The Secrets We Keep (2 page)

I poked my head into my parents' room before heading downstairs. They were asleep, the TV still casting a pale blue light. I thought about turning it off but figured the sudden lack of noise might wake them up. My eye caught the array of pictures covering Mom's dresser. The flickering glow from the TV gave a hint of what they were, but I didn't need to see the photos to describe each one. They'd been there for as long as I could remember.

The big one in the middle was a family portrait taken three Christmases ago. We were gathered around a fake fireplace in some photographer's studio. The scowl on my face was the source of a huge argument that day. Next to that was a picture of Maddy and me on our sixteenth birthday. She looked stunning and was staring off into the distance, probably at Alex. I was standing there praying for Mom to hurry up and take the damn thing so I could go back to my room. The other three pictures were of Maddy. Maddy after her field hockey team won divisionals her sophomore year. Maddy and Alex at junior prom last year. Maddy with the keys to her “new” car.

It was the same in real life. At my father's office Christmas party, she was the one he introduced first. When we went to church, she got to sit between them. When a relative or an old friend asked my mom about the twins, it was Maddy's accomplishments Mom launched into first. Me they were still trying to figure out.

I was the smart, quiet one who preferred the inside of a book to parties. Quirky and reserved, that's how they described me to their friends. Quirky and reserved.

I quietly closed the door and made my way downstairs. It was pitch-black outside, the moon hidden behind a thick bank of clouds. It had rained earlier and, from the looks of it, was going to again.

I grabbed my coat and hat from the hall closet and headed outside. Luckily, the neighbors had left their porch lights on, or I would've walked smack into the trash cans at the end of our driveway. As it was, I'd already stumbled twice—once over Bailey's half-chewed rope toy and again, steps later, over a sprinkler head. That last one landed me on my butt, cursing and trying to brush the dampness from my jeans.

When I finally made it to my car, I realized Maddy's car was in the way. She'd parked straight across our driveway, blocking everybody in.

“Seriously, Maddy?” I said as I kicked her tire. It'd be fine if she was the first to leave in the morning, but she never was. Maddy was always the last one out the door, putting her makeup on in the rearview mirror while she raced to school. It was me who rearranged the cars each morning so Dad could get to work and I could get to school.

I winced at my throbbing toe and made my way back to the house. Moving the cars around wasn't an option. If turning off the TV had the potential to wake my parents up, then shuffling cars in the driveway would certainly have them stumbling down the stairs wondering where I was going.

I hung my keys on the hook next to the door. There were five hooks there, each clearly labeled with a name. Mine, Dad's, Mom's, Maddy's, even one designated for the lawn tractor keys, but Maddy's weren't there. Of course they wouldn't be there. Knowing her, she'd probably thrown them on the counter when she came in, figuring one of us would find them and hang them up.

“This is the last time, Maddy. I swear to God, this is the last time I do anything for you,” I muttered to myself as I fished around our kitchen counters in the dark. She couldn't make bailing her out easy. Nope, Maddy had to make everything as difficult as possible.

I finally found her keys wedged behind the radio. I picked them up, swearing to tear her a new one for being so selfish, then headed back out into the damp night air. If everything went as it should, I'd be home and in bed in less than a half hour with another of Maddy's promises to make it up to me stashed away in my brain.

 

2

It was drizzling by the time I reached Alex's house. Except for a few scattered cars parked between the trees, you'd never have known there was a party going on. I guess that was a perk of being
really
rich—a long driveway and lots of land to buffer sound.

I remembered the day Maddy met Alex Furey. We were freshmen, and it was our third day of school. I thought going to a new school with my sister would make everything easier, figured I'd have at least one person to sit with at the lunch table. I didn't take into account that we had no classes together, that Maddy was a lot more outgoing than me, or that we had very little in common. I assumed we'd stick together, and I'd have a built-in safety net.

Maddy let me crowd her those first few days, smiling and encouraging me to go off on my own and make some new friends. I tried: sitting next to people who I didn't recognize in my classes and saying hi to the few kids who looked my way. But when none of them said hi back, I ignored them and minded my own business.

