Seven Ways We Lie(80)

Not thinking about the play.

Not thinking about Emily saying, “Please don’t. Please.”

Not thinking about the look on my sister’s face when I said, “I don’t need you.”

I have not been thinking about any of that.

As I hit respawn and start again, the door swings open, ushering in the sound of rain. Dad trudges in, pulling back his poncho’s hood. His facial hair has gone from stubble status to a legitimate beard, a furry salt-and-pepper shield covering half his face. He looks like a stranger.

I keep playing. He approaches the table and sets down a couple of grocery bags beside Olivia’s things, which lie in an ungraceful pile opposite me. I heard her yelling at someone over the phone earlier. I’m not curious, I tell myself. I don’t care who it was.

“Is this your sister’s?” Dad says, prodding the plastic pharmacy bag.

“Yeah.”

“Is she sick?”

“No clue,” I say, climbing a fence. The barbed wire makes my health bar dip. I ransack a nearby dead guy for medicine as my dad opens the pharmacy bag, rustling through the contents.

“Katrina,” Dad says. I hit pause and look up. His eyes, sharper and more awake than I’ve seen them in God knows how long, are flooded with disbelief. He’s holding a small green box. PLAN B: EMERGENCY CONTRACEPTIVE.

“I . . . oh,” I say. “That’s . . .”

“This is your sister’s?”

I’m silent.

“Go and get her, please.” He sits down hard opposite me. “Now.”


THE THREE OF US SIT IN DEAFENING SILENCE. MY gaze darts around the kitchen. Walls the dismal color of soggy bread. Rain still tapping halfheartedly at the glass. Sunset through the window, like firelight, simmering low under heavy clouds.

Why am I here? If they want to talk about this, fine, but why do I have to be involved?

Dad folds his hands on the table and stares at them. “How long has this been happening?”

“Maybe the start of sophomore year?” Olivia says. “Dad, please don’t be mad. The point of that pill is that I’m being responsible. That’s the whole idea.”

“This is responsible?” he says, disbelieving. “Olivia, you’re seventeen years old.”

“I know, but it’s—”

“This is not acceptable,” Dad says.

A weird look spreads across Olivia’s face. She chuckles.

Dad frowns.

“I mean,” she says, “you’ve got to admit, that’s funny. The idea of you popping in to pass judgment on, like, this kind of information, while the rest of the time you’re totally in absentia.”

Dad leans back, looking baffled. “What? What’s that supposed to mean?”

She tilts her head. “Do you really not know?”

“Know what?”

“How distant you are.”

His voice rises. “No, I don’t know what you—”

I cut in. “She’s right.”

In my peripheral vision, Olivia stares at me. I don’t look at her. Dad goes silent again, apparently stunned that I agree with this obvious assessment.

“Dad,” Olivia says, “we have to talk. We have to. It’s not just this you didn’t know about. You’re missing so much, you know? I made Honor Society in September, and you didn’t come to the ceremony, even though I asked you. You didn’t come to the plays Kat was in last spring or fall. She was amazing in both of them, and you missed them. And she’s been skipping classes, and she told me you signed off to say that she was sick? That’s not—did you ask her what she’d been doing? Because I can tell you. She’s been getting addicted to gaming and isolating herself, and honestly? It’s scary. She doesn’t get out of bed on the weekends, she’s not eating, and you don’t see it. You don’t notice, Dad.”

I stare at Olivia. Aimed at someone else, her words don’t sound like accusations anymore. They don’t trigger that defensive instinct in my chest—all I feel is a tight pang at the panic in her voice. Why does it sound so different when she’s telling Dad?

When it clicks, I’m humiliated at how long it took me to figure it out. Olivia wasn’t trying to force me to be like her. She was worried.

Every time she’s badgered me about something over the last year—Are you eating? Can you get out of bed? Are you going to class?—she was saying, I care about you. I care. I care. And all I heard was: You’re not good enough.

I sit there in the silence, trying to process this. Trying to scrub off the shame that’s pouring thickly over me now, like honey, smothering me. I wish I could take back everything I said to her on Sunday. Every furious word.

“I don’t know what to say,” Dad says, looking ashen. His arched eyebrows draw tight together. “I didn’t realize . . . I didn’t know you felt like this. Either of you.”

“It’s okay,” Olivia says quickly. “I mean, I know it’s hard since Mom left. It’s just, sometimes I feel like we lost both of you. All I’m saying is, we need you back.” My sister glances at me. “Well, I need you back, at least.”

I don’t need you, says that hard voice in the back of my head.

Guilt surges up. I sit in our dingy kitchen, stifled in silence, watching two people I’ve held back with all my might. And a million memories flutter through my mind, a storm of ticker tape. They overflow with color, like photographs edited to death. I remember trading grins with Olivia, her eyes the sort of ultra-saturated blue you see in thick paint. I remember waiting at the top of the steps on Christmas morning, back when green and red twined around the banister, and seeing Dad appear at the bottom of the steps, arms open, smile on. I remember being eight years old and tearing down the sidewalks of our cul-de-sac, the sunset a rich burgundy. Me and Olivia. Together since birth.