All You Never Wanted (9 page)

She’d left the pee-soaked underpants, tights, and cashmere capris bunched up in the stall. Knowing she’d never want to look at them again.

The whole ride home, she’d tremored like a beaten dog. And as the train pulled into Harrison, three stops before Old Greenwich, the thought bit at her—What if it happened
again
? What if she peed right now? On the train?

Because if she did it before, she might do it again.

Those next three stops were an agony.

Almost five months later, she hasn’t outrun the dread.

Next time, next time
. Alex’s mind grinds this thought against the future. What if she lost control of everything next time? Diarrhea and vomit and epileptic spasms? Because of course it would happen again. Guaranteed. She’d broken the rules and would suffer the consequences forever. She had lost that other, careful, reliable Alex. She had ruined herself. She was a crazy person who was capable only of crazy, lawless, and possibly disgusting things.

The questions now were where when how and how big were the stakes? Would she lose control in the parking lot or at graduation? At a party or in front of her whole school while walking across the stage to accept her diploma? Maybe in front of Xander at Empty Hands, which only had one bathroom but had at least sixty people roaming its floors at any given time? Or at Republic of Dim Sum, a full-body meltdown for all her best friends to see?

It probably can’t happen if she’s drained and purged. And it definitely can’t happen if she never shows up for anything.

She lives quietly, fearfully, in a husk of herself.

“Breathe it out,” says Palmer, nudging her back to the moment. “Tell me. Let it go, Al.”

Palmer’s personality is Southern sunbaked. She has all the time in the world. She hasn’t lit up, thank goodness. A lethal dose of secondhand smoke and the diabolical truth would unravel like a serpent from her mouth.
Ha-ha, funny story, Palm—did I ever tell you how I peed my pants in front of everyone in some fancy apartment at a
Haute
fashion show? All down my legs and all over the carpet? Like a baby! Then I ran away!

Palmer would hear this confession and … and …

No. Alex will never tell.

“Tomorrow,” she says on impulse, though even as she says it, she senses that it’s a mistake. Maybe even a terrible one. “I want to host Jessica’s second birthday party here at the house, okay? To show how sorry I am about tonight. And I’ll make it up to her on Saturday. That’s what I need to do. Throw her an incredible party. The best she ever had. And I’ll make up for absolutely everything.”

“What the …?” My sister looked groggy and creased. She and Palmer stood together halfway down the stairs. Palmer’s tomato cheeks and dumpling curves looked like a mean joke set against Alex the Scarecrow.

Neither of them had moved as they’d watched us jam Brandon through the door.

“My friend Brandon told me he wanted a change of scenery.”

“Oh my God.” Then Palmer got the giggles.

But not Alex. The edges of her eyes were rubbed and red. As if she’d been crying.

My stomach turned over. Maybe this joke was bad timing.

Joshua played it cool. Cricked his back and did that thing that never failed to put the squeeze on my insides where he held his chin in his palm, thumb angled along his jaw as his fingers fanned over his opposite cheek and his free hand cradled his elbow. Coy, almost girly. But because it was Joshua,
sooo
not.

And there was something about his wicked silver skull ring, too. The way it drew your eye to his lips and the scruffy peach of his five o’clock shadow—okay, I had to stop looking. Now. Nothing good happened to girls who crushed on their big sister’s boyfriends.

But Alex kept right on staring at him, and it slowly dawned on me that Joshua had accomplished his goal. To captivate her.
Whatever else I thought about that, I was glad to see her big doe eyes get happy the way they hardly ever did these days.

“Nice present, Josh, sugar.” Palmer was over the giggle fit and back to her Southern drawl. “How’d you pull it off?” I heard the saber rattling in Palmer’s question. You didn’t have to split atoms to know Palmer had never been in the Joshua Gunner fan club. She preferred emo boys like her on-and-off-again dude, Russ, with his droopy pants and his heart on his sleeve. Russ lived on the opposite end of the Joshua guy spectrum.

“Every great magic trick requires a magician’s assistant.” Joshua’s eyes crinkled as he glanced at me.

“You shoulda seen him crack that lock to get inside,” I told them, trying to explain it with my hands. “First he cuts up a soda can so it’s two sheets of metal. And then he bends each sheet into these two thingies. Like a straight mouth with a tongue. Then he rolled ’em each around the opposite sides of the lock and then he slid the tongues into the grooves between the shackle to open—”

“Thea, the way you’re sign-languaging this? It’s like you’re talking about porn.” Palmer could make an eye-roll of her entire body. “Who sexed you up tonight?”

