Despite the surface calm, it was not without trepidation that I mounted the stairs to the attic the night of the dance. Partly this was selfish; the twins had promised to do my hair and makeup for the evening, and I wasn’t sure how sublimated aggression would translate to cosmetics use. My vanity was a small thing, however, compared to the deep-seated need to see the twins restored to their former place as pillars of my world. They were supposed to be capable and mature, not sharp-tongued and falling apart.
I knocked on the door of their bedroom already wearing the dress Anton had helped me select from the Baardvaark costume department. The cocktail-length black number hailed from a recent production ofHenry V,set during the late 1940s. It cinched in at the waist and poofed wide over the hips; according to Anton, this was a signature of Dior’s New Look, and thus perfectly suited to the Parisian theme. When I removed it from the dry-cleaning bag, I found a note pinned to the shoulder in Anton’s spiky cursive: “Try not to break too many hearts.”
“What do you think?” I asked diffidently, when Addie opened the door.
She beckoned me inside. “Turn around.” I made a slow rotation, holding the sides of the skirt as though about to curtsy.
My sister nodded in satisfaction. “You have such a tiny waist. It’s perfect for this dress.”
I looked down at myself in surprise. Where the twins and Cam were willowy and narrow-hipped, a look I’d always envied, my figure had a lot more ins and outs. Maybe that wasn’t a bad thing, in this dress anyway. I swished experimentally from side to side. It was like wearing a cloud, only scratchier.
Van got up from her bed to adjust my neckline, which was relatively high-cut but wide enough to expose my collarbone. She twisted my hair into a coil so that we could check the effect in the full-length mirror. “Up or down?”
“Up.” I liked the way it looked: dark dress, pale neck, dark hair.
Van turned to her twin. “Should we give her a beauty mark?”
“People will just think it’s a weird freckle,” I pointed out, not without a modicum of self-pity. My sisters all bronzed in the sun instead of speckling like a springer spaniel.
“It’s winter,” Addie said as she removed the last bobby pin from her mouth and slid it into my hair. “Your freckles hardly show. Anyway, I like them.”
“Addie used to want freckles so badly she Sharpied herself,” Van told me.
“It would have looked better if I hadn’t used red.”
“One of the grading pens?” My voice dropped to a scandalized whisper. We were strictly forbidden to borrow them, as our parents required a steady supply to mark student essays and they tended to slip through our father’s fingers like grains of sand.
“Mom thought she had chicken pox,” Van said.
“But then she realized that was impossible, because you would have had them too.” Addie looked at Van as she spoke. When their eyes met in the mirror I held my breath, lest I disrupt the fragile rapprochement. Van offered a tremulous smile, but Addie’s expression had already shuttered.
“I’m going to check the curling iron.” She kept her eyes on the floor as she hurried from the room.
“What?” Van asked, catching me looking at her. “You think it’s all my fault.”
“I never said that.”
“You always side with Addie.”
“No I don’t!”
Van gave me a look that reminded me of our mother. I supposed she had a point. When battle lines were drawn, I defaulted to Team Addie, in the same way that Jasper and Cam had an unspoken alliance. I’d never thought about where that left Van.
“I’m just surprised,” I said, in lieu of answering her directly.
“That I’m dating a woman?”
“Nobody cares aboutthat.”
Van looked disappointed. No doubt she had a speech prepared.
“What bothers me is that you’re having anaffair.” My heart pounded as I waited for Van to respond.
Her brow furrowed. “Except neither of us is married.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s not cheating.”
“I’m not—wait, you think Phoebe’s with someone else?”
