Twisted Fate by Norah Olson
I’m not saying that I was right in the end. In fact maybe I’m to blame: the way I was caught off guard; the way I walked out of school that late afternoon with my eyes wide-open, thinking I had a plan, that I could fix everything all by myself, never dreaming how wrong things could go at the harbor.
I had my headphones on and Death Cab for Cutie blasting. I put my board down on the road and skated toward the slips. The autumn air rushed through my hair, and cars whizzed by close enough for me to feel them, and I thought in those moments, giddy and a little high, how I was going to fix things, make everything right in the world. I was going to save us both; protect Ally above everything—even though I could barely stand her half the time, even though we could go for weeks without speaking. But still I was determined to make it all okay. I thought there was no way it could go wrong and so I let myself be happy while I headed to the ocean. And that happiness felt like it was something coming from Ally’s head or maybe Ally’s heart. And I remember in those moments knowing that we were more alike than I ever could have admitted. Knowing that things between us were different, were finally somehow understood. After all, a sister in many ways is like a second self.
Back before it all happened I felt like one of us must have been adopted. Besides being what our mom breezily calls “pretty” when she takes us all dressed up to one of her fund-raisers or parties, we don’t even look alike. Ally has long blond hair that’s straight as a board and green eyes and her skin is milky pale and smooth. For as long as I could remember she’d been the good girl, the standard beauty. And I’ve been her shadow, a photo negative, where all the light spaces, the bright happy spaces, turn to dark. And make no mistake, I am dark. Not just dark thoughts and dark humor. I have dark curly hair, dark eyes, freckles instead of the romantic moonlight-paleness of her face. How we came from the same parents is a complete mystery to me.
If it sounds like I’m jealous of her I’m not. I would not have wanted to live her life or have gone through what she went through in the end. And I’d never in a million years have been naive enough, stupid enough, to become friends with Graham Copeland, part skeleton, part zombie in his expensive Diesel jeans, all blond and pretty like Allyson and too stuck up or shy or obsessed with his own weird world to talk to anyone. I could see right away that something wasn’t right. The way he looked at her, the way he could never look me in the eye quite the same way.
I remember it so clearly, the day that would change our lives forever: watching the moving van pull out of the driveway of the big old post-and-beam house next door. It was the nicest house in the neighborhood. Rockland is full of these places—mansions actually. Perfect old slate-roofed estates waiting for rich folks to move in. Or weathered stately old gems that people fixed up. Even though it was right next to Graham’s, our house was the latter. Rambling and not as square as a place should be. Our dad was a boat builder and he bought it when we were little and fixed it up himself—well, he was still occasionally fixing it up—might be fixing it up forever for all we knew. He was so busy sailing and doing restoration carpentry on other people’s mansions that he wasn’t around a lot and our house didn’t quite get the attention it needed. And that made Mom crazy, or at least gave her a good excuse to have some hysterical meltdown every time she got nervous about her high-society plans: drop cloths in the living room when company was on the way, when she was hosting another ridiculous benefit or kissing up to historical-society ladies. Our mom’s parents would invariably shell out whatever was necessary to make the place exactly what she wanted, but Dad always insisted on doing the work himself—he’d been a carpenter since he was a kid. Even with our nice house Dad’s family was a little too close to the windbeaten lobster-trawling trash our mother liked to pretend didn’t exist. Dad always had sawdust in his hair.
But next door it was a very different story. You could tell once the moving van wasn’t blocking the black Mercedes and the red Audi that were parked in the driveway that the people who moved in wouldn’t be getting much plaster and paint in their hair. I caught all these details right away. Ally of course was out by the wooded edge of our property picking blueberries like she did every Saturday and humming to herself, not having the slightest idea what was going on next door.
She walked over and gave me a handful of blueberries and we stood near the wide-trunked pine in our front yard munching them together. Then a boy came out of the garage and walked between the two fancy cars. We watched him.
He was thin and his shoulders were broad and his hands were covered with engine grease. His hair was an unruly blond mess, his bangs brushed over to the side, and he looked like he’d just woken from a long nap. He had big blue eyes that looked like they were just beginning to focus, like a baby’s eyes, like some kind of dazed animal. He had a wrench in the back pocket of his jeans and you could see his ribs through his shirt.
“Nice hairdo!” I called out to him. He flinched as I said it and started walking quickly to his house, flattening his hair down with his dirty hands. But then Ally called out again. Of course she did—the good girl, the sensitive girl that she was.
“Want some blueberries?” she asked him in that way she had, that sweet way like nothing is ever really wrong. “I just picked them. They’re special welcome-to-the-neighborhood berries.”