That first Wednesday, I went to find Maddy in the cafeteria, excited about the drawing I'd done in open studio. The lunchroom was as loud as always, the smell a cross between burned pizza and nasty gym socks. Looking forward to a half hour of peace, I grabbed a tray and bought something I deemed safe enough to eat—a hot dog—and headed in to find her. But she wasn't sitting in the corner of the cafeteria like she had been on Monday and Tuesday. That table was empty—eight vacant chairs surrounding an equally deserted table. I searched the other tables, automatically focusing on those kids sitting alone. No Maddy. It wasn't until I scanned the center of the room, my eyes skating across the six tables that had been jammed together, that I saw her. She wasn't sitting in a chair. She was perched on top of the table, her arms draped around some kid's neck. And she was laughing.

I stood there watching her, debating whether to go over and sit down next to her or to seek out one of the empty tables that littered the corners. Luckily, I didn't have to make the decision. Maddy made it for me.

She extricated herself from the boy's hold and hopped down off the table. I couldn't hear her over the noise, but I gathered from the flick of her wrists that she was telling him she'd be back in a minute.

“Hey,” she said as she stopped in front of me. “I waited for you outside the cafeteria, but—”

“Yeah, sorry, I had a question about a geometry problem,” I said, cutting off her lie. She'd never waited for me outside before. Not once during junior high and not once since we started here.

“Who are they?” I asked, looking past her to the group of people now staring at us.

“Alex Furey,” she said, smiling in his direction. Here was a smile I hadn't seen before—head cocked and perky.

“Okay,” I said, taking a step toward the table. I didn't care who we sat with so long as I didn't have to sit alone.

Maddy stopped me, her perfectly pink nails encircling my wrist. I stared down at them, wondering when she'd had time to paint her nails and when she'd started wearing pink. And were those tiny white flowers painted in the middle?

We'd come to school looking nearly identical, so much so that our homeroom teacher did a double take. We were wearing the same jeans, the same hair twisted into a bun, the same boring beige tank tops when we left the house, but somehow she had changed and redone everything from her shoes to her makeup in the last three hours.

“Alex has a cousin your age. He thinks—”

“You mean
our
age,” I interrupted.

She shrugged that off and steered me toward a table in the back of the cafeteria. “I think you'll like him. From what Alex says, you two have a lot in common.”

Which translated to: he was smart, quiet, and too quirky for his own family to acknowledge. Apparently, so was I.

“He's starting an anime club,” she continued, fingering the notebook I had tucked under my tray. It was covered with manga drawings I'd been working on during History class. Some of them were good; most of them were doodles. I had the one I wanted to show her on top. I'd ripped it out of my notebook, thinking I'd give it to her at lunch.

Maddy took the tray from my hands, not once looking at the drawing underneath. “Come on. I'll introduce you.”

She was a good five steps ahead of me before my feet started moving. I tucked the drawing into my notebook and followed her over. The two kids sitting there looked up when she dropped my tray onto the table. I recognized both of them from Honors English but had no clue who they actually were. They were two guys with longish hair and Mountain Dew T-shirts eating their food and minding their own business until my sister interrupted them.

I swung my head from them to Maddy. Her food, if she had any, her books, and her phone were at the other table.

“It's Ella, right?” I turned toward one of the boys at the table and nodded, wondering how he knew my name. “I'm Josh.”

“Yup, her name's Ella,” Maddy offered up when I remained silent. “She's into that Japanese-cartoon stuff you guys like.”

Maddy nudged me closer, and I stumbled into the corner of the table. “Right, Ella?”

I nodded, still confused, still mute. Until five minutes ago, she was into my “Japanese-cartoon stuff,” too. Last I checked, she had an entire bulletin board dedicated to my drawings. Now she was talking about it like it was some noxious side effect of having an identical twin sister. I followed her gaze to the other table and watched as her entire personality changed instantly in front of my eyes. She shook her head, tossing her hair as she smothered a giggle. Alex winked, and I swore she blushed.

