The Other Half of Me (16 page)

TWENTY-SIX

Alexa emerges from the shower twenty minutes later looking clean and rejuvenated while I am silently fuming. My rationale is this: if she’d come right out with the fact that she was talking with Tate, maybe I wouldn’t feel so betrayed. But the intimate tone and her secrecy only prove that she’s got something to hide. Her lip-biting was a true sign.

“So, what are we up to today?” Alexa slides a comb through her hair, pushing all of it forward onto her face, and then in one big motion flicks her mane back. She claims this makes her hair appear fuller. I can’t attest to this, but I can say it does spray water on me.

I wipe my face with my palm and busy myself, hiding my hurt and anger in menial tasks: straightening books on my desk, fixing the blinds Alexa left crooked this morning, and attempting to gather her stray clothing into a heap near her Aerobed.

While she considers various outfits, Alexa takes in my tidying. “Are you hinting that I’m a slob?” Her laughter doesn’t lighten my mood; rather, it digs at me. How can she find all this funny? This whole situation is out of hand.

I shrug and keep cleaning, crouching by the built-in bookshelf near my window so I can neaten it up. The thought of textbooks making their way to these shelves in under a week makes my chest hurt, and the thought of walking the same hallways I did last year makes me feel like I’m caught in a loop of life—one season into the next without stopping. I will go back to the same school with the same people and the same ugly maroon chairs that have held countless County behinds over the years—only this time, I’ll be different. Suddenly I knock a pile of books off the shelf on purpose, only Alexa thinks it’s an accident.

Alexa crouches next to me.
“Wuthering Heights.”
She points to the book’s spine. “Good book.”

“Really?” I’m unable to keep my voice steady. It rises as though I’m about to cry or scream—who knows which one. The whole time I talk I’m really thinking about her, and feeling betrayed, and my tone shows it. “I thought it was overrated. You read all this stuff about how great love is, but does it have to be so tortured? So tragic? In the end I just didn’t care that much about Catherine and Heathcliff. The best part of the novel was the description of the landscape.” I look away from Alexa and try to control my voice. “The countryside was a whole other character.”

This is true. I wasn’t caught up in the typical love and longing of that novel, but I read and reread the passages about the moors, the dank grassy hills, and the dark forests. Maybe the images made me think of painting, the textures and richness. Inside, my chest is tight. If Faye were anywhere reachable, I would leave my room to call her or e-mail her. I’d send brain waves if I thought they’d reach her—anything so I could unload my worries and get some perspective.

“Yeah, I could see that,” Alexa says, pulling me back to the moment. She waits for me to comment further, but I’m all out of literary discourse. “I’m confused,” she says with a strange expression on her face. “Is something wrong?”

I’ve seen Sage and Sierra go at each other, but despite our bickering or the way Russ and I poke at each other sometimes, I’ve never really had a heated discussion with my siblings. Or maybe
discussion
is too mild a word for what is about to happen. I knock the stack of books over again that Alexa straightened. “What’s wrong is that I can’t trust you.”

“What?” She looks shocked.

“You know perfectly well what I mean.” I start to yell. “You and Tate playing putt-putt and you pushing me to go paint so you could go off with him. Do you know how humiliating it was to show up at his house and find you there? You said you told me, but you didn’t. You hid it from me.” I grip my hips with both hands and press my feet into the floor as though I need an anchor.

“You’re way off the mark, Jenny. I would never…” She falters. “I just wanted you to do something.” I want to defend myself, but Alexa goes on. “Sure, you tell me about art history and you let me
see
your life, but you don’t explain what’s really
inside.
Are you so afraid of the fallout that you can’t even risk saying anything? You never say what you’re really thinking. Until now.”

“You want me to talk? Fine. I’ll talk. Maybe you’re onto something. In fact, I know you are. Yes, I get worried about what will happen if I say what I really feel. If I tell my dad that I’m hurt he did the gardening project with you instead of me, I’d feel dumb. We’re different, you and me. You act before you’ve even thought of the consequences. Did you for one second think that maybe it would be nice if you’d let me work on the garden with my dad—that the
three
of us could have fixed it?”

Alexa looks like she’s been slapped. She opens her mouth to say something, but doesn’t.

