Iris comes toward me, and I expect her to hit me, but she only puts her arms around me. She and Moody hold me until I stop hitting at them. They shush me, kiss my cheeks, wipe at my tears with their bare hands.
I sob. “Which one of you was it?”
“Sissy.” Moody holds my chin so that I’ll look into her eyes. “Sweetheart, Dara killed herself.”
“That’s a lie,” I spit out.
“It’s the truth.” Moody knows that she’s the only one who can reach me. For all our fighting, she has never lied to me. She’s trusted me with pages and pages of journal entries when we were children. Every dark fantasy, every vulnerable thought. Every kiss. Her first time with her high school boyfriend, the one who broke her heart. She told me about the rags she stuffed into his tailpipe to try and kill him. She fell into my arms and cried for him.
I have seen Moody at her ugliest, and I know what she’s capable of. But I also know how much she loves me. Enough to tell the truth.
She sees the change in my expression, and she frowns sympathetically. “You tried to save her, Sis, but she didn’t want it.”
“No.” I understand that I’m being unreasonable.This is grief,I think.This is what will happen to me when Edison is dead.It terrifies me that I could be so unlike my sisters in this moment. So weak.
Iris runs her fingers through my hair, pushing so much love into the gesture that it breaks me anew. “She wasn’t strong enough.”
But she was. I was sure that she was. How could I have been so wrong?
I never even told her my real name.
I see myself with Dara as she speeds over the state line, both of us singing, an open bag of gummy bears in the cup holder and melting in the sun. Somewhere unreachable, that car is still going, disappearing into a horizon I will never reach. I can’t follow her. Dara has made her choice, and she’s left me here alone to deal with mine.
25
Two days pass before I decide to see Edison. It’s an act of restraint not to answer his texts asking how I’m doing. He knows Dara was a friend, and the fact that he doesn’t ask questions about what happened only deepens my love for him. But I say nothing, not even to tell him I don’t want to talk about it.
When I finally pull my shit together and pick up my phone to call Edison, Moody puts her hand over mine, stilling me. It’s late morning, and Iris is in the shower belting out a Drowning Pool song as she lathers her hair.Let the bodies hit the floor / Let the bodies hit the floor.
“I want to make sure you’re okay,” Moody says.
I know she doesn’t mean Dara. There’s been an unspoken agreement that Dara is behind me. She was only ever supposed to be a tool in my plan, and if I formed an attachment to her, that’s my own fault. She should have been nothing to me. Barely a friend, and certainly nota sister. It is only in some very distant, dark, small place within me that Jade is grieving for her. And Jade isn’t real. She’s not even a ghost.
“I’m fine,” I say.
Moody nods to the phone in my hand. “Are you sure you’re ready to talk to him?”
“It’s been two days. Any longer and it will start to look suspicious,” I say. “He might come over to check on me.” Beneath the sweet, caring Edison who always texts to be sure I got home safely, there’s an undercurrent. A fierce, protective man who would break down the door to save me if he thought I was in danger.
If it were me in the bathtub, if I’d tried to take my own life the way that Dara did, he would have ripped me from the water, shoved his finger down my throat to make me gag the pills back up. Grabbed me by my shoulders and shaken me and demanded to know what I was thinking. Don’t I know how stupid that was? Don’t I realize he would die if he lost me?
Dara deserved to be loved like that. She deserved to have someone who could have saved her.
Moody sweeps the hair from my forehead, and she smiles. The sunlight steals across her face, making her angelic. But I know her. I’m not some man she’s seducing; she can’t hide who she is from me. “You know I trust you with all of our lives, yeah?” she says. “I didn’t want to ask you this in front of Iris. You know how she gets.” Her sober tone forces me to meet her eyes, dread churning in my stomach. “Are you sure you’re keeping Edison alive because it’s what’s best for us, and not because you want more time to play with him?”
I hate it when my sisters say his name. As though he’s a part of their world, as though they’re in on his love for me.
The selfishness of this thought startles me, but I don’t look away. I keep my gaze steady. Pulse even. Breaths calm.
“The plan is the best way to avoid suspicion,” I tell her.
Edison’s corded arms around me. My skin rising with bumps when he kisses the back of my neck in his sleep. The churning of his blood and the beating of his heart when I press my ear to his chest.
“I don’t care about him,” I say. “I’m doing it for us.”
The grace fades from Moody’s expression, and all I can see are her wild green eyes. Unreadable. Cold. Deadly. A perfect mirror of my own.
She tries to read my mind, and I lock her out. I don’t want her to see what Edison means to me. I don’t want her to see that I’mlying.
