Being the younger sister stinks. Especially when your older sister has “issues,” and everyone expects you to tiptoe around her in case she loses it again.
Especially when she’s completely fine now. But everyone got so used to her not being fine that my parents still treat her like a piece of fragile porcelain.
Me? I’m their beef jerky kid. As far as Mom and Dad are concerned, I’m a nonperishable item, tough as old boot leather.
I’m going to ask for my own laptop for my birthday. I don’t care what the stupid police chief says. And if my parents say no, I’m just going to save up the money my grandparents give me for birthdays and Christmas and whatever until I can afford to buy one for myself. Then I can do my homework whenever I want to, instead of having to work around my faking-it fragile sister.
I have to get away from Lara and her annoying giggling, but I don’t want to go all the way upstairs. I want her to know I’m hovering in wait. So I go out on the patio to text Cara and Maddie.
The sun is sinking behind the trees, and I see the silhouette of the old tree fort, the one my dad made with Mr. Connors, where Lara and Bree used to spend so much time together before they stopped hanging out.
I spot movement in the shadows beneath the tree, a faint rustle of the dried leaves piled around its base. And then I see a person climbing up the wooden rungs nailed to the trunk. Liam.
These days we smile at each other on the bus and when we see each other in the halls, but since our families stopped hanging out, we don’t see each other as much as we used to. I suddenly find myself wondering why. It’s not like we ever had a problem with each other. I guess we were used to our friendship just happening. Or maybe he got embarrassed about hanging around with a girl because his friends were teasing him. I swear, the minute I started wearing a bra, some of the guys at school started acting all weird.
I glance inside. Lara’s still on the computer. She’s still got eighteen minutes, according to the time on my cell, so I figure, what the heck? I walk over to the bottom of the big old oak, hoping I don’t scare Liam with the sound of my feet crunching through the leaves.
As I start climbing up the wooden rungs, I whistle so he knows someone is coming up. His head pops out of the doorway, and he shines the flashlight app on his cell down in my face, almost blinding me.
“Do you mind?” I complain.
“Oh, it’s you,” he says. “I was afraid it was Bree.”
I climb up the rest of the way and crawl in to join him. The tree house seems so much smaller than I remember. A spiderweb catches in my hair as I lean against the wall, breathing in the must and mold of disuse. Liam lights a candle, and it glows, flickering, showing the boy-band posters my sister and Bree had tacked up on the wall back when they were into that kind of thing. Back when they were still friends.
“So what brings you up here?” Liam asks.
“I had to get away from Lara,” I say. “And I saw you climbing up so …”
“Funny that,” Liam says with a wry grin. “I came up here to get away from Bree.”
“Remember how they always used to keep us out of here, even though it was supposed to be for all of us?”
“Oh yeah,” Liam says. “And we’d be stuck down below complaining about how not fair it was, but not knowing how to do anything about it.”
“How did they get away with being so mean to us?”
“ ’Cause they’re the older sisters?” Liam suggests. “Because that’s the way it is in families?”
“I guess. So is Bree still mean to you?”
“Not mean. Just … annoying. Seriously annoying. Sometimes it feels like the house isn’t big enough for the both of us — that’s when I escape out here. Bree hasn’t been up here for, like, two years or something.”
“It looks like no one’s been up here. It’s gross. You should clean the place up if you’re planning to hang out here regularly.”
He laughs, the candlelight reflecting on the whiteness of his teeth.
“Wow. You’re such a girl, Syd.”
“Duh, really? I hadn’t noticed.”
Some guys get all weird when I joke around with them. But not Liam. Even though we hadn’t hung out in a while, he definitely gets my humor. We used to play Mad Libs and do silly stuff like try to make all the words have to do with farts and poop. It made us laugh so hard our stomachs hurt. Our parents called us the little hyenas, because we were always cracking up about something.
“Why did we stop getting together as families just because Lara and Bree got all teenage girl and fell out?” Liam bursts out suddenly. “Does the whole freaking world revolve around my sister?”
Yes! It’s as if the candle’s glow has reached to the very deepest part of me, the part that I don’t want to let people see because I’m afraid it makes me an awful person. But suddenly, the person I’m so afraid of, Deepest Darkest Syd, realizes she’s not alone.
“Tell me about it,” I say. “When you’re normal in my house, you might as well be invisible.”
“How … is … Lara?” he asks.
“Oh, she’s fine and being totally annoying and inconsiderate, not that my parents would ever see that. That’s why I was outside. She’s hogging the computer every night, pretending she’s doing homework, but really she’s chatting.”
“ ‘Totally annoying and inconsiderate.’ Wow. Sounds just like Bree,” Liam says.
We sit, watching the flickering candle, enjoying a moment of silent younger-sibling solidarity.
“Why didn’t our moms stay friends?” he asks. “Or our dads?”
He doesn’t say, “Or us?” but it’s there, hanging unspoken like a ripe fruit unpicked, and now that I’m sitting here with him in the candlelight, I wonder, too. Because unlike all my other friends, Liam gets it.
“Mom got all caught up in the city council stuff, I guess.”
“Yeah, she’s, like, a big politician these days, huh?”
“Ugh, I know.”
“And my mom’s determined to be the real estate queen of Lake Hills,” Liam said. “You can’t go past a bus shelter without seeing her face.”
“Tell me the truth … Have you ever felt like drawing a mustache on her poster with a Sharpie when you’ve been really mad at her?”
Liam bursts out laughing. “How did you know? That was the one secret I thought I was taking to the grave.”
“Probably because I’ve felt like defacing Mom’s campaign posters once or twice,” I admit. “But at least I only have to deal with that every two years. You have to see your mom on the bus shelter all the time.”
“Yeah, tell me about it. I mean I love Mom and all, but … ‘Everything I touch turns to sold’? Cringe!”
“Well, what about my mom? ‘Kathy Kelley — Putting the public in public service.’ As long as she doesn’t have to admit that there’s anything the matter with our family in public, that is.”
Speaking of things wrong with our family, I check the time on my cell. It’s been more than twenty minutes.
“I’ve got to go. I told Lara she had to get off the computer in twenty minutes so I could do my homework, and her time is past being up.”
“Wait,” Liam says. “I … it’s just … even if our families aren’t friends anymore, do you think you and I could maybe still … you know, hang out sometime?”
Even in the candlelight, I can see him blushing through his freckles. He means like friends, right?
“Yeah,” I say, hoping that’s what he means, because I’m not sure how I’d feel about anything more. “See you in school. G’night.”
“Careful going down. I’ll shine the light for you.”
I climb down the slat ladder bathed in the light from his flashlight app. We call good night to each other again when I reach the bottom. I crunch through the dead leaves back to my house. When I let myself in through the sliding door, my cold fingers and cheeks tingle from the warmth.