“No, you didn’t. Just like you didn’t think about stepping over my catch at the beach. Or butting in so I can’t possibly be close with Sierra and Sage. And you just insert yourself with Tate and with Russ and with the school stuff.” My voice is definitely getting louder.

“I thought you wanted to transfer!” Alexa says sharply.

“No.
You
want me to. It’s just another one of your impulses.” I take a shaky breath and sit down on my bed while Alexa still stands there in front of me, arms at her sides like a soldier ready for action.

She makes her mouth small and her voice contained, quiet. “Just tell me, right now, exactly why you’re so pissed at me.”

Outside the window the sunlight flickers, casting shadows on my walls. “When I first found out about you, I was so relieved. Like, here’s my chance to have what Sage and Sierra have.”

“But we’re not twins,” she says as if this explains it all.

“Can I finish?” I feel my heart speeding up and twisting. There’s so much doubt in me now—with Alexa, with Tate, with my family, with the art show—but I press forward and test myself to see if I can say what I mean without backing out. “So we’re not the same. But that’s what I wanted. Or what I thought I wanted. I see my sisters and their amazing way of overlapping—how they flow into one another. And I wanted that. So I’m not mad at you. I’m let down by my own imagination.”

My voice trails off, and I study the mist of dust that’s illuminated by the streams of sunlight. Then I think about taking all the blame myself, and that doesn’t feel right. “But that’s not the only thing. It just feels like you need to prove how amazing you are, how much better you could be at being me than I am.” Letting the words out of my mouth feels like pulling away at a part of myself. I realize that’s exactly what I’ve been feeling.

Alexa looks at the floor and rests her palms on her knees and doesn’t say anything for a minute. “I can see why you’d think that.”

I expected her to freak out and yell at me, but she’s calm. “Really?”

Alexa nods and looks up at me, then looks down again. “I do that sometimes. I don’t know why. I just—” She coughs and brings her knees to her chest. “I’m totally driven and controlling and demanding, and maybe I’m like that here, but even worse.”

“But why?” My voice is pleading, and I pick at the paint on my shorts to distract from the intensity.

“Because you have this incredible life here.” Alexa sweeps her arm around as if she’s describing game show prizes. “Cool sisters who look up to you.” I shoot her a look of disbelief. “They do. You just don’t know it because you don’t talk to them and they’re intimidated.”

“By me?”

“Um, they’re twelve and you’re this sensitive brooding artist in the closet. Yeah, they’re intimidated by you. And Russ, he’s adorable, first of all.”

My pulse pounds with this comment because it reminds me of Alexa and her nonboundaries—she can steal Tate, but she can’t start in on my brother, too. The tension is so thick I can’t breathe.

“He wants to hang with you and you always bag out on him. ‘No, you can’t come with us. No, I’m not up for volleyball.’” Alexa imitates me with such accuracy I’m embarrassed and angry at the same time.

“I hate volleyball. Ever seen someone who hates bees try to swat them away? That’s me with the ball.”

“But who the hell cares? You think that’s what Russ is asking? He’s asking to do something with you, and since you don’t hand out a brush and palette, he’s offering the bat and ball or whatever.”

I hadn’t considered this before, and the last thing I want to do is think she’s sucked up all this in a week with me, but maybe she has.

Alexa turns away from me and starts folding her clothing briskly into neat stacks worthy of a boutique. “You talk about colors and what they mean and how you use them to convey what you feel in your paintings. But why is saying the words that you need to say to people such a bad thing? How do you expect to have people know what you want unless you
tell
them?”

Her tensely spoken words rain on me, chilling me to the bone and leaving me angry and upset. “I need some air,” I say. She’s on one side of the room and I’m on the other. I wait for her to grab me as I walk out of the room, but she just lets me go.

Outside, I sit on the stone bench, hating the way Alexa’s pansies have encroached on the rest of the lawn. It’s as though even her plants want to take over. I’ve just always thought that if people really know you, then you don’t need to explain what you’re thinking and how you’re feeling. Inside, I feel that ripping sensation, the hurt that happens when I’m honest with myself. The thing is, after I let the reality seep in, relief follows. I know I’ve been hard on Alexa—too hard, and I need to say so.

