The Secrets We Keep(5)

“Looking for Maddy,” I said. “She called and said she needed a ride home.”

“Stay for a while and hang out with me. I brought some movies from home. We can watch them upstairs.”

He’d been bugging me for weeks to spend more time with him, but I’d been obsessed with my art school application and passing AP Physics. Plus, he had Kim now, and she was more than willing to occupy every second of his time.

“Can’t,” I said. “I’m beat and we have a Physics test on Monday. Kinda hoping for something better than a B on this one.” More accurately I needed an A to make up for the F Maddy scored me last week.

Josh shrugged, the slight bit of hope I’d seen in his eyes fading away. “Sent my application in this morning. You finish yours?”

“Yup. I submitted it before I left. Now we wait.”


Josh laughed. We had planned this since the middle of freshman year. We’d submit our applications on the same day, to the same schools, then start obsessing about it four weeks out. When the e-mails finally came, we’d meet up and compare them. We’d go together or not at all. If one of us didn’t get in, then, as far as we were concerned, neither of us did.

“Yeah, now we wait.” He held the door open for me, and we walked in. It took a minute, but once I got used to the smell, it wasn’t so bad. The house wasn’t overly crowded, but that didn’t make it any easier to get around. Nobody got out of our way, and we had to weave around people, furniture, and the occasional nasty glare to make our way through the living room.

“No Kim?” I asked, smirking. She’d been clingy lately, complaining that he spent too much time with me and not enough with her. I didn’t see the problem; neither did Josh, but then again I wasn’t the one dating a sophomore.

“Nope, seniors only, according to Alex,” he said, and I gathered from his tone that Kim’s absence wasn’t bothering him. He’d spent the entire day with her while I was holed up in my room finishing the sketches for my RISD application. Knowing him, he was probably looking forward to some time without her.

I made my way through the house, irked when I saw some kid point in my direction and scowl. I could look and act exactly like my sister if I wanted to, had done it for years. But here, when I was being myself, I was a nothing.

“She was in the kitchen last time I saw her,” Josh said as he pointed to the far side of the house. “But that was a while ago.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Why didn’t you offer to bring her home?”

“She never asked,” he said, and I heard the inference in his voice. He would gladly have given Maddy a ride home … had she asked.

I couldn’t help but look around as we made our way through the house. My sister had been dating Alex since freshman year, and I’d never once set foot in here. I’d picked her up at the end of the driveway plenty of times, had made it as far as the front door to ring the bell. But not once, before tonight, had I been invited in.

I scanned the room, wondering what made this kid so special. If it was there, I didn’t see it. His house may have been bigger than ours, but the furniture looked no more expensive. The iPod docking station on the table looked to be a few years old. Mine was better.

I spotted the shadow of a girl curled up on the couch. She looked vaguely familiar, like someone I would’ve recognized instantly had the lights in the room not been so dim.

She sniffled and ran her sleeve across her nose. I followed her gaze to the far wall, wondering what had her so entranced. The wall was blank except for the giant flat screen mounted halfway up, and that was off.

“She okay?” I asked Josh.

“Who? Molly?” he asked. “I guess so. I talked to her earlier, asked her if she wanted a ride home or something. She said she was fine and wanted to be left alone.”

I thought about confirming that for myself. As soon as I found Maddy, I was leaving anyway. I could drop her off. I made a mental note to check and see if she was still there before I left, then headed into the next room.

The kitchen was at the far end of the house and doubled as beer central. There was a keg on the floor, tucked into a brown trash barrel that I presumed was filled with ice. Two coolers stood by the sliding door and what was left of several pizzas littered the counter. There were people everywhere—jammed into the small corner between the refrigerator and the pantry, sitting on the counters, leaning against walls. They’d dragged the dining room chairs in so that they could fit twelve people around the table that housed a bunch of plastic cups and what looked like a Ping-Pong ball.

I scanned the room twice looking for Maddy, listening for the sound of her voice. Placing my hands on Josh’s shoulders, I hoisted myself up so I could see, and still no sign of my sister.

“She’s not here,” I said as I glanced at my watch. So much for my back-in-bed-in-less-than-a-half-hour plan.

Josh looked around the room himself before moving toward a kid by the door. “You seen Maddy Lawton around?”

The kid looked at us, then opened the cooler. He dug around in the slush before pulling out a hard lemonade. His eyes met mine and he smirked, no doubt too drunk to figure out that I was not my sister. I remembered him from Maddy’s Spanish class. Keith something or other. He sat next to her and had asked if “she” wouldn’t mind sharing the answers to the oral exam I’d taken. I batted my eyes, and in my best Maddy voice said, “Absolutely, darling. Anything for you,” then wrote the wrong answers down and slid them toward the edge of my desk. He winked and quickly memorized them, never once questioning who I was. Idiot.