10

“Remember,” Mom says, lighting the candles we use only on these nights, “we have the family photo shoot next weekend.”

Every summer, she dresses us in color-coordinated outfits and hires a professional photographer to make us look like we not only like each other but play Scrabble every Saturday night after a family sing-along. The photo will feature prominently on our annual holiday card, which is distributed to no fewer than two hundred people across the Eastern Seaboard, including my parents’ college friends and business associates, Mom’s clients, our teachers, and, I’m sure, the Harvard admissions department.

Hatred of this family tradition is one thing my brother and I can agree on, but he’s more vocal about it. When I ask what time the shoot is, he rolls his eyes so hard I’m sure he strains a muscle.

“Ugggh. Are you friggin’ kidding me?” Griffin whines.

“No,” my mom replies, “and please don’t use that language.”

“I said ‘friggin’.

She smiles at me. “Jess, may I pass you the steak?”

“I don’t eat red meat,” I remind her. In fact, I gave it up last year for environmental reasons.

“Saving the world one burger at a time,” my brother adds snidely, and because he’s talking with his mouth full, I get a front-row view of half-masticated steak.

My mother looks genuinely confused. “You’ve always loved steak. This is a lean cut. It’s a little overcooked, maybe, but—”

“I wouldn’t say overcooked,” my dad grumbles from his end of the table. “You wanted medium.”

Mom breathes deeply. “I said medium-rare. Medium ruins it.”

“Is it ruined?” Dad asks, with an edge to his voice.

“I like it bloody.” Griffin smiles.

My mom reaches for the wine. “No, John, it’s fine; medium is fine.” Maybe I should have just eaten the steak. “Jess, have some salad and asparagus, then.”

Silently, Dad passes them down the table.

“Asparagus makes my pee smell.” My brother. I knew he was going to say it.

Sometimes Mom calls Griffin her “work in progress.” I know what she means—my brother is a half-formed cretin whose eventual release into society will no doubt wreak havoc—but I wonder what that makes me, then.

“Jess,” she asks, “when does preseason start?” My mom was a relay swimmer in college. Athletic scholarships helped pay her tuition at Northeastern.

“Actually,” I venture tentatively, “I’m kind of thinking of not playing this year.”

“What? Why?” she asks, alarmed. “You love soccer.”

Like I love steak? My fork glances off the undercooked asparagus I’m attempting to spear. “I don’t know. I’m not that good, really.” Last year, I warmed the bench more than I touched the ball.

“She’s right,” Griff says. “She sucks.” My father gives him a look that says he’s skating on thin ice.

“Sweetie,” Mom says, sliding a hand across the table, “you know it’s not just about field time.”

I do know that. It’s also about being co-captain, about painting your face for games and baking cookies for the team and selling more grapefruit for the booster club than anyone else. It’s about making friends and putting it on your transcript and showing you’re a “team player” and fitting in.

“Yeah, I know.” What’s one more season? But I add, “Guess I’m just worried about getting my applications done.” One thing she can’t argue with.

“True,” she concedes, “but Harvard will want to see extracurriculars, too. How’s that history paper going, by the way?”

Griffin’s jaw drops. “Wait. You’re doing schoolwork over the summer?”

I glare at him. “She’s pulling her grade up,” Mom says. “That’s commendable, Griffin.”

“Finding anything interesting about the Diet of Worms?” Dad asks. “How many calories are there in a nightcrawler?” He loves this joke.

“Har,” Griffin says.

“Actually,” I reply, “I’ve changed the topic. To the Russian Revolution.”

For a moment, I consider telling them about the diaries, but something stops me. If my great-great-aunt really was Anastasia Romanov, then the world will have her eventually. But not yet, not tonight.

“Interesting! Don’t you think, Val?” My dad’s staring down the table at my mom.

“Very cool!” She’s been distracted by her BlackBerry, thumbs pecking at the keyboard like chickens in the dirt.

“Val,” he repeats, because she’s the worst offender of our no-phones-at-the-table rule.

“Sorry,” Mom says but doesn’t stop. “Melissa has a question about the walk-a-thon.” Finally, she looks up. “What?” Sheepishly, she slides the BlackBerry under a napkin. Dad gives her a grim smile.

“Well, it was nice of Mr. Austin to offer you the opportunity—I guess he knows Harvard doesn’t take Bs,” she says.

The irony is that while my dad’s the one with the Harvard degree, my mom’s the one obsessed with me following in his footsteps. Boston’s where my parents met. When asked where she went to school, my mom will say, “Boston.” It took me a while to understand that this was a lie of omission, that even though Northeastern is a very good school, she wanted people to think she’d gone to the city’s more famous university, Harvard (though it is, actually, in Cambridge). When I asked my dad about this once, he said something about a need for approval. I haven’t had the guts to tell either of my parents that I’m far more intrigued by the college counseling office’s sunny brochures from Stanford and UCLA.

“Griff,” Mom says, after another sip of wine, “do you know what history class you’ll take next year?”

“I dunno. Not AP European History. Probably civics.”

“Why do you say it like that?” she asks. A light is blinking on the phone under the napkin, and I can tell it’s quietly killing her.

“Because Butler teaches it, and she’s a total chube,” Griff replies.

“What does that mean?”

“‘Bitch.’”

Mom’s knife rattles to her plate. “Griffin Morgan!”

“What? She is!” In this case, he’s right. Butler’s notorious for sending kids to the office and even once denied Jonathan Hoover a bathroom pass for an entire period; he nearly peed his pants.

