The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,100
her at a boyfriend’s house. Bet must have had a way to contact Sissi Clemmens that Laurel didn’t know about, because Sissi was on the road to Pensacola not half an hour after Bet pulled her final snow job. Bet had overplayed that one badly, and Laurel had panicked her by saying it was time to bring the cops back in.
Thalia knuckle-punched Laurel in the arm, hard, claiming her attention again. “There’s that whole ‘no statute of limitations’ thing that does make it matter, a tiny bit, to me.”
“You should thank her,” David said. “You make more sense to me now. In a way. You’re almost forgivable.”
“Wait, what?” Thalia said. “I make sense to you? Good God, I think the earth’s polarity just reversed.”
“David’s not going to tell anyone. He understands why you felt driven to do what you did, and it’s okay,” Laurel said.
“‘He understands’? I don’t like the way you said that. It was very moist and hand-holdy. I am not cattle, Bug. I drive. I don’t get driven,” Thalia said. Her gaze was back on the road, but then her sloe eyes narrowed into long angry slits. Her hands clenched down on the wheel so tightly it looked like she was trying to strangle it. “Wait a sec. You have to be kidding me. So Mr. Math here thinks he’s solved for X, huh? You told him Uncle Marty gave me the bad touch and turned me into Crazy Thalia. How nice for the both of you, to be able to reduce me to such a simple two plus two. Is that what you told him, Jesus Bug?”
Thalia had let her foot grow heavy on the gas pedal. The Volvo wobbled over onto the shoulder, and Thalia jerked it back to the middle of the lane, so mad she was panting.
“It’s not your fault,” Laurel said.
“Is that what you think, metal man?” Thalia whipped her head around long enough to take David’s measure in the backseat. She said, “Cause and effect. Incest in, actress out. God, I wish people really were so simple. If they were, acting would be a hell of a lot easier. Spare me. I don’t want you to excuse me, David, and I sure as hell don’t need you to explain me.” Thalia laughed, an abrupt burst of angry sound. Then she said, “Marty never laid a hand on me. You assholes.”
Finally, Thalia had Laurel’s full attention. She turned in her seat to stare at her sister. “Yes, he did.”
“No, he didn’t,” Thalia said.
“Sometimes,” Laurel said carefully, “people don’t want things to be true, so they stop remembering. I’ve read about it.”
Thalia laughed again, this time in a glorious peal. “I bet you have. In Family Circle or Reader’s Digest, no doubt. I bet those are the articles that always caught your eye in the pediatrician’s waiting room. Did you angle the magazine carefully to the wall, so the other mommies wouldn’t see what ugly story had you so engrossed?
“And what did Reader’s Digest teach you? Do I need to go to hypnotherapy and retrieve my sad past? Please. I’ve had hypnotherapy and past-life regression. Gary and I once did a womb workshop where they tied us up together in a long canvas tube so we could struggle our way out and be rebirthed as twins. It’s the sort of thing we do on date night, while you two share a Diet Coke and hold hands at the movies.
“What do you want, Buglet? You want some tidy cause and effect like Mr. Science back there? Then here’s a double scoop of logic for you both. One: If Marty made me who I am, tell me when. Show me the day when the fairies took your sugar-mouthed angel sister and left you a wild nixie. If you can, I swear I’ll go right back to the hypnotherapist and ask if it’s possible my uncle diddled me when I wasn’t looking.”
There was no such day, and Laurel knew it. Thalia had always been Thalia, sly and mighty, a changeling only in her ability to slip her own skin and tuck herself inside a character. She’d been born with that. One of Laurel’s earliest memories was Thalia at about six, weeping fat tears with Laurel’s pony doll in her hands. When Laurel had asked what was wrong, Thalia’s tears had stopped instantly, and she’d glared at Laurel, irked at the interruption.
“I’m not crying,” she’d said. “I’m being your pony. He’s the one who’s sad.”