Iris comes thundering down the stairs. She’s brandishing her burner phone like an accusation. “You know how this is supposed to work,” she hisses. Her voice is a rasp so that the neighbors won’t hear. Ever aware of her surroundings, Iris is cool and collected even when her eyes are filled with rage. “You can’t just disappear all night, Sissy. I was this close to going out and looking for you.”
I stare at her. Cunning Iris, who always needs to be in control. She fought with all the violence in her body to keep us together when we were kids. The first time a social worker came to separate us, when we were five, Iris latched onto his back and bit his ear so hard that it bled. He screamed and tried to throw her, but she held on, and it took both of our foster parents and their teenage son to pry Iris away. She was spitting and writhing like a snake, her eyes black with rage.
After I arrived at my new foster placement, I didn’t unpack for a month. I was so sure Iris would come scaling the trellis to whisk me away in the middle of the night. But she couldn’t. The day we were separated, the three of us learned how big the world is. Filled with vast turns and chasms, caves and valleys. We could scream and scream, and the sounds would never find one another.
Now she stares at me in much the same way, because for just a few hours, I made her feel like that terrified little girl again. She didn’t know if I was hurt, or dead, or had driven into a lake and couldn’t shatter the windows of my car in time.
I don’t tell her that I feel some satisfaction, mixed in with my shame. I’m twenty-five years old. I can disappear for a few hours if I want to, and I don’t have to pick up the phone just because she wants to know where I am.
“I was with Edison,” I tell her. Moody comes to stand behind Iris, and her own expression is more contemplative, one eyebrow furrowed, arms crossed and shoulders hunched. Moody shares in Iris’s worry, but she doesn’t judge me. She understands, in her inexplicable way, and watches me now with a hint of admiration. Always caught in the cleanup, I’ve never shown my own interest in killing, and she’s proud of me. Respects what she sees. “And I have to go take a shower now. We’ve got a date later.”
Moody frowns. “You didn’t sleep with him already, Sissy.”
“No.” The accusation rattles me more than I was prepared for, and I clear my throat. “No. It was nothing like that. He needed someone to talk to.”
It may not sound believable, but it doesn’t matter because my sisters can see that I’m telling the truth. When Iris finally speaks, her voice is not exactly calmer, but tentative, like she’s a buzzard circling carrion. “What’s the date? Where are you going?”
“I can handle this, Iris.” I square my shoulders, and immediately I feel foolish in my attempt to counter her ferocity. Behind her, Moody gives me a pitying expression, as though I need training wheels to pull this off. But I don’t care. Edison is mine. Before we came here, all three of us agreed that it was my turn.
“I thought you would be happy,” I say to Iris. “What was it you said to me the last time? That I was too soft?” She said those words exactly. I remember, because I was packing her lover’s limbs and torso into trash bags and duct-taping them crossways like Christmas presents. I did everything for her but tie a bow. That lover was supposed to have been for me, but I didn’t feel right about making him mine. I hated his aftershave when he sat down on the bus bench beside me, and I was so anxious that I spilled my coffee all over his shoes. “There you are!” Iris had called as she sprinted out to rescue me, and sheintroduced herself to the victim before apologizing for her clumsy sister.
He’d grinned in a way I suppose he thought was charming and said, “I must be seeing double.”
But Edison isn’t anything like him. He’s different. This whole mission is different, and I’m in complete control.
Now Iris puts her hands on my shoulders. But there’s no force to her grip. She’s taking the killing-with-kindness approach. “I think Jade needs a twin,” she says.
“No!” I hate that I sound like a petulant child. “I don’t need you for this.”
“You broke our cardinal rule,” Moody says, being practical. “We always check in with each other. When we didn’t hear from you last night, we didn’t know what to think, Sissy. We were about five minutes away from going out to look for you. We would have been seen, and we would have had to abort everything and start over.”
I think—impractically—of the man we buried up in the Arizona wilderness off that hiking trail. He’s the only one in Rainwood to have seen two identical sisters, and he died for our secret.
“I’m sorry that I made you worry,” I say, looking alternately at each of them so they’ll see that I mean it. I don’t add that I’m hurt they think so little of me. I may not have killed anyone yet, but a lifetime in the foster system taught me how to take care of myself. When he was deep into his addiction, I protected Colin from his own dealer. Foster Brother Dearest was built like a linebacker but he didn’t have much grit, and he knew I carried a knife, so he asked me to come along. He was short on cash and his dealer thought he could have a few minutes with me instead. The dealer is lucky that his surgeon was able to reattach his finger.
I’m aware of how I look: tall, but petite. A rounded chin and bigdoe eyes. I know that I come across like easy prey. Even though we’re all identical, Ilooklike the baby of us three. Like I would trust a kindly trucker to give me a ride home, like I give everyone the benefit of the doubt, and I close my eyes at horror movies. But my sisters know me. We’ve all had to survive on our own, and we all made it this far intact.
In the interest of keeping the peace, I tell Iris and Moody exactly where I’ll be and I promise to check in with them. Moody is quick to point out that they’ve always done as much for me. But I don’t tell them about last night with Edison because some selfish, greedy little part of me wants to keep it all to myself. If they knew how gentle he was, and that his hands immediately stopped when he sensed my hesitation, they would understand just how safe I was in his house. The only predator in those four walls last night wasme.
9
I haven’t been to a fair since I was about sixteen. I was with Moody. Just Moody and not Iris, who had been placed in a group home fifty miles away. “I have something for us,” Moody whispered when we met up by the fried-dough stand. She opened her purse and showed me two small white tablets in a plastic ziplock bag.
“Baby aspirin?” I guessed, and she laughed and hugged me.
“X, you idiot,” she said, and took my hands. “I wanted us to try it together.”
The pills, she later told me, were twenty dollars apiece, and she wouldn’t have had enough money to get one for Iris anyway. We made a vow never to tell her about it, and nearly a decade later we still haven’t.
We rode the Ferris wheel, and we were at the top when it came to a halt. Twilight was setting in, and the sky glowed an unearthly neonpink. The lights were giggling and whispering far below our feet. Moody coiled her arms around mine, a warm body against the chilly September air. She had bleached all the color out of her hair, and the tips were still faintly pink with traces of blue. Kool-Aid.
A wave of incredible happiness overtook me while we were stuck there. We’d found each other. Soon enough we’d be torn away again, but for now we were sisters.
“I can read your thoughts,” she whispered.
“What am I thinking?” I’d asked.
She nodded to the car ahead of us. A pair of teenage boys was hanging over the railing, trying to spit on the people below them. “That if they tried to hurt me, you’d kill them.”
