Is this what it feels like to be a ghost? To haunt the same halls over and over, waiting for someone to see you, to speak to you, to call for you or send you away again?
—
Quinn returns in the evening. I find them in the common room, drinking a martini garnished with lemon peel, flicking through the pages of one of Godwin’s books too quickly to actually read the words. I have no idea where they conjured up gin.
“Did Ellis abandon you?” Quinn says without looking up.
“Predictably.” I brace my hands against the back of the sofa. “What are you up to?”
“Nothing. I’m bored. Do you want a martini?”
Good lord, does anyone in this family do anything besides drink all the time?
But I can’t afford to be impolite. And besides, growing up with my mother, I can’t exactly pass judgment. “If you’re offering.”
Quinn lets the book fall shut and gives me that grin again—the sincere one, all teeth. It feels like a victory, winning that smile. “Follow me.”
We retreat to the kitchen, where Quinn produces liquor bottles from a plastic grocery bag on the counter; they must have run by the store on their way back from New York. Quinn mixes a fresh drink and drops the lemon peel in with a flourish. When I take a sip, it’s dryer than I’m used to, the taste of vermouth strong in the back of my throat.
“It’s good,” I say anyway, and Quinn snorts.
“If you don’t like it, we can do shots instead.”
It’s a joke, of course—and a good thing, too, because the martini Quinn made isstrong,and the second one they mix is stronger. We both end up sprawled on the common room rug, the room spinning overhead and little waves of heat coursing through my stomach.
“This was a mistake,” I mumble.
“No such thing,” Quinn says, although the slurred way they say it suggests the contrary.
I don’t understand why my mother enjoys this so much. I’m afraid to move, for fear I might detach from the earth and spill unanchored into the sky, my tongue thick and heavy in my mouth.
Or maybe I’m afraid of losing control like she did—drunk in our gallery with a knife in hand, ripping all those priceless works of art to expensive shreds.
I drape my wrist over my eyes, but that only makes the spinning worse. “How often did you get to see Ellis?” I find myself asking. “After you went to Yale. I guess you didn’t come home much.”
A long silence passes in the wake of those words, long enough that I squint over at Quinn and start to wonder if I’ve said something wrong. But at last Quinn exhales and tilts their face toward me, says, “Not much, no. And god knows Karen and Jill weren’t home enough, either.”
It takes me a second to realize Karen and Jill must be Ellis’s mothers. Quinn’s, too, although perhaps not very good ones.
“That must have been hard,” I say.
“Depends who you ask, I suppose. I survived just fine. Ellis, though…”
I’m still trapped in the thick gauzy space of intoxication, but something about the way Quinn says it injects a shot of adrenaline into my blood. And suddenly I’m a little more awake, a little more alert.
“What do you mean?”
Quinn’s eyes are slivers of obsidian glittering beneath their half-lowered lashes. “I mean it fucked Ellis up. She was always a little insecure, but…”
Insecure? “Are we talking about the same Ellis here?”
“Same Ellis. I don’t know what kind of persona she puts on at school, but yeah. Because…well.”
Quinn blows out a heavy burst of air and pushes themselves upright, turning toward me properly, with one knee drawn up. Something about the way they’re sitting reminds me so keenly of Ellis: the body language, perhaps, or even just the clothes. And yesterday wasn’t a fluke; they dress exactly alike. I wonder if Ellis did that on purpose, modeling herself after her older sibling—if she hero-worships Quinn and can’t tell the difference between admiration and appropriation.
Maybe, in some small ways, Ellis is human after all.
“Fuck it. Look. Ellis was always a little weird growing up, you know? She was one of those gifted kids. I’m smart, but Ellis…she was on a whole ’nother level. The tutors almost couldn’t keep up with her. She’d get sobored,so damn pathologically bored. She needed constant stimulation or she’d throw these tantrums and give the whole house migraines.”
