Envy

thank you, ma’am. She’d barely invited them in when she dropped the bomb.

“Who was my daughter sleeping with?”

“Huh?” Taylor asked, looking at her sister.

Hayley looked clueless.

Sandra had planted herself right in front of the twins and didn’t step back. She was totally invading their personal space.

“Do you know who Katie was having sex with?” she asked, her eyes fierce and angry.

It was a look neither girl had seen from Sandra, who had always seemed so fragile.

Hayley shook her head. “As far as I know, she wasn’t. And if she was, it was none of our business when she was alive.”

“Or now, when she’s, you know, not alive,” Taylor said.

Sandra’s eyes were stony. She was upset. Cold. Livid.

“Dead is the word you’re looking for, Taylor,” she said.

Taylor felt her face go pink. “Right. Dead. Well, we honestly don’t know.”

Sandra was on a mission. She needed to know. “Did she have a boyfriend?” she asked.

Hayley took that one. Taylor was unusually flustered. “She might have had someone she was talking to online.”

“This is more than online,” Katelyn’s mother said, backing up and going toward the coat tree. She started fishing through her coat pockets.

“Damn,” she said. “I can’t find it.”

“Find what?” Hayley asked.

“The pregnancy test she took,” Sandra said, now digging through her purse but coming up empty-handed. “Must have left it in the car.”

Taylor looked over at Hayley. She didn’t say it, but she was thinking that nobody takes a test for having online sex. If people did, grocery and drugstores would be selling the kits by the cartful.

“Look, Mrs. Berkley,” Taylor said. “We didn’t know her that well. Not like we did when we were little. But I’m pretty sure Katelyn would have told you if she thought she was pregnant.”

Taylor’s words seemed to soften Mrs. Berkley’s features.

“Maybe so,” she said. “At least, I hope so.”

She opened the door, which was their cue to leave. As it swung shut, the twins looked at each other.

“What you just did was very nice,” Hayley said as the pair hurried down the steps to the sidewalk in front of house number 23.

Taylor shrugged off the compliment. “That’s not why I did it. It was the truth. Mrs. Berkley and Katelyn were close. Close enough to make me wonder what it would be like if it was just me and Mom.”

“Instead of you, me, and Mom?”

“Right.”

“That’s a nice thought. Thanks for that.”

“Oh, come on. Like you haven’t wondered what it would be like as a singleton.”

Just then they noticed Teagan, loitering in the alleyway with his BB gun and a coffee can that he’d been using for target practice. Both girls thought it, but didn’t say it: Who buys coffee in a can anymore?

“Starla home?” Taylor asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “The little B is upstairs.”

“You mad at her?” Hayley asked.

Teagan lowered his BB gun. “Not really. Or maybe yes. She’s always telling me what to do. Even when I’m not mad at her, I have to get ready to be mad.”

He kicked the coffee can.

“Aren’t BB guns illegal?” Hayley asked.

“You going to tell on me?”

“No. I’m just asking.”

He shrugged. “I don’t care if they are. It’s fun to shoot stuff. One time I knocked a robin out of a tree. That was cool.”

“Actually, that’s not cool at all,” Hayley said.

“Whatever. I’m going inside. Come on and I’ll let you in.”

chapter 35

TEAGAN KNOCKED ON STARLA’S BEDROOM DOOR and opened it before she had time to call out an answer. Brothers across the world routinely did that. Girls routinely got special treatment like that. No sister ever has to knock to get into her brother’s room, that is, if she’d ever want to actually go into the gross, stinkfest lair that is usually on the other side of such a barrier.

Starla was sitting on the floor in that god-awful beanbag chair texting and listening to her iPod. The room smelled of strawberry incense, and whoever thought that torching strawberries was a good idea was completely devoid of any good sense or scents. The only thing worse was tea rose incense, which Taylor was convinced smelled like a burning grandmother. Starla had taken to burning incense to round out what she called her “spiritual” side.

“Hayley and Taylor are here,” Teagan announced.

“Oh, hi,” Starla said, not looking particularly happy to see them. She reached up through her cascade of golden hair and pulled out her earbuds. “What’s going on? You two look like crap.”

Teagan disappeared into his room next door, and Hayley and Taylor went inside.

“What’s up is that five minutes ago Mrs. Berkley just asked us if we knew who Katelyn was having sex with,” Hayley said.

Starla didn’t get up and the twins didn’t sit. “Oh, that must be why she’s been calling me,” she said.

“So spill the beanbag,” Hayley said. “Who was she sleeping with?”

“Sleeping with? A pillow is about it,” Starla said. “Probably a blanket.” If Starla had meant to be ironic just then, it fell flat.

“Honestly, you don’t know?” Taylor said.

Starla’s phone buzzed with a text, and, ignoring the two girls in her room, she went about the business of answering it. Without looking up, she said, “As far as I know she’d met that guy online but not in person. He stood her up.”

“Right,” Taylor said. “But how come her mom found a pregnancy test kit in her room?”

Starla looked up startled and then returned to her texting. “Beats me. I mean, maybe Katelyn was playing around more than we thought. Sometimes quiet girls are the wildest ones, right?” Turning, she specifically directed her gaze at Hayley. “How’s Colton doing?”

Hayley smartly refused to take the bait. “Look, we thought you liked Katelyn,” she said instead. “We thought that you’d want to know how she died. If she was pregnant, she might have felt there was no way out.”

“No way but a suicide,” Taylor said.

Starla shrugged slightly. “That seems dumb, but maybe.”

“Or maybe she didn’t want anyone to know because the guy that got her pregnant was someone older, someone she was protecting,” Hayley said, a little proud that she refrained from saying something snarky to Starla in retaliation for the crack about Colton.

“But I don’t know anything,” Starla said. “I’ve got ten thousand messages to answer.”

It was Starla’s way of dismissing them, and it worked. Taylor and Hayley turned to leave. Teagan emerged from his room as they were heading out.

“You were right, Teagan,” Taylor said. “Your sister is a total B.”

“The biggest B in the history of Port Gamble,” Hayley added.

“No argument from me,” he said with an undisputed grin on his face. “I heard you asking about Katelyn. What’s up?”

“What’s up?” Taylor asked. “She’s dead, and we don’t think she killed herself. What do you know?”