The Secrets We Keep(7)

I let it slide for now, more interested in getting her shivering body into the warm car than anything else. Tomorrow … tomorrow I’d start asking the questions.





4

I didn’t bother to take us through the house. I figured my sister was out here by herself for a reason—a reason that probably involved her friends not seeing her like this.

“You want me to follow you home?” Josh asked.

I shook my head. His car was blocked in five deep, and if I didn’t get home soon, my father, and not my silently miserable sister, would be my biggest problem.

“Call me when you get home,” Josh said, and pointed toward the house. A few people had found their way out onto the front lawn and were busy setting off car alarms. “I’ll be up for a while.”

Yeah, he’d be up for the rest of the night working cleanup duty while Alex passed out on the couch.

I got in the driver’s seat and looked over at my sister. She was slumped down into her seat, staring straight ahead. Her hair was damp, stringy, and hanging limply around her shoulders, and what little makeup she had on was now smudged.

“Your mascara is messed up,” I said as I handed her a tissue from my pocket. It was damp from the rain, but that didn’t matter; it’d work better that way.

She tossed the tissue aside and opened up her glove compartment, pulling out a small package of baby wipes. In three swipes, she had her face clean, every trace of her made-up face gone. Like this, natural, with no pretenses and no image to maintain, she looked a lot more like me.

A shiver racked her body and she drew her knees up to her chest, resting her head on them. Her eyes caught mine and she smiled, the faint tilt of the lips the closest thing to a thank-you I would get. My eyes shifted to her feet. They were bare. She was holding her flats when I found her. She’d probably dropped them when she stood up. I toyed with going back to get them, grabbing a coat of Alex’s for her while I was at it, but I didn’t want to waste any more time.

I took off my coat and tugged my sweatshirt up over my head, then gave it to her along with my coat and hat. I was quite sure I was going to freeze my butt off until the heat kicked in. But she was pale and she was shivering. I didn’t know what else to do.

Maddy took my sweatshirt and slid her arms into the sleeves, then put my coat on over it. She wrapped it farther around herself, sinking deeper into the fabric and herself in the process. She didn’t complain about her hair when I tucked it into my hat, nor did I get a thank-you when I gave her my socks and shoes. She merely shoved her feet into them and went back to staring out the passenger-side window.

Not long ago, she would’ve said thank you, and probably wouldn’t have taken the only dry clothes I had in the first place. But a lot can change in a few years. She’d changed a lot in a few years.

I cranked up the heat and searched the rest of her car for a blanket, an extra sweater, an old pair of jeans … anything I could find to still her tremors. I found a tube of lip gloss, an empty Pop-Tarts box, and three days’ worth of homework that hadn’t been turned in. Funny, it was Spanish homework. Now I knew why she had needed me to take that test.

“We’ll be home in a few minutes,” I said as I tried to maneuver the car off the lawn and onto the driveway. It was harder than I thought with bare feet—my toes kept slipping off the pedal. “I’ll cover for you tomorrow with Mom and Dad and tell everybody at school on Monday that you aren’t feeling well if you want to stay home for a couple of days and avoid everybody.”

“Can’t,” she mumbled. “People will start talking if I don’t show, make up some rumor about me and Alex fighting.”

Judging by the stares of the few people we’d passed in the front yard, my guess was they already were. “They started talking before you left, Maddy. Trust me.”

“No they didn’t. They wouldn’t do that. Alex wouldn’t let them.”

I groaned, amazed at the lie she was selling herself. “You honestly believe that? The rumors started the second I got there, the instant they realized that you called me to come get you rather than ask Alex to drive you home.”

I didn’t bother to tell her about Jenna or her dig at me. Maddy would take her side. She always did, blamed Jenna’s miserable attitude on the fact that she had a hard time at home. As if her parents’ financial problems and their crazy need to hide them were somehow a free pass for Jenna to be mean. But no amount of lipstick could cover up her ugly personality.

She shrugged. “You don’t get it, Ella. You never will. They don’t care about you showing up. They don’t care about you at all. They’re more interested in lying—making up stories that will ruin their friends’ lives while making themselves more popular.”

She was absolutely right. Since we started high school, I’d watched her dance around these people, play their games, and worry about what everybody thought while I cleaned up her messes. I didn’t get any of it. Not from the first time she sat down at Alex’s lunch table to last month when she came home so trashed from a party at the beach that I had to spend three hours with her in the bathroom holding her hair back while she puked. Once she passed out, I had the honor of lying to my parents, telling them the leftover Chinese food Maddy had inhaled when she got home was probably bad. That wasn’t the first time I’d covered for Maddy, and it sure wouldn’t be the last.