time it had been raining for what felt like weeks, and the creek out back was swollen? And the two of you had decided to build every manner of boat to see which ones would actually stay on top of the water, and then which ones would actually carry things downstream?”
“I asked to use Sarah’s Barbie doll,” I said, “the one in the bathing suit.”
“The one she’d just gotten for her seventh birthday,” Mom adds. “Do you remember what happened?”
“The little boat we made carried away her doll so fast that we weren’t able to catch it. It went into the drain, and we never saw it again.”
“I remember seeing her on our back porch after,” Mom says. “She wasn’t going to tell me what you did, loyal little thing, but she was so pitiful. Her shoulders were all hunched over, and her hair hung in her face, and she was working so damned hard not to cry. I finally got it out of her—”
“And I had to use some of my leftover Christmas money to buy her a new one,” I say.
“She looked the same in that video. She was every bit of seven, crying because she just watched something she’d wanted more than anything in the world fall down a drain and disappear forever.”
Mom and I find each other’s eyes in the waning dark.
“She isn’t fine,” Mom says.
“Look,” I say, throwing up a hand. “She isn’t seven anymore, and the world is going to eat her alive if she doesn’t learn to stand up for herself.”
“That might be true, but the person who chews her up and spits her out is usually you.”
Mom stands from where she sits at the table and bends to press a kiss into my hairline.
“Cut that girl some slack, all right? Take care of her. She’s been in love with you for as long as I can remember, and you know it.”
She disappears around the corner, then the door to the master bedroom shuts behind her. For the first time since everything began, I sit quietly and give myself the space to think about what it is I really want.
* * *
Nighttime makes me sentimental. I have spent every night since the failed meet-up waxing poetic about the person Alice is, but being back in Randall’s class for makerspace only reminds me of everything Rhodes isn’t. Even if Alice was always noble and good, Rhodes is still the person who has devoted so much of her energy to making me feel small.
And yet, Alice and Rhodes are two sides of the same coin.
Knowing Alice for who she is, I have to wonder how much of Rhodes’s antagonism was something I created in my own mind because I have always been so unbelievably, unrelentingly threatened by her.
It’s such a knee-jerk reaction to hate the girl sitting across from me now, with her dark hair hanging soft around her shoulders.
I catch myself lapsing into it, and then I remember who she really is again.
The only person I have to hate right now is myself.
With absolutely zero preamble, the list for the final round of the scholarship appears in our inboxes on our first day back to school after the project proposal.
Rhodes’s name on the list is a big fat of course, of course, but Kiersten’s name makes my stomach twist.
I can’t think about her anymore without wanting to crawl into a hole.
I placed so much hope in her. She saw so much ugliness in me.
There are three others: Marianna Walters, Chelsea Leath, and, rounding out the hat trick, me.
“It’s fine.” Sarah frowns into her fingernails.
It isn’t fine.
Three Conservatory students are Capstone finalists: two art-track students and one from the theater track.
Sarah isn’t one of them.
Rhodes glances up from the giant clipboard across her knees, but she says nothing.
Our eyes meet for a fraction of a second.
My heart scatters into a thousand pieces.
Her eyes drop back to her paper, and for once in her fucking life she’s actually working.
“It’s okay to say you’re upset about the Capstone,” I say to Sarah.
My eyes re-center on the empty paper in my lap, but Sarah’s tense frame is easy to perceive in my peripheral vision. She isn’t working at all: Her paper sits empty in front of her, too, and she hasn’t even bothered to pull a pencil from the Hello Kitty pouch she keeps in her book bag.
My conversation with Mom echoes forward from the recesses of my mind:
She wasn’t going to tell me what you did, loyal