The Book of Cold Cases(60)

“Take it,” she said.

Beth looked at it warily. She and Lily regularly stole from Julian and Mariana’s well-stocked liquor cabinet, and had for years, but Beth had no experience with pills. “What does it do?”

“It makes you high, silly,” Lily said. “Like really high. It’s better than anything else I’ve tried.”

Beth didn’t want to get high. She wanted to play records and get drunk when her parents weren’t guarding the liquor cabinet. Being high with Lily sounded like something that wasn’t terribly fun. “I don’t know.”

Lily’s gaze went darker, flatter. “Take it.”

Saying no to Lily was always a tricky proposition. You had to do it the right way. “It would probably destroy me,” Beth said. “Obliterate me completely. You know what a lightweight I am.”

Lily laughed—she was susceptible to compliments, but you had to use the right tone so she didn’t suspect you were lying. “You are,” she said. “You’d probably be halfway to California before you came down.” She put the pill away, and Beth breathed a silent sigh of relief.

She didn’t think Lily should be taking the pills, either, whatever they were. But she wasn’t going to start nagging her half sister. That would be pushing things too far. With Lily, it was all about balance.

A few hours later, they took Beth’s bicycle out of the garage in the middle of the night. They went to a neighbor’s house, where the girl who lived there had just left for college, and broke into the unlocked garage. Lily took the absent girl’s bicycle, and they went for a ride, pumping up the hills and coasting down in the wet, freezing-cold neighborhood, flying by the dark houses while the rich people inside slept.

Each girl had brought a bottle of wine—Lily red, Beth white. “Which girl is bitter, and which girl is sweet?” Lily said, mimicking Mariana’s old game when she saw the wine Beth had picked. “Little girls can’t be both, you know. They have to be one or the other.”

“We also have to be eaten, apparently,” Beth said. “It’s all we’re good for.”

The wind was cold on Beth’s cheeks as they rode, cold enough to hurt and make her eyes water, but she loved it. She loved that the drizzle soaked her wool hat and the ends of her hair, and that her fingers went numb on the handlebars right through her mittens. In those hours in the middle of the night at Christmas, the girls had the world to themselves. They could be anything, do anything, and there was no one to stop them.

“What do you want to be?” Lily asked her when they paused, leaning their bikes on a wet park bench so they could take swigs of wine. “An actress? A singer? What?”

Beth shrugged. Her future was a blank. She was pretty enough, but she had no particular talent in one thing or another. She couldn’t sing or dance or write. Hollywood had exploded with movies like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Easy Rider, but those movies were about men. She’d read a copy of On the Road that she’d swiped from the library, looking for the glamour and forbidden excitement, but all she could see in it was a bunch of boys driving around, showing up at their girlfriends’ when they needed a place to stay. Beth didn’t want to be a girlfriend who took in a broke boy and fed him, gave him money, and had sex with him before he went off to other adventures and other women. That didn’t sound like freedom, like free love. It sounded like a bore.

“You need to be something,” Lily said.

“Why?”

“Because otherwise your parents are going to marry you off by the time you’re nineteen, and you’ll have a baby by twenty. And that will be it.” She gave Beth a flat stare. “Then again, maybe that’s what you want.”

That made Beth briefly furious, a flash of anger that made her see red. “I won’t,” she said. “I won’t end up like our mother. And I won’t get pregnant like she did, either.”

“Yes, you will. You’ll even get a husband, a man who makes a lot of money and will take your virginity for you, though I guarantee you won’t enjoy it. It won’t be any fun at all.”

There were no words to describe how terrifying that thought was, how it made a black hole of panic open up in the pit of her stomach. She had so many feelings for Mariana—love, desperation, disdain, anger—but she did not want to end up like her. Repeating Mariana’s life was the worst thing that could happen.

But Lily wasn’t completely wrong. Beth took a long swig of wine, hoping it would dampen the terror.

“We need to talk about money,” Lily said.

Beth frowned. “What?”

“Money,” Lily said again. She took a sip of her wine, but she didn’t seem drunk, while Beth felt her head start to spin. “I’ll be eighteen soon, and I’ll be out of the foster system. How much money will Mariana give me, do you think?”

Beth wasn’t following. “Mariana is going to give you money?”

“Of course she is,” Beth said. “She has to. She feels bad about me, remember? I’ll have to figure out how much I’ll need. She has plenty.”

“Mariana doesn’t have money,” Beth said.

“Sure, she does. She goes shopping all the time and her wallet is always full of cash.”

That was true. They’d seen the money come out of the wallet plenty of times. “That’s my father’s money,” Beth said. “He gives her an allowance.”