I dropped my hands. “Give it up, Palmer, it’s
your
mind in the gutter. What’s the real name for that tongue thing again, Joshua?”

“A shim,” he said. “You jigger in your shim, it clicks apart the wafer, presto. We popped it and got inside. Cut down Brandon with some pliers and elbow grease and we were back on the road in fifteen minutes. No harm done.”

“Brandon’s only here overnight,” I added. “He has to go home tomorrow.”

Joshua cut me a smile. Grateful that I took the reins on the lie so he didn’t even have to tell it. He only cared what Alex thought—or, more precisely, how he stacked up in Alex’s thoughts. I could have been the family dog at this point. Good for a seat on the passenger side … 
an’ now git
.

“Or maybe Brandon should stay through tomorrow night? Don’t you think, Thea? Otherwise he’d miss the
party
,” said Alex. Not looking at me. Uh-oh. So she’d heard already? Who told, Palmer? But Alex didn’t seem mad or anything. Jeez, that was almost too easy. If she was annoyed, I’d find out—but not in front of the others. That wasn’t Alex’s style.

Alex drifted down the stairs to the foyer, her hands praying under her chin. She circled Brandon like he was for sale. The whale was maybe six feet by four plus another four feet deep. Up close you could see how crudely the papier-mâché had been slurped on, how Brandon’s skin had hardened lumpy beneath the uneven cobalt-blue acrylic paint job.

It’d been hard going, hauling Brandon onto the flatbed. I was weary from the effort. Plus my hands were cut up from the fantail, blue paint-sparkle dusting my top and jeans, and my heart was still beating in loose aftershocks from those moments on the highway when I could have sworn to God we were being followed by the cops.

Fun overload, though. A Gia night. Except Gia was nowhere now that I was back at Camelot being the baby sister. It was almost impossible to coax myself into something sultry and Gia-esque when Alex was around. She knew me too well.

“I vote dining room.” Joshua scooped up the large box of
Pizza Hut resting on the hall table. Plain cheese. No-taste Girl Pizza, he’d named it, maybe so I’d pay for it, which I did. But it seemed that he was going to eat it anyway.

“The dining room?” Alex unrolled her bottom lip. “Yikes.”

“Why not?” Joshua smirked. “Maybe we can contact the spirit of Elvis.”

But this was Joshua’s usual routine when Arthur and Mom were away. He liked to play Lord of the Manor, but at the same time he loved mocking the manor, too. Camelot was icky-tacky, and Joshua needed to show us that he knew the difference between cash and style.

Not that we didn’t see it already. Even that first day, I’d gotten the joke. Hadn’t cared, but got it. We all had. And it was no surprise when Mom decided to put Camelot on the market only a few months after we’d moved in, where it’d been dangling for over a year now. No bites. The thing is, a person can’t just walk in and plunk down millions for Camelot without also mentally tallying up how much it’ll cost to get rid of its greasy comic-book-villain vibe.

Like, take this dining room. The vaulted ceiling and exposed stone fireplace reminded me of some medieval-feast oil painting. And then the goth touches—the flocked black-velvet wallpaper, black candles in silver candlesticks and candelabras, the oversized silver loving cups so it looked like a sacrificial altar on the mantel. All this room needed was a switcheroo bookshelf and rolling eyes in the portraits.

Except there weren’t any portraits, since nobody important had been born into Arthur’s bloodline until Arthur himself.

I didn’t want to sit across from Palmer in my usual spot while
Joshua and Alex got to play husband and wife at the table. So I procrastinated, boinging around, trotting out the cups and napkins and attempting to seem unbothered when Alex took Mom’s place as if it was the most obvious thing. But why did Alex get Mom’s seat? What unspoken law decreed that I wasn’t table-head worthy?

Then maybe as a joke, but also not, I said, “Hey, Alex, do you need some company in your electric chair? You don’t have to die alone, you know.” And then I wedged in next to her. There was plenty enough space, since the chair was massive as a throne. Square-cut from ebony wood and hammered with metal grommets.