I always think I know how people are feeling, or more what they’re thinking, but I don’t. I don’t really know what Russ feels or what Tate thinks or if Sierra and Sage would talk to me on the way home from camp or if my parents want to have more to do with my art—because I don’t ask. I offer little tidbits; the watercolor river series I painted in Montana and gave to my dad was a test, like if he loved me, then he’d love my paintings. But I never saw those river paintings again. And I figure if the twins wanted to talk to me, they would. And if Russ felt like hanging out, he’d clue in that maybe backyard sports isn’t going to do it for me.

When you realize you’ve been wrong, that you’ve been missing out on parts of your life, the wind leaves your body at an immeasurable rate. You can’t get back the unspoken conversations, the afternoons spent thinking instead of explaining yourself, the night of being left out while the rest of your tribe is somewhere else. Suddenly I see my life unfolding fast, like I have the chance to be proactive. Rather than feel crushed by everything I haven’t done, I think about what I could do. Not that I’m going to rush out and yell my feelings from the top of the studio, but I could stop building the wall around myself—maybe loosen the mortar that’s been drying.

I retrace the steps to my room and know that now’s the time for an apology. A real one. Alexa is right where I left her, folding her clothes in a way that shows me she’s trying to busy and distract herself. I don’t think she expected this bump in the road, either. I clear my throat louder than necessary, and she shifts her gaze to me. I sit on the edge of the bed and take a deep breath. “I’m…” I pause and search for the right words. “I’m kind of—”

She stops folding and cuts me off. “Look, it wasn’t going to be perfect, right? How could it be?”

I nod and think back to the moment I found her. “I kept checking the message board to see if they’d have the answer to everything.” I’m building to an apology, but she won’t let me get there.

“I know, I did the same thing.”

We stare at each other and I’m aware of Alexa’s whole being. We share a biological father, but our daily lives are separate. I want to know what she thinks about me, and I’m about to do my usual nonasking when I press myself to reach out to the edges of the canvas in our relationship. “Will we always know each other?”

“I want to,” Alexa says softly. Her cell phone’s ring breaks the hush of the moment. We both look at the phone as it vibrates on my desk. “I should get that, it could be Mom.”

“I thought you just spoke with her.” My voice turns steely as I recall each word she uttered to Tate. All the revelations I experienced outside are being evacuated from my mind.

Alexa remains calm, but bites her top lip. “Well, sometimes she likes to call back. We miss each other.”

“Okay, that’s enough,” I bark, and stand up, leaving the bed’s warmth and any fuzzy feelings I had behind. She’s lying right to my face, and I can’t let it slide, no matter how much I want to. “Just tell me the truth, Alexa.”

“What?”

“I see how you look at Tate, and I heard you on the phone with him, okay? I looked at your phone while you were in the shower and saw his number.”

Alexa is staring at me in stunned silence, and the fact that she doesn’t come out and admit it is making me even more furious. That she had the gall to lecture me on how I should interact with my family when she can’t even be honest with me makes me queasy. My skin feels like it’s on fire, so when I continue talking, it sounds as if I’m about to go on a rampage. “It’s so pathetic that you have to come here and invade my life and try to win.”

Alexa narrows her eyes at me, through being nice and calm. The phone stops ringing, and when it does, she launches into defensive mode. “Well, I think it’s rather pathetic of you to spy on me and invade my
privacy.
Are you that insecure that you’d assume Tate would drop you for me?”

I exhale hard, as if Alexa has socked me in the stomach. Once I regain my composure, I make sure my words hit even harder. “Are you that insecure that you need to steal my family and boyfriend in order to feel important?”

Alexa squares off against me. “Nothing happened with Tate,” she says firmly. “And I wasn’t trying to steal anything from you.”

“Whatever. I saw you flirt with him, and now you’re having secret phone calls.” I want to drop my anchor in the small epiphany I had minutes earlier, but I’m too angry to hoist it overboard.

Alexa’s hands shake. She tries to quell the movement, but I can see the fluttering. “You’re totally paranoid. What’re you going to say next, Jenny? That I made you go paint that night just so I could get some time alone with him?”