the right side, along with new shingles. So basically it looked nothing like her old house and more like a house that had undergone extensive plastic surgery. This made Cleo think again of her sister, who had not had extensive plastic surgery but many of her clients had. Cleo took a step back from the curb and surveyed the remodel. They probably should have just knocked it down and started over. Her mother would have found its asymmetry displeasing to her eye, and her father would have called it a structural disaster. It felt strange that both she and Georgie had grown up here, with such wildly different childhoods, with such wildly different experiences. She hadn’t been the type of kid who wished she had another sibling—Cleo’s parents were company enough for her, though it occurred to her now, standing on the sidewalk with her head cocked, that maybe if she’d had someone closer to her age within her house, she wouldn’t have felt so lonely, that she wouldn’t have craved her parents’ approval and attention and praise. Cleo’s loneliness, especially once she moved in with her grandmother, fed her, to be sure—to be better, to stand taller, to pull more attention and eyes toward her. But success could never be a permanent plug for emptiness.
“Do you want to ring the bell?” Gaby asked.
Cleo shook her head. “I just . . .”
She trailed off. She didn’t know exactly what she thought. She couldn’t impart to Lucas the whole of her childhood by visiting her old home. That it was happy because her mother was warm and wore paint-speckled clothing most days, and her father was pretty brilliant and passed on his love of all things brainy, and yet it was also isolating because she was too smart for a lot of the other kids and also not always friendly, as if her mother’s kindness never penetrated and her father’s intelligence overcorrected. But MaryAnne got her; they, like she and Lucas, were peas in a pod for a long time—swapping books that were probably too grown-up for them, like Carrie and 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale, but in those days, parents didn’t care about age-appropriateness like they did now, and listening to music that Cleo liked because MaryAnne liked it, not because she had developed any musical tastes of her own. (MaryAnne’s older brother was just obsessed with Pearl Jam and Nirvana, so basically that.)
It wasn’t just the two of them either; that wouldn’t be fair. Cleo couldn’t go on the campaign trail and say, like, “I had no friends, which drove me to where I am today.” She did. She and MaryAnne both had friends beyond each other. They had the debate team and the kids on the school paper and in all the other clubs that they joined (though none of those kids had leaped to her defense in MaryAnne’s Facebook post). And Cleo played tennis, and her senior year was elected captain, though this was after her parents had died and she never knew if it was that people liked her or pitied her. She put it on her college applications regardless, so that was good. But all these people, all her friends, well, they weren’t much different from Georgie. They occupied a space in her life, but they didn’t take up space, which were two very different things.
She had a boyfriend her junior year, Matty Adderly. He’d also applied for the internship at the mayor’s office, but Cleo hadn’t sabotaged him. She knew he wouldn’t get it anyway. He was sweet and just the right amount of geeky to be completely devoted to her, but not smart enough to make her want to push it into a forever thing or that she worried he’d beat her out for the job. He also didn’t come from connected parents (his dad was an accountant; his mom stayed at home), unlike MaryAnne’s blue-blood stock who could call in favors and give her a leg up above the rest of them.
After Cleo’s parents’ accident, Matty tried to be there for her at every turn. Now Cleo could stand on the curb of her old street and stare at her old house and consider this kindness, how he wanted to bring her tea and help her move to her grandmother’s and offered to take notes in her classes when she had to miss school, but back then she felt like he was smothering her. She was used to the unadorned, naked affection