With Carina at the table, the odds were nobody would notice what Lia put on her plate or in her mouth, anyway.
~oOo~
Lia went into her room at the top of the stairs and set her tote and backpack on the big, comfy armchair beside her desk. Her room here at home wasn’t terribly different in décor from her little apartment in Providence. In fact, it wasn’t terribly smaller than her apartment. The sherbet-y color scheme—soft yellow, peach, cream, and lavender—was the same in both places, and theater stuff made up most of her wall hangings and knickknacks.
Here, though, were some lingering traces of her childhood—like the big dollhouse in the corner of the room. She and Elisa, who were so close in age they’d gone through school in the same grade and people called them ‘Catholic twins,’ had lots of identical stuff, including the dollhouses, which had been gifts from their nonna when they were small.
But as close in age as they were, Elisa and Lia were very different in temperament, and it showed. Elisa’s dollhouse sat in the corner of her room, but it was like a museum piece, every room set just so, all the décor and furnishings precisely arranged, the little family figures frozen in tableaux of real life. She’d played with her things, carefully, and always returned them to their ‘proper’ places.
Lia had used her dollhouse like a theater. She’d painted and refigured, added on and taken away, making tiny stages for her plays. She’d made wigs and costumes, props and sets, and now the dollhouse looked like any theatre backstage—chaotic and well used. A real fixer-upper. It had been years since she’d actually played with it, but it made her happy to see it.
She went into the bathroom that connected her room with Elisa’s and washed her face. The trip from Providence to Quiet Cove was a commute, not a journey, but somehow she always felt like she’d come a long way and had to wash the travel dust off.
After, she went down the hall to a door covered in snarky bumper stickers and a hardware-store sign that shouted BEWARE OF DOG in bold red letters on black.
She knocked on her little sister’s door but got no answer, so she opened it an inch or two. It wasn’t locked; Papa wouldn’t allow them to have locks on their doors.
Carina lay prone on her bed, typing on her phone. Headphones covered her ears, and her head banged up and down. How she was managing to type at the same time, Lia did not know.
Her room was a fucking mess, with clothes and books and papers covering most of the floor and every flat surface. She didn’t let Emilia come in to clean until and unless Mamma insisted, and then there was a big fight about it first.
At some point, Mamma had allowed her to paint the walls with black chalkboard paint, and for a while she’d covered them with all kinds of Day-Glo chalk drawings and weird sayings. Carina was a pretty good artist, honestly. Now posters, photographs, and her cartoony drawings were taped up on the black walls instead.
Once upon a time, Carina had had the same kind of girly baby-pink bedroom Elisa and Lia had had (and still sort of had), but now there was literally no kind of style going on in here except mess.
Carina had had a dollhouse, too, just like her sisters. The exact same—huge, expensive—dollhouse.
She had demolished it beyond repair before she was four.
That was her little sister: the biggest bull in the china shop. Carina was constantly causing trouble, spewing attitude, tearing shit apart. She was sixteen and had the attitude of a fifty-year-old high-seas pirate. Which was almost funny, because she looked like a delicate, beautiful, black-haired china doll.
Lia went to the end of the bed and waved her hand before Carina’s face.
The phone dropped to the comforter, and Carina slipped the headphones to her neck. “Hey.”
“Hey,” Lia echoed. “Just wanted to say hey.”
“Hey.”
They stared at each other. Carina’s expression was impatient, her eyebrows high and her lips pinched.
“Okay, I guess I’ll see you at dinner,” Lia said.
Carina put her headphones back on.
Such a little shit.
~oOo~
“So tell us about school, honey. How are your classes going?”
Mamma held out the salad bowl to Lia, who took it and used the tongs to heap leafy greens onto her plate. Salad was the best camouflage. If she filled her plate with veggies, nobody would notice she’d