how to explain it right. It’s like she’d smooth something over herself, push it away, maybe, and she’d be Tess again. The Tess everyone knew, the one who was always so happy, who always showed a smiling face to the world.
But that was for the world. For me … wel , I remember this one time, when I was twelve and she was fifteen, I went into her room without knocking, hoping she’d let me sit with her and Claire, and she just stared at me like she’d never seen me before.
“Hey,” I said, and then she’d smiled, a too-bright and too-sharp curve of her mouth, like she’d forgotten how to smile and couldn’t even fake it, and got up, came over to me, and said, “Get out.”
She didn’t yel . She spoke in this weird, flat voice, almost like speaking hurt her, and when I said, “But—” and Claire said, “Tess, relax, okay?”
Tess swung around and looked at Claire. Just looked at her, didn’t say a word, and Claire looked away from me, looked at the floor.
I took a step back, and Tess shut the door again, stil looking at Claire and never once at me. It was like she’d forgotten I was even there.
That night, at dinner, I asked Tess something—what she was going to wear to school the next day, maybe, or about her hair, things I knew Tess loved talking about—and she ignored me.
“I think Abby asked you a question,” Dad said, and gave Tess a playful nudge with the bowl of salad he was holding.
“I can’t do this anymore,” Tess said, and again, she didn’t shout. She didn’t even sound angry. She just sounded … gone. She got up and went to her room and wouldn’t come out for two days. She didn’t go to school, didn’t take cal s other than to tel people she wasn’t feeling wel but that she was so glad they cal ed. She was “asleep” if anyone came by. She didn’t eat, and I don’t actual y think she even slept at al . She just did … she just did nothing.
Mom stayed home from work the second day, and when I got home from school Tess was out of her room and smiling again. When I asked her if she was okay, she looked at me like I’d asked her a question she didn’t understand and then said, “Mom says you have her mother’s eyes.”
“Oh,” I said, hurt because Mom never talked about her parents with me, not ever. I knew they were both dead, but that was it. I hadn’t even known my eyes looked like my grandmother’s.
“Yeah,” Tess said. “Did you know she kil ed herself?”
“What?”
“She did,” Tess said. “So maybe you’re haunted.” She leaned in toward me. “Maybe you’l end up just like her.”
Normal y this is where I’d have hol ered for Mom or Dad or both of them, but I couldn’t. Tess was just—she looked so normal, so Tess-like, but what she was saying—it scared the crap out of me. I didn’t want to be haunted.
I didn’t want Tess to sound so happy about it.
So I just stood there, staring and scared, until she walked away.
When I final y worked up the nerve to ask Mom about my eyes, she said that yes, they did look like her mother’s, and then, “Why do you ask?”
I shrugged.
“You’re not like her, though,” Mom said, leaning over and smoothing my hair away from my face. “You’re like your father. When he decided to be who he real y was, when he stood up for himself, he—wel , let’s just say you can tel he’s your dad.”
I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but didn’t ask. I figured it had something to do with Dad’s brother, John, who’d died when Dad was in high school, and how Dad had left home for a while afterward. Mostly—after hearing that and what Tess had told me—I decided my parents hardly ever talked about their pasts and their families for a reason.
I stil wanted to be Tess, though. I wanted to be able to make people smile like she did, wanted to always know what to say or what to wear. I wanted to have that mysterious something she had, I wanted her ability to make everyone who met her turn to her, like her. I suppose I could have told someone about Tess’s moments of darkness, the ones that only happened at home, in private, but my parents never talked about it to anyone and I— wel , everyone would have said I was jealous. Younger sisters who aren’t as pretty and perfect as their older sisters always are, right?
And the truth is, I was. Those few moments at home aside, Tess was everything you could ever want to be.
Then Claire got pregnant right after the start of her and Tess’s senior year and Tess … she changed. Not on the surface, not in the glossy self she dressed up every day and that she let everyone see. But at home, in private, she was different. She was silent. She was angry. She was careful to never show it except at home, but at home, being around her was like—it was like being around someone who was so angry they were sick with it.
And I didn’t want to be like her anymore.
Sometimes, especial y as Claire’s pregnancy real y started to show and Tess was waiting to hear about col ege, she’d just lie on her bed and stare at the ceiling. And not just for a little while. For hours.
And once, we ran into Claire and her mother at the grocery store when Mom sent us to get hamburger buns. Tess acted like she didn’t see them, but the whole car ride home, al she talked about was how much she hated Claire. She spoke so much and so fast spit flew out of her mouth, dangled from the corner of her lips, and when she ran her hands through her hair, she did it so hard that thick strands of it were wrapped around her fingers when she lifted them away.
That wasn’t the worst moment, though. Not for me.
The worst was the summer night I came home after I broke my own heart—and how stupid I’d been back then, at fifteen, to not see that you could do that, to not see that you could destroy yourself more thoroughly than anyone else could—and found Tess sitting in the living room.