I hooked my ankle around hers, linking us. It felt good to sit there, so close to her. I hadn’t expected that. The warmth and safety of her bare ankle. Like when we were little and I’d wake up in the middle of the night and run down the hall to crawl in bed with her. The heat of her body and the fall of her breath sending me back to sleep.

“Electric chair,” Alex repeated, automatically positioning her arm along the armrest. As if strapping in.

“Bzzt!”
I shuddered, twitched, bared my teeth as the death volt passed through my body.

“Stop,” Alex murmured.

“Bzzt! BZZT!”
I was being a brat. I wanted attention—I wasn’t even sure who from. I didn’t even know what I wanted. I was just so used to looking for things to want.

“Thea.” Her second warning was delivered in the exact same tone. It was hard to rile Alex.

“Cut it out, Thea,” snapped Palmer. Riled.

“Kidding.” But my ankle didn’t give her up. My thigh pressed into my sister’s thigh, her pelvic bone poked at my softer parts, and the jut of her elbow was aimed at my chest. As she leaned away from me, I leaned away from her. My weight thrown out on the armrest as we formed a V in the chair and became a three-legged, two-headed princess-monster.

The others hadn’t sat yet. Joshua slid pizza slices in front of us. “
Bon
appetite.” Pronouncing “appetite” the American way. As Palmer lit all the ghoul-black candles of the candelabras.

“Ooh.” Alex laughed, but not nicely. “I hate those candles. This room always reminds me of a vampire morgue. Makes you just about want to kill yourself.”

“Ah. And Alex Parrott for the win.” Joshua, who’d sat down at the way far Arthur end of the table, raised his water bottle. “With the downer comment of the night.”

“I didn’t mean it,” she said, too quickly, and I felt her get tense. I had to wonder if they’d had this conversation before, about Alex being a downer.

I’d known Alex’s body as long as I’d known mine. Every haircut and outgrown sneaker. It seemed I’d spent my whole life with Alex four inches taller and way more slinkster-chic, with those boy hips and her Jazz Age bob that never cowlicked. It pained me to feel how she’d changed. Those planky bones of her, the grip in her body at Joshua’s comment. The resistant clench as she unhinged her mouth for her first bite of pizza. Which I knew she didn’t want to eat.

“ ‘Vampire morgue’ is one way of putting it,” I said, “but don’t even get me started on this creepy Scooby-Doo room.”

Alex didn’t look at me, but her elbow bump-rubbed mine. Grateful.

Could she sense my body the way I knew hers? Could she feel how charged I was for Joshua? Even though he didn’t deserve it, he didn’t deserve anything at all, for God’s sake. Just look at him. Inhaling his second pizza of the night. More in love with himself than with anyone else in the room.

Maybe I despised him. I knew I despised how wild I was for him.

“What is it?” Alex was staring at me. For a second I was terrified that I’d said it out loud. I felt myself blushing.

“BZZZZT!”
I yelled, as loud as I could. Pulling the lever on the fake electric chair to jump the whole mess out of my head.

“Thea. I wish you wouldn’t do that,” said Alex. So calm. Like I hadn’t done anything at all.

Xander’s note comes to Alex as a Facebook message, even though they aren’t Facebook friends. Mmmm. She didn’t know you could do that. She didn’t expect herself to jump out of her chair when she saw his name.

She sat down again to read.

He’d added a MapQuest thumbnail and his landline and his cell number.

And then there was another message from him. A friend request.

She hits “Ignore Request.” Logs off. Crunches up in her chair. MF. Marisol Fernandez is fourteen years old and Alex hardly knows her. And then, last month, Xander had told her everything. Because, of course, he’d learned everything. Alex imagines Xander’s skin like a blowfish, stabbed with thousands of antennae. Each one lit up with other peoples’ crises.

Probably he’d been onto Marisol before anyone. And of course he’d tried to persuade Alex to become interested in Marisol, too. Which was frankly insulting.

Wasn’t it?

Alex didn’t go there. In fact, she’d done the opposite—she’s tried very hard not to learn anything new about Marisol. But Xander doesn’t seem to care. He’s slipped her more Marisol-related facts than she’d ever wanted to learn. Like how last fall Marisol had come into Empty Hands asking for extra tutoring, no karate. How Marisol is a gifted student. How, unlike many other Empty Hands situations, her family life (single mother, no siblings) doesn’t even touch the shallow end of desperate.