Page 23

“If Sasha Stone found out how good it feels to be bad,” Brooke says, and tips me a wink.

The truth is most of me doesn’t know how it feels to be bad. My sister feels so vibrant inside my body now that I’m aware of her; it’s like everything else about me—skin, hair, teeth, arms, legs, toes, and eyes—are merely part of the vehicle that was made for her, just waiting patiently for the takeover when they got to live too. I’ll fight it as long as I can, my mind the last holdout once everything else has abandoned itself to this new experience.

I ignore my phone during the football game, squeezing out the fight song like it’s the best sixty-four measures that ever existed and avoiding eye contact with the brass section. They don’t even make it into my peripheral.

I drop off the girls, ignoring a weighted suggestion from Lilly that I check my texts and a knowing nod from Brooke when she gets out, shutting the passenger door with her butt and then smearing her face all over the window as I try to back out of her driveway. I laugh, my mouth making the right shape and my throat producing the sound it’s supposed to, but the truth is I can’t wait to get home.

I can’t wait to stop being myself.

Hands that don’t fumble or hesitate, no waiting for permission or asking in the first place. Tree bark scraping across my skin as I slide down to the ground, knees a weak mess of desire. But I don’t feel the pain, don’t feel the hard ground underneath me or the pressure on top now. I can’t feel these things, because it’s not me. Not my body curled in ecstasy, toes pointed at the moon. Not my nails slicing red ribbons down his back. Not my blood rising to the surface of my neck, something I’ll have to hide later, when I am myself again.

There are no words, only sounds, as if my clarinet were jammed down her throat, every breath passing unintelligible sounds that compose a song of victory. She is a feral thing, my sister, long denied and now unleashed. She takes what she wants, scratching, pawing, tearing at him. She’ll have bruises, but so will he.

The three of us will study them later, and remember.

I wake sore, lips swollen as if I’d played for hours. My fingers stray to my face, brushing aside hair somehow laced with dead leaves. The rising sun catches a note taped on the footboard, lined paper bearing a message meant only for me.

Told ya it’d be fun

And underneath me, a smear of blood on my sheets.

ten

I. Things I Know

A. This has gone too far.

1. My sister had sex with Isaac.

2. My sister lost my virginity.

3. I can’t control myself.

II. Things I Don’t Know

A. How to stop

B. If I want to

My mom is always begging me to talk to her more, and that could be kind of a problem. If I open my mouth, all kinds of things are going to come out: accusations, admissions, confessions. I can tell her about my sister, her heart pumping away inside of me, and I imagine my mother’s will respond, picking up a rhythm it believed it lost years ago. Now that I know about my twin, I wonder how I could have discovered her only recently, never spotting her in the perpetual dark circles under Mom’s eyes, whoever the woman is on the other end of Dad’s mysterious calls, the long silences between my parents that stretched out longer over the years.

She’s there between them, a phantom that is not named or talked about, but around and through, their words tearing holes in what’s left of her, a brutality of neglect. I see her in the sidelong glances from Isaac in the halls, hear her in the loud curses tossed by the people who would’ve been her friends, feel her in the lingering soreness between my thighs. I even taste her in the food that didn’t decorate the wall behind my head in the dining room, mashed potatoes not thrown in a fit that never happened.

I chew slowly, as if being hyperaware of my actions will lead me to some form of control over hers. My food is ground to a pulp, saliva running down my throat before I catch Mom looking at me over the rim of her glass, water paused at a perpetual angle. We stare at each other for a moment, Dad’s steak knife grating against his plate while the glass magnifies her lips, drawing out the cracks that years ago she would have balmed away before dinner.

“Mom?”

“Sasha?”

We talk at the same time, a small question in the upended lilt of our voices. We don’t speak the next part, Are you all right? Because it seems that she knows I’m not, perhaps has known for a while. And maybe I knew she wasn’t either.

“Help me with these?” She nods toward the plates, and I follow her to the kitchen with mine in hand, trying not to stare at the mess of bone and gristle that remains. The door swings shut behind us, and Mom leans against the counter, dishes forgotten in the sink.

“What’s going on with you lately?”

I scrape what’s left of my dinner into the garbage disposal, listen to the grind of flesh and bone being pulped and forgotten.

“What do you mean?”