Inevitable and Only(20)
I could tell he was trying to get her to laugh, and maybe she smiled, but I’d already rolled over to stare at the wall.
Elizabeth’s bed creaked as Dad stood up, and then I felt my mattress sink as he sat on the edge of my bed. He squeezed my feet. “You too, Cadie. How are you feeling? Do you want to talk?”
I closed my eyes. “Can you just let me go to sleep?”
Dad let go of my feet, and my words hung in the air for a tense moment. Then he whispered, “Of course,” and got up to turn out the light.
After Dad left, neither of us spoke again. I stared at the ceiling for what felt like hours, my stomach twisted in knots, watching shadows from the streetlight playing across the ceiling. I wondered if Elizabeth was already asleep, but after a while I heard soft sniffling coming from her side of the room.
If I were spending my first night in a new house, with a new family, less than a week after my mom died, I’m sure I’d cry, too—except I didn’t do crying if I could possibly help it. And when I did, I usually wanted people to pretend it wasn’t happening. So I rolled over and convinced myself I hadn’t heard anything. But the moonlight was brighter on this side of the house than I was used to, and it took me a long time to fall asleep.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mom and Dad had suggested that Elizabeth take a week or so to “adjust to her new situation” before starting school. Mom offered (somewhat feebly, I thought) a back-to-school shopping trip, and Dad said he’d take her down to DC to see the sights—the White House and all the monuments, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Zoo, the Kennedy Center. But Elizabeth had declined (politely, of course), saying that she didn’t want to have to worry about making up schoolwork. I could tell Mom was relieved, but Dad seemed disappointed.
So the next morning, we all squeezed into the Honda and rode to school together—Dad, too. He’d insisted on leaving the bookshop in Cassandra’s capable paws for a few hours in order to come help Elizabeth “get settled at school.” There really wasn’t much for him to do. As soon as we got there, Elizabeth went to the front office with Mom and handed in all her paperwork. Then they gave her a locker assignment and a class schedule and turned her loose. Mom said, “Well, that’s that, I’ve got a meeting in four minutes, you know where to find me if you need me, oh and Cadie, don’t forget Josh has a double lesson today after school,” and disappeared into her office. But Dad hovered, reminding me again to show Elizabeth the ropes and help her find her classrooms.
“Dad. I know,” I said. “You don’t need to stick around. She’s going to be fine.”
Dad hesitated, then held out his arms. I saw the relief that softened his face when Elizabeth stepped forward for a hug. “If you need anything at all, you have my cell number,” he murmured into her ear, and she nodded. The hug went on long enough that I started to feel awkward standing there, so I pretended to look through my school bag for something.
“Dad,” I said. “We’re going to be late.”
“Right,” he said, and made a motion as if reaching to pull me into the hug too, but I ignored him.
Dad sighed. He let go of Elizabeth and stood there, looking from one of us to the other and back again. He smiled. “My girls. You really do look like sisters.” I stared at him. What was he seeing? Elizabeth and I looked nothing alike. We were nothing alike.
He turned twice to wave at us as he walked down the hall. I didn’t wave back.
Elizabeth clutched her schedule and shifted her bag to her other arm. She didn’t carry a backpack—she’d piled all her notebooks into a beige L.L.Bean tote bag. It looked much more chic than my ratty orange backpack, which had song lyrics scribbled all over it in multicolored Sharpie markers.
The tote bag had a monogram: E.M.J. I snuck a peek at the top of her schedule. Elizabeth Marie Jennings. So she had her mother’s last name. At least we didn’t have to share a name, too.
She saw me glancing at her schedule and held it out, so I took a good look and saw that we wouldn’t be sharing many classes, either. Which made sense. Elizabeth was a junior. She was only six months older than me, but that put her a grade ahead. She’d gone to Catholic school in Ohio, and she seemed nervous about Friends. She’d asked me twice that morning, while we were getting dressed, if I was sure there wasn’t any sort of uniform or dress code. When she’d seen my outfit—tight black jeans with patched knees, purple ankle boots, and a blue-and-green sweater with multicolored buttons sewn all over it—she’d said, “You’re wearing that to school?”
I’d muttered, “Yes, Mom,” and then immediately felt terrible. I tried to cover it up with a laugh, which only made things worse. Her freckly face reddened as if I’d slapped her, although she tried to hide it by going quickly to the vanity mirror across the room and brushing her hair. Her shoulders slumped. It looked like she was trying to retract herself into her own body. The only sound was Josh, practicing minor scales down the hall. Slowly. Very slowly.
“Hey,” I said, “I’m sorry. I’m always a grump in the mornings. But I do the best French braids on the planet. Want me to do your hair?”
“I always wished my mom knew how to braid hair, but she was terrible at it.” Elizabeth spoke so softly I could barely hear her, and for a moment I almost wondered if I’d imagined the words—until she turned and sat primly on the edge of her bed. I knelt behind her and began crisscrossing strands of that long strawberry-blond hair. Dad’s hair.