Sister Pact (8 page)

“You didn't even try to make me.”

Leah shakes her head. I can tell she's trying not to cry. And she's right. What's the point of beating this dead horse? She did it. It's over. There are no do-overs in suicide. I put my hands over my face. I don't know why, but I don't want her to see me cry—like she doesn't deserve to since she left me.

“Let's not talk about this,” Leah says. “Let's talk about the art. You want me to help find your colors? Your concentration?”

I nod.

“Okay. Then let's think. Why don't you use the paintings? My paintings?”

“I can't. It's too hard…”

“Okay, then you just have to figure out something else you love that you'd want to paint twelve times. Although, compared to me, they'd all pale, wouldn't they? Hey, that's funny…pale…because, you know…”

I stiffen.

“What's the matter?”

“It's not funny. You being dead is not funny.”

“I'm sorry. I was just trying for a little levity. Get it? Levity…”

I walk to the door, then turn to face her. “Can you tell me why?”

“It doesn't matter.”

“To me it does. It matters a lot.”

Leah walks over to the wall and looks out the window. She traces a drop of condensation with her finger. “It all seems so stupid now. I was mixed up. It was stupid. I was stupid.”

“Was it that guy? The secret one?”

“There's no secret guy. There used to be when I was stupid and thought love was the only thing that mattered. God, I was an idiot.”

“What happened to him?”

She looks at the ceiling. “Nothing happened to him. It's what happened to me. I changed.”

“Why?”

She looks straight at me. “You have to ask? You were there. You saw. Everyone acts as if love fixes all. But that's bullshit. Love kills more than it saves.”

My breath leaves me. I don't want to finish the Cape memory. I don't want to see how it went down, but I know what she means. I do. “What about Vanessa? Was she why?” I ask.

Her eyes go to slits. “You're worried about all the wrong things—why you're not on my computer, why I did it, if those nasty little rumors are true. I don't need to answer to you.”

First pain, then heat—then hate. Just like Dad, she slays me. She storms over to me but stops when she sees my hands. She takes them in hers. Her face softens. She points to my fingernails, now painted Essie Mint Candy Apple. “Awww, pretty Cape colors.”

I shake my head and let my tears race down my cheeks. Cape colors.

She moves my hair behind my ears. “Forget about me. Go on with your life.” She shows me her nails, the polish some color I don't even remember the name of, now peeling. “I'm last year's colors. And I always will be. I'll never change.” Tears run down her face, leaving angry red, raised marks in their path. “And now I'm stuck here.” She looks around. “In this dark studio you never even visit anymore.”

I admit, that makes me feel a little guilty.

“I don't want you to go. I want you with me,” I tell her.

“Find your art. Soon. Or Dad's going to get rid of me.” Her eyes crawl over the shrouded paintings.

“I know. I'm trying.”

Her hands fall on my arms. “Listen, I know you don't understand why I left you, and I'm sorry about that. But you can save me now. Isn't that good?”

“What if I can't?”

“You have to try.” Leah puts her face so close to mine, I can smell the cherry Chap on her lips. “It's the only way.”

I feel in my pocket—the second pill from my rescue dose already in there.

“It doesn't have to be just those. It could be other ones too. Art is something you have to sacrifice for. I did—for dance.”

I think about the diet pills. And the pills she didn't take but should have. I think about what Piper said about finding my art. “I'm worried…”

“Just try it once. See if it works. Then maybe your art will come back on its own.”

“Okay.”

“Good. Now let's get you to sleep.”

She gets in front of me and takes my hand, leads me through the door, back through the house, and up the stairs to my room. When I get there, Max and Emery are waiting. I think it's cool they keep showing up together for me.

“Hey,” I say.

“Where were you?” Max asks.

“In my studio.”

“That's great, Al,” Emery says. “How'd it go?”

“Good.” I smile.

Em jumps on my bed, her book for AP lit in hand. “This totally sucks. You're so lucky you're not taking this.”

“Yeah, who's going to write my essays?” Max asks.

I lower myself onto the bed next to Em and close my eyes.

“Good night, Allie,” Leah whispers.

“Good night,” I whisper back—only Max and Em think I'm talking to them.

Art class. I've dreaded this all day.

“Hey,” Nick calls, his hands shoved in his pockets, his gaze fixed on the scene in front of him.

“What's up?” I ask, but by the time I make it to the back of the room, I realize what he's looking at, and then all I'm thinking about are the three easels set up like executioner's rifles, locked and loaded. I touch the pill I stole from Mom that's stashed in my pocket.

“Ugh. We're doing this now?” I ask.

“Apparently.” Nick groans. “Piper seems cool with it.”

I look at her arranging her paints, a smile on her face, and I can't help but wonder if she indulged a little before class. She turns to face me, as if she read my mind. She winks, and I guess I've got my answer. It's what all the greats do apparently. Who am I to question it?

“Okay, how are my best students doing?” Mr. Kispert asks as he comes to join us. “I was thinking that today you don't have to work on your concentration—unless you want to. Feel free to just paint. Sometimes when you're trying too hard to find your idea, you just need to throw paint on the canvas and get things going.”

He looks at me when he says this, and once again, I want to disappear.

I open my backpack and take out my Gatorade. My fingers go into my pocket again, where the Xanax lives—an Indian summer–orange oval. I remember thinking it looked like a malformed SweeTart when I took it out of Mom's bottle. The one she thinks is so cleverly hidden in her underwear drawer.

