All the Lies We Tell (Quarry Road #1)(47)
Something was going on with her sister, and Alicia didn’t know what to do about it.
She should do something about it, right? Jennilynn might be a pain in the ass, but she was still Alicia’s sister. If she was in some kind of trouble, something she couldn’t get out of on her own, then Alicia had to help her. When Alicia was failing math two years ago and didn’t want to tell their parents, Jennilynn was the one who convinced her to get a tutor from the school, so that by the time their parents found out how poorly she was doing, Alicia already had the solution in place.
This felt like something so much worse than a bad grade. Alicia wanted to blame Ilya for it. In the past year or so, the friendships between all of them had changed and shifted, and it had a lot to do with the fact that he and Jennilynn had this on-again, off-again weird thing going on between them that neither of them would admit to. Alicia wanted to make this Ilya’s fault, that her sister started drinking and smoking dope and staying out all night and coming home with love bites on her in places that Alicia could barely imagine getting kissed. She knew, though, that whomever Jennilynn was staying out late with, it was not Ilya.
It could be the guy from the party, the one who brought the beer. It could be any number of guys, Alicia thought with a sudden, fiercely painful throb of anxiety and jealousy. The ones Jennilynn met at the diner. The ones who drove trucks and smoked cigarettes and paged her weird messages. Her sister had become the sort of girl that all the guys liked, and Alicia . . . was not.
She thought of Nikolai.
Kissing him was one of the worst things she’d ever done, and she couldn’t stop thinking about it. Months had passed with neither of them speaking of it. Worse, though, was how it seemed they were no longer even friends. No more joking, no more teasing, no more pranks. If they had to be near each other, he looked right through her as though he’d never met her instead of knowing her for most of his life, even instead of a girl he’d kissed at a party when they were both a little drunk. There were times when Nikolai made Alicia feel like she might lose her mind with fury, but the loss of this friendship had sunk deep and aching all the way to her bones, and it wouldn’t go away.
If she’d known kissing him was going to change everything, would she still have done it? She couldn’t be sure. All she knew was that now everything was going wrong, and she couldn’t seem to stop it.
She didn’t want to get out of bed, but if she didn’t get up, their mom would come in and see that Jennilynn wasn’t there.
Maybe for once they’d see that she’s not perfect.
No matter how mad she was, Alicia wouldn’t rat Jennilynn out, not on purpose. It was an unspoken pact that they’d always have each other’s backs. Jennilynn had been taking too much of an advantage of it lately, but there was a small good point to that.
Jenni is so going to owe me.
After grabbing her robe, Alicia headed into the bathroom to take a shower. There was something else good about her sister not being there—Alicia got all the hot water. Her parents had been up for hours already. There was no fighting for the shower or the sink or the mirror. She took her time, soaping and conditioning and shaving her legs, until her mother pounded on the door with another command to hurry up or she’d be late.
Jennilynn was in bed when Alicia went back into the bedroom. There was nothing but a glimpse of pale-blonde hair peeking out from beneath the faded quilt made from blocks of fabric cut up from her old baby clothes and blankies. Alicia was supposed to have one, too, but her mother never got around to finishing it.
Alicia put her hands on her hips. “Hey. Get up. You’re going to be late for school.”
“I’m sick.”
“You’re not sick,” Alicia said. The sister pact was only about them against the adults. It didn’t count for them against each other. “You’re hungover.”
“Not.” Jennilynn didn’t so much as twitch back the covers. Her voice was husky and low.
She did sound like she might be sick, at least a little. Alicia tried to pull on the blanket, but Jennilynn had a death grip on it from underneath. They struggled for a few seconds before Alicia won.
“Shit,” Alicia said, stepping back at the sight of her sister. “What happened to you?”
“Nothing.” Jennilynn sat up, clutching the blankets to her chest.
Her hair was tangled, sections of it dark with dirt, like she hadn’t washed it in a few days. Bits of crumbled leaves were scattered throughout. Beneath the protection of her robe, Alicia shivered with a sudden, inexplicable chill.
“You look like crap,” she said. “What happened to you? Jenni, what happened to your neck?”
Dark bruises impressed her sister’s pale flesh. There was even a small but angry red scratch just below her chin. Jennilynn pulled the blankets up higher, hiding herself from view.
“It’s just a hickey or two.”
It didn’t look like a hickey at all. “Gross. Mom will kill you—”
At the words, Jennilynn let out a low, snorting laugh that cut off, strangled. “She won’t. Kill me. She wouldn’t actually kill me.”
Alicia grabbed clean panties and a bra from the dresser and slipped into them with her back turned, self-conscious in front of her sister, even though Jennilynn had no such issues with modesty and wouldn’t notice or care if Alicia did the hokey pokey buck naked right in front of her. Alicia pulled on a pair of jeans and one of her favorite T-shirts.