“You're good, right?” Maddy asked over her shoulder as she danced away. I didn't bother to answer. I was too busy trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

“You gonna sit?” Josh asked.

“What?”

“I said are you going to sit?”

“Yeah. I guess so.”

I pulled out a chair a safe three seats away from him and sat down. I didn't speak, just focused on my food, confused and hurt that I'd been dumped—literally dumped—by my own sister.

Three years later I was still sitting at that same table with Josh, but now my sister's exclusion didn't bother me.

 

3

I parked as close to Alex's house as I could, which was still fifteen cars away. I could hear the music now, the faint thump of the bass echoing through the windows. Out of habit, I locked the car. Not that anybody would think to steal it. My sister's ten-year-old Honda was nothing special compared to the shiny new toys parked around it. That, and nobody messed with anything that belonged to Alex Furey. And my sister most definitely belonged to him.

I followed the music up the walkway. The front porch was littered with plastic cups and empty pizza boxes, the occasional soda can tossed in between. I made my way up the stairs, careful not to look at the two kids making out on the railing, and opened the door to the house.

I don't know what hit me first, the music or the smell, but both sent me in search of clean air. Three steps and the stench of perfume, pot, and sweat finally cleared. The pounding in my head … well, that dulled to a tolerable level. I hadn't been to a party like this since I was a freshman and Mom paid Maddy to take me out with her. Something about me needing to make friends. Since then, I'd spent plenty of time running pick-up duty but had done my best to avoid
ever
having to enter into this social scene again.

“Hey, what are you doing here?”

His voice echoed over the drumming in my head, and I looked up to see Josh coming out the front door. I thought about asking him the same question—he wasn't exactly top man on his cousin's list—then I remembered his parents were away, Alex's with them. A family vacation that didn't include kids.

Surprisingly, both sets of parents thought it wiser if Josh and Alex stayed together while they were gone. My guess was that that had nothing to do with Josh's parents and everything to do with Alex's father wanting to make sure his son didn't trash his house while they were gone. Josh would stay to make his parents happy, but there was no way he'd run babysitting duty for his uncle.

“Looking for Maddy,” I said. “She called and said she needed a ride home.”

“Stay for a while and hang out with me. I brought some movies from home. We can watch them upstairs.”

He'd been bugging me for weeks to spend more time with him, but I'd been obsessed with my art school application and passing AP Physics. Plus, he had Kim now, and she was more than willing to occupy every second of his time.

“Can't,” I said. “I'm beat and we have a Physics test on Monday. Kinda hoping for something better than a B on this one.” More accurately I needed an A to make up for the F Maddy scored me last week.

Josh shrugged, the slight bit of hope I'd seen in his eyes fading away. “Sent my application in this morning. You finish yours?”

“Yup. I submitted it before I left. Now we wait.”

Josh laughed. We had planned this since the middle of freshman year. We'd submit our applications on the same day, to the same schools, then start obsessing about it four weeks out. When the e-mails finally came, we'd meet up and compare them. We'd go together or not at all. If one of us didn't get in, then, as far as we were concerned, neither of us did.

“Yeah, now we wait.” He held the door open for me, and we walked in. It took a minute, but once I got used to the smell, it wasn't so bad. The house wasn't overly crowded, but that didn't make it any easier to get around. Nobody got out of our way, and we had to weave around people, furniture, and the occasional nasty glare to make our way through the living room.

“No Kim?” I asked, smirking. She'd been clingy lately, complaining that he spent too much time with me and not enough with her. I didn't see the problem; neither did Josh, but then again I wasn't the one dating a sophomore.

“Nope, seniors only, according to Alex,” he said, and I gathered from his tone that Kim's absence wasn't bothering him. He'd spent the entire day with her while I was holed up in my room finishing the sketches for my RISD application. Knowing him, he was probably looking forward to some time without her.