The Almost Sisters(11)

It wasn’t romantic. I’d never girl-crushed on him in some silly, ain’t-he-dreamy way. I only loved him, whole. He was my best friend. He knew all my secrets, and he’d told me all but one of his. I’d cried facedown in his lap after my cat died. He was the last person I talked to every night, on the phone, and he was the first person I wanted to see every morning; we picked up our endless and ongoing conversation on the bus, between classes, at lunch, and after school at my house, with no need for segues or greetings. Now here he was in my basement, ruined in my arms, and it was good to wrap protectively around him as he rooted and pushed and sobbed his guts out.

Then he gasped and stiffened, and I felt it all come out of him. All that writhing misery, I pulled it right out of his body into mine. His rigidness relaxed into peace, and I felt a swell of pride that I could do this for him.

We lay in each other’s arms for a dozen heartbeats, perfectly still, and still perfectly together. In that silence I felt something starting, and it was the story of me and JJ.

I teetered on an internal edge, feeling us tip toward the beginning of a whole, real life. First comes love, I thought, and even though I was only seventeen, I knew all the things that would be next. I could imagine me and JJ at college, at our jobs, at our wedding, all the way up to a baby we would make exactly like this. Somebody with his nose and my deep-set eyes. There was one next after another for us, so obvious and easy, and with no need to hurry. It was ahead of us, and we were paused, complete, our bodies linked, on the brink of our beginning.

Then he was scrambling away from me and trying to get all his clothes straight, his cheeks staining even redder when he saw the smear of blood on my inner thigh. He mumbled something about needing to get home. He wouldn’t look at my face.

I was still mostly wearing my nerd-girl standard-issue uniform—a thrift-store dress with combat boots—but I felt so naked then. I had to sit up and put my left leg back into my panties, fasten my top buttons, tie my left boot, smooth my hem. When I looked up, he had gone. The next day he wasn’t at school. He never came back to school, and he didn’t return any of my calls. I went to his house, four times, but he wouldn’t come downstairs to see me. He didn’t speak to me again until the Christmas he came after Rachel.

I didn’t get pregnant, that time. Which put me at a lifetime score of one for two on random, unprotected sexual encounters. I never told anyone about me and JJ. Not Rachel, not Mom and Keith, not the small tribe of nerd girls at my lunch table. It hurt too much to say; I’d been demoted from best friend down to a Kleenex.

It ruined something inside me. That was the year I started drawing Violence anyway. I’d been doing a funny strip starring a character named Violet who looked like me and who frolicked about accidentally thwarting crime. After JJ, prototypes of Violence starting hiding in the margins. Watching my toon. Watching over her. Violet changed, too, evolving into a version of me who did have Super Pretty as a power, and anyone who screwed with her met Violence. Violence ate men like they were snack cakes and was never, never sorry. That was Violence’s true origin story. She came to be when I got my heart ripped out and ruined in under seven minutes, but that was not a tale that I could sell to Dark Horse.

Later, when JJ reappeared and Rachel got so serious about him, I made myself believe that he was a new guy—some stranger I’d just met. Especially after they got married and then Lavender came. I separated Jake from JJ, my ex-bestie who’d once wept and writhed and used me, spending his sorrows in my body while keeping his heart for Rachel, for later. It was this secret piece of ugly history that made me sure he was capable of thoroughly shitty sexual behavior now.

“This cake is amazing,” Rachel said with her mouth full. She stuffed more in.

“Where’s Lavender?” I asked.

Rachel shot me an irked look, her mouth now too full to answer. She stood in profile to me, chewing, breathing heavily in and out through her nose. After she swallowed, she dropped the rest of the chunk of cake onto the floor and dusted her hands together, adding crumbs to the carnage.

“She walked down the street to play at Olivia’s house. Surely you don’t think I’d let my child witness this.”

She said it flat, rhetorical, but after the last five minutes I wasn’t sure of anything. I’d never seen her this way—never. I hadn’t been allowed to. Not even when I might have helped. As a kid she did her grieving in the laundry closet with no witness except Thimble, her stuffed bunny. Back then, at least, I knew when she was ruined. I would sit outside the closet in silent solidarity and be extra nice to her when she emerged. As an adult I couldn’t even do that much. I didn’t have the intel. I’d never seen her weep her mascara off, not once.

“What did he do?” I asked, meaning, how had Rachel caught him? And was it a true affair? A one-night thing? A hooker?

It didn’t actually matter. I was on her side, period, because Rachel was a “step” in name only. We were both barely three when Mom and Keith got married. I had no concrete memories of a life before her. She was family, while Jake was like her garden shed, fabricated elsewhere and then added on. And the boy he used to be? JJ? He was a bullet I’d dodged years ago.

Rachel straightened up. She had five inches on me, even in bare feet. I watched her trying to gather the shreds of her cool blond dignity. She couldn’t, quite. The raccoon eyes spoiled a lot of it, and the way her hands were shaking spoiled the rest.