“Go.” Mom’s voice is dark. She points to the door. “You’re dismissed.”

He swipes his plate from the table. It clatters as he drops it on the counter. “You’re the one on your CrackBerry!”

“It’s for charity, Griffin. I’m thinking about someone other than myself.”

Griffin looks like he’s eaten a lemon. He shoves his chair under the table, hard. “I thought I was your charity.”

My mom’s voice shakes. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Valerie,” Dad pleads.

She snaps. “No, John. You don’t hear Jess using language like that.”

I do, on the regular, just not in front of her, and I don’t understand why my brother can’t just play along and keep the peace for once.

Griffin sneers at me. “Of course she doesn’t.”

He’s ordered to his room. “I’ll be there in a minute,” my mom says, exhausted.

“Why, so we can have a heart-to-heart?”

“Griff,” my dad says, and my brother slams the dining room door open, shoulder bumping against the frame so hard that I know it will leave a bruise. Sometimes I’m startled to see how much he can look like a man when he still acts like a little kid.

Silence settles over the kitchen. Mom empties the last of her wine. Red lace creeps up her cheeks, the same blush of emotion that I get, the curse of our pale complexion.

This quiet is different from the silence of the library a couple of hours earlier; a current of resentment runs through it. My father’s chair scrapes tile, knife scrapes plate. “Dammit, Valerie,” he says, “not everybody’s perfect.”

What does he mean by this? Perfect like . . . you? Perfect like . . . Jess?

Clearly, I want to tell him; some of us are just better at pretending.

By the time we leave Chili’s, Lila’s sloshed. She sways on the front porch of her house, at the end of a cul-de-sac behind the elementary school. “Bye-eeee!”

“You think she’ll be okay?” Ryan asks. He sits shotgun. I’ve already dropped Josh at home.

After dinner, I called Ryan and offered to pick everyone up—anything to be out of the house immediately. As I pulled out of our garage, I could hear the rattle of doors slamming. At least amid the comfort of dry potato skins and Americana kitsch, of baseball on the flat screens and Ryan’s warm thigh touching mine under the table, I could relax. . . . I could relax until Josh and Ryan started up a game of “Bartender,” daring each other to drink disgusting concoctions of mustard, Sprite, and coffee creamer they mixed at the table. It was a game that Griffin and I used to play as kids—when Griff and I still got along.

Maybe it was funny at first, but when Josh started pretending to dry heave and the family in the corner booth complained to the manager, I wasn’t laughing anymore. By the time an irate Daniel, Josh’s brother, cut us off, I wanted to crawl under the table. As Lila, Josh, and Ryan headed to the car, I did just that, retrieving as many sugar packets and emptied creamer cups as I could. “Sorry,” I whispered to a frowning Daniel. “You okay to drive?” he asked. I am; part of offering to be DD means I don’t have to pretend to drink.

At her house, we watch Lila fumble with her keys. She drops them, retrieves them, drops them again. “I think she’ll survive,” I tell Ryan. “Although tomorrow she might wish she hadn’t.”

“Yeah,” he says, tearing his gaze from the porch. “I guess Josh will check on her.” The worry on his face is quickly replaced by a more familiar look, one that says, Wanna make out? “You want to come watch a movie?”

Watch a movie, like “get a soda.” I glance at the clock. “It’s after ten.”

“Come on,” he says, stretching the seat belt to nip at my ear. “Val will understand; she loves me.”

“She does love you—that tickles.” I nudge him away. “But she and Griff got in a fight.”

“What does that have to do with you?”

“So, then my parents got in a fight,” I say, annoyed—with Ryan or with my parents, I’m not sure, maybe both. Then, with a sudden realization, I’m even more annoyed—if Griffin was grounded, he’ll be home tomorrow. But Evan is coming over, and I don’t want my brother sniffing around.

The thought of the diaries sets my imagination whirring as Ryan continues to nuzzle my neck. How do I tell my boyfriend that, currently, there’s a trunk full of journals in my room that suggest my great-great-aunt might have been Anastasia Romanov, and, right now, I’d rather spend the night with them? I don’t. I blame my curfew.

When I drop him at his house, Ryan gives me a puppy-dog pout. “Sure you don’t want to come in?”

In my mind, I’m already home, starfished on my bed reading the translations of the journals Evan typed up for me. “I can’t.”

“All right.” He swings out of the car before poking his head back inside. “Call you tomorrow? We can watch that movie.” He slurs a little bit, and I realize for the first time that he’s more buzzed than I thought.

Katie’s question swims up like a fish through the muck and the murk: Why are you with him, Jess? Once again, it sparks a small flame of fury inside of me.

“Yeah,” I say, forcing a smile. “That’d be nice.”

He grins. “Love ya.”

“Love ya.”

This is how Ryan always says it: not Love you or I love you or I love you, Jess—just Love ya. Two little words.

He taps the top of my car before I pull away.

Semantics, I tell myself. Only in my peripheral vision, I see that silver, glinting fish.

On the way to my room, I stop at Griffin’s door. “You grounded?” I ask.

“No,” he mumbles. “Get out of my room, nerk.”

“Nice. What does that even mean?”

The video game he refuses to look up from gives his face a sinister glow. “Nerd and dork. ‘Nerk.’”

“Ah, Griffin. If you’d only use your superior rhetorical powers for good instead of evil.”

He throws a balled-up sock at the door. The only thing about me that impresses my brother is that I’m dating Ryan Hart.