I save it to my phone and send a duplicate to the cloud just in case.
“Are you even going to look at me?” Em demands, dragging me out of my thoughts. “What’s so interesting on your phone, anyway?”
“Lilac Tanner.”
Her lip curls and I bite back a savage smile. It’s rare someone gets Em on the back foot, and I take some credit for being the one to put her there.
“Well, if you’d rather slum it with—”
“My dad doesn’t like you,” I suddenly say, the words coming out of nowhere.
That throws Em even further off-kilter. She stands, then shifts her weight from foot to foot, frowning at the floor.
“I think we should break up. We had a good run.”
Her face dissolves into a snarl and she picks up a pillow and bashes me around the head with it. Even though the stuffing’s soft, the amount of force she uses makes it sting.
“Calm down. You don’t even like me.”
“I do. I—” She falters, the pillow falling from her grasp. “What d’you evenmean?”
“You like when I buy things for you or when you can parade me around school like I’m a status symbol. You don’t actually like me at all, though, do you?”
“Iloveyou.”
A surprised laugh explodes before I can stop it. “Don’t do that. You can’t rewrite this as some big affair.”
She immediately changes tack, and I admire her resilience. “Are you seriously breaking up with me because your dad told you to? Since when do you respect his opinion?”
I run a hand through my hair, so over this conversation, it’s not funny. “Go now and you can keep the car.”
It’s not fancy, just a small model Toyota that I found online, almost new. Still, I know she couldn’t afford one on her own. It’ll hurt her enough to pay for her own petrol from now on.
Em stands beside the bed for a moment longer, her hands clenching and unclenching. “You’re such a dick. I made it so easy for you to change schools.” When I don’t respond, she spins on her heel and leaves.
The instant she’s gone, I turn back to my phone. The order for makeup sits on the screen, luckily directed to Em’s house rather than mine. I duplicate the order and type in Lilac’s address, adding a note, then go back to the clone.
“Hello, little sister,” I murmur, poking around in the different apps Sierra set up to see what other information I can glean. “Let’s see how I can use you to get what I want.”
CHAPTERTHIRTEEN
LILAC
The downsideof feeling good before visiting Sierra is the massive slump I fall into once it’s in the rearview mirror. There are a million things I could do; even if I don’t do anything fun, I should use the time to revise. Instead, I lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling, rewriting history into something more palatable inside my brain.
One fantasy is that I never took drugs. My friendship with Tessa doesn’t start with her rescuing me from a chemically induced fog, but with us on an equal footing, helping each other. My sister’s foster parents never worry that I’m a bad influence. Sierra never spends a day believing that her closest blood relative would rather get high than spend time with her.
How could I have done that when I know how bad it felt when Mum did it to me?
But that’s too far back. Too painful. I’d settle for helping Tessa navigate through her trauma rather than standing by, helpless to do anything but mouth platitudes and yell at her caseworker that she needed more help.
Tears threaten and I roll over, sniffling into my pillow like a small child.
I’m lonely.
Finley and Rosa are lovely, but they’re also acquaintances who are far too new to consider as friends yet. I ache to spend a night with my sister, chatting about nothing and everything.
The ability to text her is both a curse and a blessing. I chuck an anecdote about Mum bringing her home from the hospital for the first time into the open thread, then put the phone aside.
