Inevitable and Only(14)

“My half sister, who I’ve never met,” I mumbled. Who I didn’t know existed until this week.

“Anyway, Josh said it’s fine with him, but of course it doesn’t really affect him. You’re the one who gets to say whether it’s all right or not.”

I hated the way Dad was acting like I even had a choice.

I shrugged. “Like you said. Where else is she going to sleep?” Then I stomped upstairs and discovered that Mom and Dad had already moved some of their furniture out into the hallway. So it had been decided without me, no matter what they were pretending.

I went into my room—my old room—and grabbed an armful of clothes, then hung them dead center in Mom and Dad’s gigantic closet. At least I could set up the room the way I wanted it before Elizabeth showed up.

Mom came up to help me, while Dad spread out papers all over the kitchen table and made a lot of phone calls to lawyers. We spent the rest of the evening moving stuff, and by midnight, we had all my furniture relocated into the master bedroom. Most of Mom and Dad’s furniture wouldn’t fit into my old room, so we left their bookshelves and vanity table in my new room, and carted their rocking chair down to the basement. Mom packed up their summer clothes to store in the basement as well, since my old closet was tiny.

We left the queen-sized bed in the master bedroom, because Mom said they were ordering a new bed for Elizabeth and we could wait to move all the beds around until it arrived on Monday. She said they’d be fine squeezing onto my twin bed in the meantime. But when I came downstairs in the middle of the night for a glass of water, Dad was sleeping on the couch.



Dad left early on Saturday morning for Ohio, before I woke up. There was a note in the middle of the kitchen table: See you Monday night, plus one! Mom threw out the lilies—they’d already started to rot—but she didn’t touch the note, so we ate around it all weekend, like it was a weird centerpiece.

I spent Saturday rearranging the new room, trying to get it to feel like my own space. Hanging up stuff on the walls helped—two paintings Micayla had given me for my birthday last year, a drab landscape of a Scottish moor and a sickeningly picturesque English cottage. She’d found them in an antique shop on The Avenue, then doctored them by adding a yeti to one and Darth Vader to the other. The yeti was emerging from the gloom of the moor, holding up a cell phone like he was trying to find service, and Darth Vader sat cross-legged in the yard of the cottage, making a daisy chain. Micayla had done such a good job matching the color palettes that it looked like they’d been created that way originally.

I also had a giant signed poster of Regina Spektor. Raven and I each bought one when we went to see her at Georgetown University last year—Mom drove us down to the Glenmont metro and we all rode into the city together, but then she dropped us off at the auditorium and went shopping in Georgetown. So it was basically our first unchaperoned concert. Raven wore lipstick and a miniskirt with fishnets for the occasion. We didn’t meet any cute guys, though, and Raven complained she was freezing all night. We ended up sitting next to an old Israeli couple who nodded their heads quietly to the music the whole time and smiled at us a lot.

I covered the wood floor with a big rag rug I found rolled up in the basement when we were carrying down boxes of summer clothes. It was something we’d brought with us when we moved to Baltimore, a farewell gift from everyone at Ahimsa House. I showed it to Mom, and she sighed and said, “Well, that brings back a lot of memories.” But she didn’t say any more about it, so I carried it upstairs. Maybe Mom thought we’d left that life behind, but clearly it had caught up with us.

Saturday night, I slept over at Raven’s. I didn’t want to sleep in that gigantic bed again, in a room that wasn’t really mine. We stayed up until four in the morning. First we tried to figure out how to make mix tapes using a tape deck Raven had rescued from Hampden Junque on The Avenue. “So romantic,” Raven said. “I’m totally making a mix tape for Max.”

“But Max probably doesn’t have a way to listen to tapes,” I pointed out.

“Irrelevant,” she said. “He’ll know what it means.”

Then we took out Raven’s nail polish collection and painted each of our toenails a different color, just to see what they all looked like. Plus, when we were seven years old we’d made a solemn vow never to paint all our toenails the same color. That was what other girls did. Not us. At the time, this seemed very important.

Finally we watched Pulp Fiction. The dialogue was awesome, but I had to cover my eyes at least once in almost every scene. Raven, on the other hand, loved gore.

“If you like this, you’ve got to see Kill Bill,” she kept saying.

“My parents would kill me if they found out I was watching this. They hate blood-and-guts movies.”

“Which makes it all the more enjoyable,” Raven said crisply. “If someone’s going to ruin your little-lamb innocence, I, as your best friend, certainly deserve the honor.” Raven lived with her mom and grandmother, whom she called by their first names, Renata and Ruby, and who didn’t care much about what she did. She said it was partially an only child thing, and partially a “sisterhood of women” thing. Not that Dad was strict with me, either. But Mom seemed to make up new rules every year. Every month. The older I got, the more rules there were.

“Isn’t it supposed to work the other way? More freedom as you get more mature?” I complained to Dad once, after the first time Raven and I dyed my hair—green and purple streaks. Mom was not pleased, and proceeded to lay down a dozen new rules for what I was or wasn’t allowed to do. But Dad said, “She just hates to see you growing up so fast.”