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Authors: Trisha Leaver

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BOOK: The Secrets We Keep
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I made my way through the house, irked when I saw some kid point in my direction and scowl. I could look and act exactly like my sister if I wanted to, had done it for years. But here, when I was being myself, I was a nothing.

“She was in the kitchen last time I saw her,” Josh said as he pointed to the far side of the house. “But that was a while ago.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Why didn't you offer to bring her home?”

“She never asked,” he said, and I heard the inference in his voice. He would gladly have given Maddy a ride home … had she asked.

I couldn't help but look around as we made our way through the house. My sister had been dating Alex since freshman year, and I'd never once set foot in here. I'd picked her up at the end of the driveway plenty of times, had made it as far as the front door to ring the bell. But not once, before tonight, had I been invited in.

I scanned the room, wondering what made this kid so special. If it was there, I didn't see it. His house may have been bigger than ours, but the furniture looked no more expensive. The iPod docking station on the table looked to be a few years old. Mine was better.

I spotted the shadow of a girl curled up on the couch. She looked vaguely familiar, like someone I would've recognized instantly had the lights in the room not been so dim.

She sniffled and ran her sleeve across her nose. I followed her gaze to the far wall, wondering what had her so entranced. The wall was blank except for the giant flat screen mounted halfway up, and that was off.

“She okay?” I asked Josh.

“Who? Molly?” he asked. “I guess so. I talked to her earlier, asked her if she wanted a ride home or something. She said she was fine and wanted to be left alone.”

I thought about confirming that for myself. As soon as I found Maddy, I was leaving anyway. I could drop her off. I made a mental note to check and see if she was still there before I left, then headed into the next room.

The kitchen was at the far end of the house and doubled as beer central. There was a keg on the floor, tucked into a brown trash barrel that I presumed was filled with ice. Two coolers stood by the sliding door and what was left of several pizzas littered the counter. There were people everywhere—jammed into the small corner between the refrigerator and the pantry, sitting on the counters, leaning against walls. They'd dragged the dining room chairs in so that they could fit twelve people around the table that housed a bunch of plastic cups and what looked like a Ping-Pong ball.

I scanned the room twice looking for Maddy, listening for the sound of her voice. Placing my hands on Josh's shoulders, I hoisted myself up so I could see, and still no sign of my sister.

“She's not here,” I said as I glanced at my watch. So much for my back-in-bed-in-less-than-a-half-hour plan.

Josh looked around the room himself before moving toward a kid by the door. “You seen Maddy Lawton around?”

The kid looked at us, then opened the cooler. He dug around in the slush before pulling out a hard lemonade. His eyes met mine and he smirked, no doubt too drunk to figure out that I was not my sister. I remembered him from Maddy's Spanish class. Keith something or other. He sat next to her and had asked if “she” wouldn't mind sharing the answers to the oral exam
I'd
taken. I batted my eyes, and in my best Maddy voice said, “Absolutely, darling. Anything for you,” then wrote the wrong answers down and slid them toward the edge of my desk. He winked and quickly memorized them, never once questioning who I was. Idiot.

Josh caught Keith's look and clarified. “This is Ella,” he said. “We're trying to find Maddy.”

“Ha! Well, that explains why she looks like crap,” Keith said as he walked away, not offering to help.

I glanced down at myself, thought maybe I was wearing mismatched shoes or had a big pizza stain on my sweatshirt. I had on an old pair of jeans, a plain gray hoodie, and an equally dull jacket, and nothing was grossly wrong with any of them. Sneakers matched, too, so maybe it was my hair. I'd quickly tossed it into a ponytail before I left, then tucked it up under my hat. Perhaps I should have actually brushed it.

Josh caught my hand as I went to smooth my hair. “You look fine. He's just being a jerk.”

Not wanting Josh to know how much the drunk kid's comments hurt, I tried for a smile. I doubted I had pulled it off.

“I wasn't lying, you look fine,” Josh said again. “You always do.”

I shook my head and watched as Keith stopped a few feet away and bent down to whisper something into a girl's ear. She turned around, her gaze raking over me. Crap, Jenna.

