The Identicals(40)

The weed isn’t helping with her paranoia. She should leave. But instead she heads for the brass bar cart in the corner. She tucks a bottle of Grey Goose vodka under one arm and a bottle of Bombay Sapphire under the other and leaves the house, only expelling her held breath once she is scurrying back down the driveway.

She makes a drink: vodka, tonic, ice, and a fat wedge of lemon.

By five o’clock, Ainsley is drunk and really, really stoned—she polished off the second half of the joint and didn’t even bother opening a window. Her mother has effectively abandoned her, so whatever behavior Ainsley exhibits is Tabitha’s fault.

Now Ainsley is ready to take action. At school that day, Emma had been on her like white on rice, asking if she was okay. Apparently a rumor had been circulating through Nantucket High School that Ainsley had been locked in a closet in her house for two days as punishment for throwing the party.

Where did people come up with this stuff? Ainsley wondered.

“No,” she said. “I was grounded Saturday and Sunday. Then my grandfather died, so on Monday we had to go to his funeral on the Vineyard.”

“Oh,” Emma said. She sounded disappointed. “I thought Tabitha finally went postal. I thought she might have broken out the duct tape and the rope.”

“No,” Ainsley said. “My mother is annoying, but she’s not psycho. My grandfather died.”

Emma had shrugged. “That’s what grandparents do,” she said. “They die.”

Ainsley had considered telling Emma about the woman who came to the reception and slapped her mother, but Emma can’t be trusted with that kind of story. She either wouldn’t care or would care too much.

“What’s up with you and Teddy?” Emma had asked at lunch. “Did you two fight?” Teddy was, for the first time ever, sitting with the baseball team at lunch instead of with Ainsley and Emma.

“I’ll tell you later,” Ainsley said. “I don’t feel like getting into it now.” She looked across the cafeteria at Candace, who today was wearing a pink silk button-down, a pair of white AG Stilts, and nude Tory Burch flats. Her mother, Steph, used to be big into braiding Candace’s hair or doing half ponytails, but now Candace wore her hair straight and shiny. It pained Ainsley to admit it, but Candace was pretty. Her clothes were stylish and effortless. Her skin was clear. Her eyes radiated the pureness of her heart.

Except that she had stolen Ainsley’s boyfriend.



Now, drunk and stoned and alone, Ainsley calls Emma. “Are you ready to hear what happened?” she asks. Emma isn’t good at offering comfort or support—but revenge? Revenge Emma excels at.



Ainsley is sitting in third-period English. Her paper on Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is six and a half pages long instead of ten. It is poorly written, repetitive, and untethered to the text because Ainsley didn’t read a single page of the book. She had tried the night before, but the dialogue is written in the southern vernacular, which might as well be a foreign language.

Candace and Teddy are both in Ainsley’s English class. Ainsley is sure that they have turned in ten-page papers using appropriately annotated selections from the book to back up their thesis statements and have probably also supported their arguments with quotations from Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Angela Davis, the way Mr. Duncombe suggested. Candace and Teddy don’t speak, they don’t even look at each other, but Ashley can see the pearlescent waves of true love shimmering between them. She only has to suffer this particular hell for a few moments, however. Before Mr. Duncombe can even start in on how important the literary voices of the marginalized are, the intercom buzzes. Ainsley sucks in a breath. Ms. Kerr asks for Candace Beasley to be sent down to the office.



By lunchtime, it’s all over the school: a nearly full bottle of Bombay Sapphire and a baggie holding what appeared to be cocaine residue were found in Candace Beasley’s locker.

“Wow,” Maggie says as she and Ainsley move along the salad bar. “I remember when Candace was a total goody-goody. Don’t you?”

Ainsley shrugs. “I do. But people change.”

“Most of the time it’s the good kids you have to watch out for,” Emma says. “They’re so good that one day they just snap and become really, really bad.”

“She’s facing a possible three-day suspension,” Maggie says. “Her parents came in and everything.”

Three-day suspension, Ainsley thinks. She has three days to get Teddy back.

“I’m surprised she’s not facing legal action,” Emma says. “I mean, alcohol is one thing—but cocaine?”

“She says it isn’t hers,” Maggie says. “She told Dr. Bentz someone must have planted it in her locker.”

“That would be what I would say if I were her,” Emma says. “‘Wasn’t me; someone planted it.’ She didn’t ask my advice, but if she had, that would have been my suggestion.”

“Still, how would someone else get into her locker?” Ainsley says. “Unless she gave someone the combination. The last person who had that locker graduated, like, two years ago. And they’re impossible to break into.”

“Impossible,” Maggie says in agreement.



Ainsley is both buoyed and terrified for the rest of the school day. The news about Candace is everywhere: the school is on fire with it. Candace Beasley, a straight-A student and an altar girl at Saint Mary’s, brought a bottle of gin and maybe also cocaine to school. It’s so outlandish that Ainsley expects to be yanked out of class at any moment. But Emma had promised Ainsley that the plan was foolproof. Back in November, Emma had been tardy for school for the fifth time, which required her to meet with the principal, Dr. Bentz. She was asked to wait in the room outside his office by herself until Dr. Bentz returned from a Rotary Club breakfast. There was a fire drill; the school emptied out, but Emma stayed put. That was when she started snooping. She found teacher evaluations (boring), ninth-grade MCAS scores (boring), and the combinations for every locker in the school. The list of combinations she kept.