm.” Liz shot out of the parking lot with her usual high-speed roar. I had no idea a Prius was capable of it. “My guess? He’d like to change that.”
Ha. Right.
When we got home, Mom was too busy shrieking at Dad to notice my new violet walls or to care that Liz and I had picked up enough Chinese takeout on the way home to feed the entire offensive line of Woodbury High’s football team.
Or Liz, as the case may be.
When I grabbed a small carton of rice and the entire container of seafood delight and headed for the stairs, Liz put a hand on my arm, stopping me.
“Dad could probably use a break from the shrieking. Should we all eat together?”
Mom was still pissed about all the lies Dad fed her when he sent me to Shangri-La. Mom’s lungpower was amazing, but I didn’t feel like rescuing Dad. He deserved it. So I kept going.
Liz’s grip is ridiculously strong, though, and she bought me violet paint and helped paint my room. She also treated me to DQ, so it didn’t seem like the right moment to take her down.
As if I could.
“Fine.” I returned to the kitchen table just as Cat showed up, grabbed the carton of vegetable lo mein, and tried to make a similar move for the stairs.
Liz grabbed her, too. “Since when is everyone around here so antisocial?”
“Since Lydia broke out of reform school?” Cat’s claws were out, reminding me of Amber. “Why? Is this one of those special moments when we’re supposed to hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya’?”
Liz frowned at her. “Cat, what’s happened to you?”
She flicked a snotty look at me. I think it made at least a thousand of them. “Like I said. Lydia came home.”
Liz glanced toward the stairs. Based on the decibel level, Mom and Dad were battling it out in their bedroom and unlikely to quit anytime soon. “Do you have any idea of the hell Lydia went through in reform school?”
Oh, great. Just what I needed. Cat hearing anything about reform school and telling the whole school.
Cat smirked at me. “Did you? Excellent.”
Wow.
Liz wrapped an arm around my shoulders. I nearly brushed her off—I can handle my own battles with Cat, thank you very much—but my legs actually felt a little wobbly. I told myself it was a delayed reaction to the paint fumes.
Cat rolled her eyes. “Don’t tell me. Lydia even has you under her spell. Did she tell you her so-called charms aren’t working for her at school anymore? Except maybe with guys who are just looking for an easy lay?”
I sucked in a breath.
I also pictured Zach in his silly pseudo swordfight with Liz this afternoon. Was he like Drew and every other guy? Just wanting to hook up with me?
No, he had zero interest. He also had Lauren.
I glanced at the rice and seafood delight I’d set back down on the table. It wasn’t too late to grab them and go as far away from here as fast as humanly possible.
But not to Montana. Or Milwaukee.
As I reached for the containers, a chair slammed down on the floor. I whirled to find Liz in Cat’s face, which had gone pale, maybe because Liz had her in a headlock.
“I can’t breathe.”
“Like you say, excellent.” Liz loosened her hold, but not much. “Maybe you’ll stop talking about your twin sister like that.”
Shrugging, I grabbed my rice and seafood delight. I was tempted to dump Cat’s vegetable lo mein on the floor, but Liz would probably put me in a headlock. It wasn’t worth it.
None of this was worth it.
“Let her go, Liz.”
Liz, being Liz, didn’t.
“Seriously. Please.”
The impromptu wrestling match brought back vivid nightmares of bench-clearing brawls at Shangri-La, which were always stopped, but the same way the refs at a pro hockey game stop them: after letting the slugs fly for a few minutes. I felt like heaving. I’d also lost my appetite for seafood delight, which was almost unheard of.
Losing every shred of self-respect I’d ever had, I also started to cry.
Damn it.
Just like that, Liz released Cat, picked the overturned chair up from the floor, and proceeded to sit down on it. She dug into the sweet-and-sour chicken as if nothing had happened. Turning away from them both, I wiped my eye with the back of my hand, then turned back and grabbed the chair next to Liz.
Cat sat down, too. I think it had more to do with Liz’s barked command—“SIT!”—than a desire to hang with her sisters.
I knew the feeling.
“So let’s talk.”
Liz, of course.
I raised my hand. “Don’t I have a right to the assistance of counsel or at least a phone call?”
Grinning, Liz waved a rice-coated fork in the air. “There’s no point in calling out for pizza, since we already have Chinese, so you don’t need a phone call. But if you’d like a lawyer present, I can ask Mom to join us.”
I laughed. Before Shangri-La, I don’t remember anything Liz ever said being funny. After a day spent sniffing paint with her, she was growing on me.
“You really are falling for her crap.” Cat, whose vegetable lo mein sat untouched, stuck out her lower lip. It reminded me of our seventh birthday, when Mom gave her a Barbie doll but gave me a G.I. Joe. “You drank the Kool-Aid.”
“No, but I would if we had any. Especially cherry. Hey, let me check.” Frowning, Liz pushed back from the table and went to the fridge. She returned with two cans of Diet Coke and one Coke. She handed me the Coke, kept one Diet Coke, and gave the other to Cat. “No Kool-Aid, sorry. Maybe Lydia’s been force-feeding it to everyone she knows.”
“You know that’s not what I meant.” Cat’s lower lip was still front and center. For someone who didn’t hang with Amber and Tess anymore, she sure acted like them. “Lydia waltzes back into town, acting like she still rules the world, and the whole family falls for it.”
Liz pointed at the ceiling, in the general direction of Mom and Dad’s bedroom, where World War III continued to rage. “The whole family, huh?”
Cat sat back, crossing her arms. The temptation to shove her vegetable lo mein in her face until she choked on it was almost overwhelming.
She must not have noticed my fingers twitching. “Fine. Dad didn’t fall for it, but Mom did. So there’s one rational person in this house besides me.”
“You really don’t get it.” Liz took a long swig of her Diet Coke. “You think Jane and I fall for crap? Was it crap last spring when all those losers you used to hang out with went after you, and we helped you out? Even Mary?”
Cat shrugged. “Maybe I was wrong about Mary. At least somewhat.”
“At least somewhat?”
Based on Liz’s glare, I had a feeling the vegetable lo mein was going to end up in Cat’s face without any help from me.
Cat bit her lip. “Fine. I didn’t know Mary. But you didn’t, either.”
“So maybe you don’t know Lydia.” Liz glanced at me, offering a half-apologetic smile. “Maybe none of us do.”
“Lydia is Lydia. Was, is, always will be.”
“Right.” Liz sighed. “So that’s why you’re treating her as badly as your so-called friends treated you last spring.”
I watched the two of them argue, curiously detached. Actually, no, there was nothing curious about it. Detachment was the first and most useful skill I learned in reform school. It was how I survived.
After a few more volleys back and forth, Cat leaped to her feet. “That was different. I’m different from Lydia. I didn’t deserve to be treated like that.”
Liz’s eyebrows went up. “But Lydia does?”
I’d had enough. Way more than enough. Leaving the seafood delight for another day, when I might again have some semblance of an appetite, I stood up. “Thanks, Liz. For the paint and the help and, well, for today. You can’t fix everything, but I appreciate the fact that you tried.”
I turned my back on both of them before another tear fell. Because Shangri-La taught me more than detachment; it taught me never to let the bastards dance on your grave.