She walked over, a beer in one hand and the drunk kid's hand locked in the other. The disgusted scowl she reserved for me was firmly in place. “What are you doing here?” Jenna asked. “I strongly doubt
you
are on the guest list.”

“Where's Maddy?” I asked, ignoring her comment.

“She's gonna flip when she finds out you're here. God, it is bad enough she has to deal with you at school, but here…” She shook her head and trailed off, unable to find the exact words to describe her hatred of me.

“Whatever. Where's Maddy?”

I followed Jenna's eyes to the ceiling and groaned. It would be exactly like my sister to call me in a tizzy, then suck down two more beers and forget about everything. “You've got to be kidding me.”

Jenna giggled, her hand playing with the blond hair at the back of the drunk kid's neck. She was amazing, could go from mean girl to flirt at a staggeringly impressive speed. Yeah … me, I didn't find it amusing.

“You want to check upstairs?” Josh asked, motioning toward the stairs.

“Uh … no,” I said, remembering the one time I walked into Maddy's room unannounced to retrieve the calculator she'd “borrowed” from me. Mom was out at book club and Dad still wasn't home from work, otherwise I doubt Alex would've even set foot in Maddy's room. Dad made sure both Alex and Maddy knew the rule—no boys upstairs if my parents weren't home and even when they were, the door had to stay open. Wide open. That night the door was closed, and I got more of a view of Alex than I ever wanted.

“Let's look outside. If she's not there, I'll check upstairs,” Josh said.

I nodded my thanks and followed Josh onto the deck. What the house lacked on the inside, it made up for out here. It was quiet, the huge lawn sloping down toward the lake. I could see a shape I thought was a dock, but without a light, I couldn't be sure.

But what I could see clearly were two Adirondack chairs off to the side of the deck stairs. And if my eyes were right, someone was sitting in one of them.

“Maddy?” I said as I approached. She was huddled into herself, curled up in a ball, her shoes dangling from her hands.

“Maddy?” I repeated, shaking her gently. I'd never seen her like this—quiet and distant—and it was beginning to freak me out. “What's wrong?”

She looked up, and the fear that had struck me when I first saw her had nothing on the pain that lanced my heart now. The tears I'd heard on the phone were still there, streaming down her face as she struggled to compose herself. From the looks of it, she'd been sobbing long and hard, hidden away back here.

I shot Josh a glance, hoping he could fill me in. He'd been here the whole time, was sleeping under the same roof as Alex. He had to have some idea as to what was going on.

Josh shrugged, hunched down in front of my sister, and stared into her eyes. He waited a second for Maddy to silently acknowledge him before asking, “Where's Alex?”

“Inside.” She hiccuped.

“Do you want me to get him?”

“No,” she said, and stood up.

She was soaking wet and shaking, her lips nearly blue. From the dampness of the grass and the puddle next to the deck, I gathered it had rained here, too. And by the looks of it, Maddy had been sitting outside, alone, when it happened.

I doubted she was drunk. She got up without any help and didn't seem to have a problem following my questions. She didn't stumble or cover her mouth and swallow down beer-tinged bile threatening to come up. I knew what drunk Maddy looked like, and this wasn't it.

My guess was that the glaze covering her eyes was from her tears and nothing more. “What's going on?” I asked.

She stared at me for a long minute, then shook her head. “Nothing. Can we go?”

I had a thousand questions for her, but I knew she wouldn't answer any of them. I thought about searching each room of the house until I found Alex and asking
him
what was going on. Somehow I didn't think that would help. If Maddy didn't want me to know, then she wouldn't tell me. I'd hear about it on Monday at school, then get a completely different version of the story the following day. By the end of the week, I'd have fifteen versions of “What Happened to Maddy Lawton?” to sift through. But before I listened to any of them, I wanted the real story from her.

I let it slide for now, more interested in getting her shivering body into the warm car than anything else. Tomorrow … tomorrow I'd start asking the questions.

 

4

I didn't bother to take us through the house. I figured my sister was out here by herself for a reason—a reason that probably involved her friends
not
seeing her like this.

“You want me to follow you home?” Josh asked.

I shook my head. His car was blocked in five deep, and if I didn't get home soon, my father, and not my silently miserable sister, would be my biggest problem.

