“Can we just agree to let it go?” I avoid Chelsea’s gaze now as I unpack my socks into the drawer. Tennis socks on the left, whites in the middle, brights on the right. A drawer for delicates, and one for denims, a closet of cottons, a shelf for wools. A place for everything, and everything in its place. Book, puzzle, doll. Eating, sleeping, towel arrangements. There is a harmony to the way we conduct ourselves. A way the hosts of the lake house find acceptable. It falls to me, and it’s an intense amount of pressure. I rely on order. The rules. The way we have always done things. The balance that has made everyone happy. I follow routine because if something goes wrong, blood is on my hands. The rules of the house matter. Stick to the familiar. That way I don’t forget one little thing and ruin everything.
“No.” She folds her arms over her chest. “Not talking about it isn’t the same thing as letting it go, and this is your grudge, Kennedy. Not mine.”
The cold spills over me as the words vibrate through me.Your grudge.I feel ice in my veins, and even through the buzz of my drink, the walls of the room seem to stretch. Chelsea seems to fade backward somehow and I reach for her, but I’m already rewinding. I squeeze my eyes shut.It isn’t my grudge, I think to myself.It isn’t my grudge. I keep my eyes clamped shut as I feel layers of the present peel back like the skin of fruit, until I hear footsteps creaking toward me.
“Chelsea?”
“What?” She sounds irritated. Not quite angry. Not yet. They’re becoming less forgiving.
The girl on the stairs walks between us as if we aren’t there. Chelsea looks straight through her, and every hair on my body stands on end. The girl’s long, tangled mess of hair covers her face as it always does, and I watch, spellbound as she pauses in front of the magic mirror for a moment, raising a hand slowly to her face to touch her hair with her pale, slender fingers. Her pinkie is obviously broken, stuck in an awkward, useless position, and I curl my fingers into a fist, phantom pain shooting through my hand. She bends down with a loud, knuckle-cracking sound and reaches for the drawer where I keep my hairbrush, and my breath freezes in my throat. I don’t want to see her face. The long, dark hair always seemed like a protective curtain. As a child, I lay awake at night imagining what was beneath. Maybe it was a bare skull, or a mass of worms, or layers of exposed muscle like in an anatomy book. Now I can’t imagine anything at all, and that’s somehow more frightening than maggots or bones. The unimaginable is always the most horrifying. The thought of parting her hair and seeing nothing, the absence of anything, is the quintessence of my deepest dread. That is my fear of death described in one word: nothing.
This is the first time one of them has appeared to me, actually appeared in person, in years. They’re getting stronger. But just as her hand touches the drawer, she suddenly turns to face me and vanishes. I stumble backward into the open balcony door, the handle digging painfully into my back, my heart hammering in my chest.
Chelsea steps between me and my suitcase and folds her arms, her brow furrowed. “Are you okay?”
I rub the small of my back. “Yeah. I’m fine.”
She frowns. “Seriously, Kennedy. What was all that about Ryan’s secret girlfriends?”
I shrug, deflecting. “Nothing. I was talking him up.”
She glares at me. “The whole comment was passive-aggressive.”
“You take his side in a conversation he’s not even party to. Shocking.”
“Because it’s not just his side.” Her cheeks are beginning to flush pink.
“No, to you, any comment about Ryan is a comment about both of you. Honestly, if I just met us, I’d think you and Ryan were together and I was the outsider.” It slips out before I can stop it.
Chelsea’s eyes widen and her mouth drops open. “I cannot believe you just said that.”
I shrug one shoulder uncomfortably. “You act like you’re better than the rest of us. Like our lives are trivial. I know Ryan calls me a spoiled brat. But he’s the brat. He isn’t as smart as Chase, as clever as Emily, and doesn’t have as many friends as I do, and he acts like if he doesn’t have something, it’s morally deficient.”
“And money, right? You and Chase are the stars and we’re the nothings. Even Emily.” She sits on the bed and pushes her hair back from her flushed face, her eyes bright.
“I didn’t say either of those things.”
“But they’re true. Did it ever occur to you that that’swhat Ryan and I have in common? That maybe it’s hard being dragged around by special people and being known as the guests all the time?”
“You’re not…” I trail off. That’s exactly what Ryan and Chelsea are. “But you’re all guests here.” Even me.
“But we’re guests at Chase’s in the Hamptons, too. And at Emily’s art shows. At the games where Ryan is stuck on the bench. We are always the guests. And you know what? I’m not pretending to like Mila anymore. I do like her, and I do think Ryan is a better match. Because I love Chase, but I also love Ryan, and Chase already has Emily.”
The wordsI also love Ryanare the only ones that register, and they slap me in the face. I take a moment to gather myself.
“I like her too. I don’t know why we play these games, and I don’t want to fight. But Chase doesn’t like Emily and he’s never going to. She’s never going to give it up. It’s pathetic.”
Right then, the door swings open and my stomach drops. Emily and Ryan are standing there. Emily steps in and closes it behind her, leaving a stunned Ryan alone in the hallway. Her eyes are brimming, but she doesn’t look sad. She looks absolutely furious. I push the sock drawer closed behind me. I should have locked the door. That’s one little thing I could have done to prevent ruining everything. But some things can’t be kept out, and an unimaginable cold sweeps into the room with Emily.
She looks at Chelsea and then at me. “I’m pathetic?”
I take a hesitant step toward her. “No. That’s not what I meant.”
“It’s what you said,” she hisses in a low, vicious voice. Shetakes a breath and lets it out shakily, the ghost of a cloud forming in the air before her lips. “I’ll stay here tonight, but I’m leaving in the morning. But before I go, I want you to know that I think you are both terrible people. Chelsea, you went behind Kennedy’s back for four months with my brother.”
Chelsea’s face turns white. “That’s not true. Nothing actually happened. You’re twisting things.”
“You can paint it any way you want. You were together and you hid it and now you’re lying about it. You kept it a secret, maybe because you were ashamed of my loser family, maybe because you wanted to wait around for the better catch and dump him the second she came around. And look what happened.”