“Stalker-y,” says KK. “I like it.”
Johan says, “That show was one of the reasons I wanted to go to college in New York.”
“To stalk a guy?” Parker asks.
“To stalk an experience completely foreign to anything I’d known before!” exults Johan, who is very red-faced from all his alcohol consumption. He places his index finger and thumb together like he’s holding a maestro’s baton, and calls out, “And for the music! The nightlife! The danger!”
“The pizza!” says Caspian.
“Don’t talk about carbs or no more noogie noogie for you,” KK says, not seeming to understand that the double use of words like noogie nixes sarcastic intent.
“Speaking of carbs, where’s those cookies your little friend brought over earlier?” asks Li. I retrieve the tin of Junk in da Trunk cookies, place it in the middle of the table, open it, take one for myself, and hand the tin to Li. She takes out a cookie and has a bite. “These are, like, the definition of disgusting. And possibly the best cookie I’ve ever had.”
She passes the tin to Parker, who takes one and has a bite. “I’ll pay for this later. For now, hurts so good.”
He passes the tin to Sam, who passes it on to Johan. “I’m trying not to go into a diabetic coma tonight,” says Sam.
Johan has no such qualms. He takes a bite of a cookie. “Is that potato chips I taste in here?”
I say, “Yeah, and chocolate chips and butterscotch morsels and malted milk balls and peanuts and pretz—”
“Stop,” says Johan. “Allow me the illusion my teeth aren’t going to fall out after I finish this cookie.”
“I wish Jason wasn’t passed out in Sam’s room,” I say. “Cuz these cookies would certainly be the end of him.”
“JUST STOP!”
There’s a moment of silence after Sam’s outburst. Sweet Sam never behaves so rudely.
“Stop what?” I ask him.
“Stop being mean about Jason. Stop interfering.”
“Interfering?” I ask, taken aback. “You do what you do with Jason no matter what I say.”
“So maybe don’t say anything? Maybe keep your opinions to yourself and let me live my life? If a guy I like is a jerk, let me find out on my own. I don’t need your help, Ilsa.”
Of course he needs my help. I’m eight minutes older. I think I know a little bit more about the world than naïve Sam.
“Fine,” I say.
Not fine.
Even more than the pain I feel that Sam apparently thinks I don’t get him is the betrayal I felt that Sam never trusted me enough to tell me he was hurting so badly. His silence made me feel like a failure as a sister. And I was a failure, because I never had the courage to just ask him if he wanted my help. Czarina probably didn’t ask him, either—she just went ahead and helped. Sam and Czarina have always been the Dynamic Duo, not Sam and his twin. Sam and I have no twin telepathy, no twin identical moves. We’re just people who came from the same womb and were raised in the same apartment(s). He got the better room—in our grandmother’s apartment, and in her heart.
“Someone’s been secretly harboring some resentment,” Dr. Caspian informs us.
“What’s your secret?” Johan asks Caspian. I think he’s trying to take the attention off Sam, who looks frustrated. “You know what I’d like to know, Casp? When you and your conquests go at it”—here Johan eyes KK—“how do you, you know, complete the transaction? Do you have a special—”
“Handler?” Parker asks, using finger quotes.
Everyone laughs except for Freddie and Caspian, whose stitched mouth is not capable of such an expression. Freddie’s look, however, falls somewhere between murderous and mutinous. But KK saves his pride. “Believe me, Casp ’n’ Freddie have all their parts in order.” She looks to me. I know that look. It’s KK’s I need to throw someone under the bus expression. “You know who has secrets, Sam? Ilsa. Ask her where she’ll be living when you think you’ll be in some part of California you have yet to determine because you don’t understand the state at all.”
Sam says, “You mean Ilsa’s intention to become Maddy’s nanny and move into my room when the Hogues take over this apartment?”
“You knew?” I say. And finally, after all these years, he acknowledges what the family knows but never says aloud. Czarina’s spare room is essentially Sam’s room. The favorite’s, and no one else’s.
Sam says, “Of course I knew! I was just waiting for you to tell me. Typically reckless Ilsa, thinking she can rock the boat with secrecy and then offer a grand reveal that will send everyone spinning.”
“You becoming a nanny is absurd…,” says Li. “Why would you squander your time in a job you probably don’t even want, if you really thought about it, in a place you already know?”
“What else should I do?” I ask her.
Parker offers, “Go to college. Wander the world. But don’t stay here for no reason other than you wanting Sam’s room for your own finally.”
It’s so much more than that.
Is it?
Why am I doing it?
KK says, “I’m with the rest of these dummies on this one. Don’t be a fuckup because that’s what’s expected of you, Ilsa.”
“But that’s the very definition of reckless,” says Sam. “And that’s our Ilsa.”
“SHUT UP!” This time the outburst comes from me. “Being a nanny is hardly a reckless job.”
Li says, “Agreed. But there’s also no point to it, for you, at this stage of your life.”
Johan says, “And you’re probably taking the job from someone who really needs it.”
I feel ganged up on. Quietly, Li says, “Don’t give up on yourself so easily.”
“I don’t know what else to do,” I confess.
I meant about myself, but Li is thinking about the bigger world. Li says, “These are scary times. Do something. Rise up. Protest. Participate. Believe in something bigger than the silly goings-on of rich people at the Stanwyck.”
“Hey!” says KK. “I’m one of those people.”
“Exactly,” says Li. “Who