“Call me when you get home,” Josh said, and pointed toward the house. A few people had found their way out onto the front lawn and were busy setting off car alarms. “I'll be up for a while.”

Yeah, he'd be up for the rest of the night working cleanup duty while Alex passed out on the couch.

I got in the driver's seat and looked over at my sister. She was slumped down into her seat, staring straight ahead. Her hair was damp, stringy, and hanging limply around her shoulders, and what little makeup she had on was now smudged.

“Your mascara is messed up,” I said as I handed her a tissue from my pocket. It was damp from the rain, but that didn't matter; it'd work better that way.

She tossed the tissue aside and opened up her glove compartment, pulling out a small package of baby wipes. In three swipes, she had her face clean, every trace of her made-up face gone. Like this, natural, with no pretenses and no image to maintain, she looked a lot more like me.

A shiver racked her body and she drew her knees up to her chest, resting her head on them. Her eyes caught mine and she smiled, the faint tilt of the lips the closest thing to a thank-you I would get. My eyes shifted to her feet. They were bare. She was holding her flats when I found her. She'd probably dropped them when she stood up. I toyed with going back to get them, grabbing a coat of Alex's for her while I was at it, but I didn't want to waste any more time.

I took off my coat and tugged my sweatshirt up over my head, then gave it to her along with my coat and hat. I was quite sure I was going to freeze my butt off until the heat kicked in. But she was pale and she was shivering. I didn't know what else to do.

Maddy took my sweatshirt and slid her arms into the sleeves, then put my coat on over it. She wrapped it farther around herself, sinking deeper into the fabric and herself in the process. She didn't complain about her hair when I tucked it into my hat, nor did I get a thank-you when I gave her my socks and shoes. She merely shoved her feet into them and went back to staring out the passenger-side window.

Not long ago, she would've said thank you, and probably wouldn't have taken the only dry clothes I had in the first place. But a lot can change in a few years.
She'd
changed a lot in a few years.

I cranked up the heat and searched the rest of her car for a blanket, an extra sweater, an old pair of jeans … anything I could find to still her tremors. I found a tube of lip gloss, an empty Pop-Tarts box, and three days' worth of homework that hadn't been turned in. Funny, it was Spanish homework. Now I knew why she had needed me to take that test.

“We'll be home in a few minutes,” I said as I tried to maneuver the car off the lawn and onto the driveway. It was harder than I thought with bare feet—my toes kept slipping off the pedal. “I'll cover for you tomorrow with Mom and Dad and tell everybody at school on Monday that you aren't feeling well if you want to stay home for a couple of days and avoid everybody.”

“Can't,” she mumbled. “People will start talking if I don't show, make up some rumor about me and Alex fighting.”

Judging by the stares of the few people we'd passed in the front yard, my guess was they already were. “They started talking before you left, Maddy. Trust me.”

“No they didn't. They wouldn't do that. Alex wouldn't let them.”

I groaned, amazed at the lie she was selling herself. “You honestly believe that? The rumors started the second I got there, the instant they realized that you called
me
to come get you rather than ask Alex to drive you home.”

I didn't bother to tell her about Jenna or her dig at me. Maddy would take her side. She always did, blamed Jenna's miserable attitude on the fact that she had a hard time at home. As if her parents' financial problems and their crazy need to hide them were somehow a free pass for Jenna to be mean. But no amount of lipstick could cover up her ugly personality.

She shrugged. “You don't get it, Ella. You never will. They don't care about you showing up. They don't care about you at all. They're more interested in lying—making up stories that will ruin their friends' lives while making themselves more popular.”

She was absolutely right. Since we started high school, I'd watched her dance around these people, play their games, and worry about what everybody thought while I cleaned up her messes. I didn't get any of it. Not from the first time she sat down at Alex's lunch table to last month when she came home so trashed from a party at the beach that I had to spend three hours with her in the bathroom holding her hair back while she puked. Once she passed out, I had the honor of lying to my parents, telling them the leftover Chinese food Maddy had inhaled when she got home was probably bad. That wasn't the first time I'd covered for Maddy, and it sure wouldn't be the last.

BOOK: The Secrets We Keep
9.94Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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