I found myself in a crowd of people that I didn’t particularly like. They were cruel, but I quickly learned that the best way to protect yourself from getting bullied was to be a bully.
Over the course of that school year, I began to resent Clover for being a living reminder of all the ways I had changed. She knew too much about me. She knew that I sighed every time Beth gave me a hug and that I was secretly scared of bees but could never tell Grandpa Dean. She knew that I didn’t like people to know who my mom was because what if that was the only reason they liked me? She knew too much.
When Clover started at Calvin Prep the following year, shewould try to talk to me about how I was acting different. How I was being a dick. It pained me, but I ignored her and so did my friends.
Sometimes I would hear our mothers discussing the sudden divide between us late at night while they shared a bottle of wine. They chalked it up to puberty. Beth was always saying not to push anything between us and that this was normal. Forcing us together would make it worse.
After a few months, Clover stopped trying. Over the next few years, she would make the occasional friend—usually a kid who stayed for a couple months before changing schools.
I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time, but I lived for summer. Because it was a reprieve. Things bounced back a little, like a rubber band returning to its shape. Our moms would take us on trips. We were never the same Clover and Bennett, but there was always a ceasefire and sometimes things even felt normal.
Sometime around when Clover started ninth grade, everyone at school found out that Beth was my mother’s assistant. That word was all wrong for what she meant to us and how important—how integral—she and Clover were to our everyday lives. But Clover went from the quiet thicker girl to having a target on her back, because now they knew she wasn’t one of us.
That April, Clover turned fifteen and was granted the keys to the social media castle by her mom. After school, she would speed through her homework and spend the evenings scrolling on her phone.
I was painfully jealous. All I wanted was to know what she was looking at. What meme or video had her laughing under her breath. But I had no right to know what made her smile on that little screen of hers.
One night, a few weeks before the end of the school year, oneof my text threads with some of my friends—if you could call them that—started blowing up.
Val, a vicious girl who could stab you in the back with her eyes closed, sent out a link.
My stomach dropped the moment the page loaded.
It was Clover. A selfie in a patch of clover with the bigger house just behind her and a bee buzzing at the edge of the frame. The ground was fresh with rain, but the sun had just broken through the clouds and she was squinting into the light with a laughing smile on her lips. The caption simply said: home.
VAL
What a fucking fraud. I can’t believe she’s posting Bennett’s house and trying to pass it off as hers.
She lives in that little pool house, right, Bennett? It’s barely the size of an apartment. Honestly, she has no idea how lucky she is that your mom pays for her to go to CP.
The responses were immediate and furious. Not even because Clover had done anything so wrong, but because no one wanted Val to believe they thought she was anything other than right. And no one had the guts to cross her.
I eventually turned off the notifications on the thread as I scrolled and studied the handful of photos that Clover had posted. My thumb hovered, nearly liking a photo of her with a book open on top of her face. Beneath, the caption said: osmosis.
Then I remembered that I was Bennett, and she was Clover.
I started to imagine it was me who she was giggling over every time she looked at her phone. Over the next week, I brushed the thought aside, determined not to even entertain the idea. But I would fall asleep with my phone in my hand, wondering what it might belike if she and I could just start with a clean slate. What it might be like if I were someone else entirely.
It was six days before I gave in and created a fake profile. I had never done it before, but Val and her friends were always making secondary profiles for snooping on people who had blocked them or doing recon on crushes.
And that’s how Josh happened. Josh went to Cannon Beach High School. He was going into eleventh grade. He liked sketching, because it was something I was okay at enough to do and post. He used to play basketball, but had quit last year to concentrate on art, because that felt like the kind of fantasy normal teens could have. He had a mutt named Lucy and two younger brothers. His parents were stupidly in love.
JOSH
hey
The message sat for a week before I got a response.
CLOVER
hi unless you’re an old creep or a bot
JOSH
Ha. neither. You?
CLOVER
