Pretty Reckless (All Saints High #1)(52)

I sigh, picking them up and handing them to him.

“Marx, Penn! You’re so clumsy.” I laugh breathlessly. “You dropped your—”

“Via?” His voice is thin glass, waiting to be shattered.

I lift my eyes from his stupid keys to the stupid couch where my stupid family—Mel, Dad, and Bailey—are all sitting in one neat line, hands tucked between their thighs, and between them sits a grown-up version of Sylvia Scully. She’s clad in a conservative black dress that ends at her ankles and wears a polite, robotic smile.

She stares at me, not Penn.

“Surprise.”





You came back to me like a tempest Beautiful and dazzling and destructive

Ripping everything in your wake

Including, but not limited to, my heart





Be careful what you wish for.

For four years, I’ve dreamed of this moment.

In some of my dreams, I punch her square in the nose and tell her she’s a cunt.

In others, I hug her close and fall to my knees, begging her to never leave me again.

In most, I tell her all the things I wanted to share with her while she was away. That Mom became worse after she disappeared, which means that maybe she gave a shit after all. That Rhett got beat up by a bunch of white supremacist drug dealers who tried to get into his territory several times and was hospitalized twice. That he is missing three teeth and half an ear now, adding playfully that his modeling days are over. That I hadn’t lost my virginity to Adriana, like Via said I would, because “Adriana always looks at you like you’re food, and the kind you don’t leave leftovers of.” That I made it as captain. That she was wrong about Kannon, too. He didn’t grow up to be an asshole and is actually surprisingly bearable for a human being.

But now that she is here, I just stand like an idiot and stare at her as though she took a dump on my football gear. I can’t fucking breathe, and it feels like she is pressing on my sternum with her orthopedic shoes.

I’m taking inventory, for whatever the fuck reason, to make sure all the organs are still in place. Even sitting down, I can see that she is still a head and a half shorter than me, only we’re both much taller. She is lithe and athletic, but her long blond hair is now braided into an Amish bun, and she doesn’t have any makeup or the nose ring that she had before. Her dress could belong to a nun.

This is not my Via.

She rounds the coffee table in small, gentle steps and goes for a hug. Stiffly, I feel her scrawny arms wrap around me. Finally, my brain tells my body to snap out of it, and I pat her back. I want to crush her with a suffocating hug, but I can’t. She’s a stranger. At least, she looks like one. I glance at Jaime and Mel who are both standing up, their arms behind their backs.

Via is back.

They brought my sister back.

Melody, of course, is the first to cry. I swear, this bitch should’ve been born into a One Tree Hill episode. The drama is always high when she’s in the room.

“Penn.” Her lower lip wobbles. God, please. Don’t let her film this shit and send it to The Ellen DeGeneres Show. “Via. You have so much to catch up on.”

I know I’m in shock when my mind goes in a different direction. Instead of, you know, wanting to catch up with my sister and find out where the hell she’s been all these years, I try to figure out why they didn’t tell me before. Why they didn’t give Daria the heads-up.

Shit, Daria.

Her juices are still on my pubes. I take a step back from my sister, who doesn’t feel like my sister anymore, and twist my head to where I left Daria. She is still there, rooted to the floor, gaping at Via in disbelief. Via meets her gaze and swallows. I’m waiting for my twin to talk so I can figure out who I’m dealing with. Because right now, she looks like a cardboard version. The blueprint before they poured personality, a soul, and character into her.

“Where in the good fuck have you been?” I curl my lips in revulsion.

Okay. Not the reaction everyone was expecting by the way Via flinched and Melody choked on her breath. But screw that. They weren’t the ones deserted.

You made me the fucking tin man, sis.

Via looks down at her untrendy tennis shoes, shined to perfection. She is twiddling her thumbs.

Who in the hell is this girl?

“With Dad…” Her voice is barely a whisper. It’s so delicate and brittle, it breaks around the last letter. “And Grandma.”

“I thought they were traveling around the country with their cult? Making the Midwest even more redneck.”

The asshole who decided at some point in my childhood that my mother wasn’t worth the trouble and we were in his way to achieving greatness. He, therefore, decided to be an itinerant preacher of some sort. Last I heard, he lived in a trailer from the eighties with my Southern grandmamma. Real fucking catch.

“They were.” She is still looking down. “Are. After I ran away, I managed to find them in Mississippi. I called and called until he picked up, then I hitchhiked there.”

“To Mississippi?”

She nods.

She is timid, shy, and doesn’t look me in the eye. My real twin sister from four years ago would eat her for breakfast.

“Why don’t we talk about it over a cup of tea?” Melody claps her hands, channeling her inner Queen Elizabeth. I don’t want tea. I want to know everything. And I want to know why Via didn’t pick up the phone to call me in four years.