Something screams at me not to do this. Dr. Applegate saying she believed I didn't want to do it. Mom in the car:
Don't leave me, Allie. Stay.
Leah begging me to bring her back. I honestly don't know who to listen to.

I look at the paints in front of me, and it's like I've become color illiterate. I dab some red. Yellow. White. Black. Blue. Straight from the tube, they look like fingerpaints—bright and brash and ugly. I take my brush and start to mix them.

Nick looks at me and smiles, then goes back to his painting. He's mixed a dandelion, a cocoa, and an acid-washed moss. The colors are perfect and subtle. He's painting a baseball field, which is sort of brilliant, because it is the most basic thing he could paint. Everyone knows a baseball field. Especially him. But there are ten thousand ways to paint them and almost none of them are wrong.

“Wow,” I say, and he blushes.

“Kid stuff really, but I gotta get my painting arm warm.”

I smile. Nick is now mixing baseball and painting as adeptly as he's mixing his paint and that makes me wish I could find my art as easily as he always does.

I stare at my palette. I want to see what he sees. I just don't. I can't. I feel the presence of someone next to me. Is Leah here?

Piper's voice—not Leah's—says, “I remember what you wore that night.”

Nick steps closer, and Piper holds up her hand. He tries to shake her off, but she doesn't listen.

She leans over me and mixes a perfect Venetian red—like the dress I wore to the party. She steps away. I see Nick out of the corner of my eye, watching me as I stare at the beginning of the end—that red dress.

“Tap into the pain if you have to, Allie. Art bleeds it out of you.”

I mix the Egyptian-blue color, the dress Leah wore, my hand shaking as I do. I keep saying I want answers. I keep asking Leah. Why can't I just make myself remember? Fill in the blanks? I look at the colors, loud and accusing. Leah looked amazing that night, even better than usual. She shined when we walked into the party. My eyes close as I glimpse that memory.

“Come on,” Leah had said, pushing me onto the stage. Her stage. “This is going to be your night, the one you'll always remember.”

She was right about that. I will never forget that night—the parts that aren't pushed away by my damaged psyche or buried by my drunken blackout. The little pill in my pocket calls to me. Would it help unlock me? I shoot Nick a smile and then twist to grab my backpack and my Gatorade.

My heart beats fast as I slip the pill between my lips and swallow it with the thought that I'm going to end up just like my sister.

“It's not the worst thing in the world,” Nick says, making me feel like he's gotten inside of my head. He points to the canvas and says, “You'll get it. You always do.”

Nick goes back to working on his field. Piper is working at her painting. She's doing a portrait of a girl leaning against a window. It's mostly grays and blues, and it's kind of brilliant. That just leaves me and my blank canvas.

What's the easiest thing to paint?
Still life.
The words come to me. Not from Leah but from my mind, like it's taking over for me in this chess match. Still life. Still alive. Leah. It always comes back to her. But at least it's something I can work with. I start to sketch flowers in a vase, taking a top-down perspective. I am really just playing with angles, but it makes the flowers look like they're being slaughtered. Mr. Kispert says art is about choices. Am I making the right ones?

The headphones are snug in my ears, and the pill starts to kick in. My head starts to feel warm, in a tingly sort of way. And the pressure that's built up in my temples and neck and shoulders lessens. In truth, I loosen. And I get why Mom takes this stuff.

I turn up the music and try to create without thinking. I stop looking at the lines I've drawn and reach inside me for the colors. The red goes on the canvas.

We walk into the party. I see her friends. They were all smiling and toasting me with those red Solo cups that smelled like beer that had already gone sour. I turned away from the cups, and Jason handed me a strawberry daiquiri because he said it tasted better than beer.

Egyptian blue explodes on the canvas. I see Leah and Sean taking me home. Both of them are pissed, not just about me but at each other.

I paint one flower, jet-black for when I found her. She's dead.

“I'm sorry,” Leah whispers in my ear.

For once I don't want to hear her voice with her excuses. And it's not just because I'm in school or was supposed to have a say in this. It's because I'm trying hard to get that last image of her out of my mind. I don't want to remember Leah with her colors bleeding out of her.

I blink. And she's there, standing next to my painting.

She looks at it and then back at me. “I like it. It's strong.”

I wish I could get her to leave, but I know she won't. So I ignore her and let everything spill from inside me onto the canvas. And just this once, I don't care if it's right. Or if it's okay. Or if it's enough.

But when I'm done with my paint rapture, I'm scared. Because I think I might be insane—with the colors I chose and the emotion I unleashed. So I dip my smallest brush and add a tiny magenta outline and a few lines for accents, hoping a little bright can save this painting. Hoping a little Happy can fix it. So no one will see how fucked up it is.

Mr. Kispert stands behind me. A crowd follows him. My stomach tightens. “The colors…”

“I know. They're different…”

“They're powerful. Evocative.” Instead of being a peaceful still life, my flowers look like baby vultures, mouths opened, reaching for their next meal. “I love the perspective. Stunning.”

Leah crosses her arms over her chest and beams. “You painted my colors.”

She may be right. They're definitely not mine.

Nick looks at my canvas, shakes his head, and smiles. “I told you. You're amazing.”

I try to see what they see. The colors may be powerful, but they're stains from a wound. The only controlled element is that outline—one skinny purple line where I tried to rein it all in. I shake my head. I shouldn't have listened to Leah. I've made a mess of this. It's sloppy. Leah used to call me that—sloppy seconds.

I remember one day in my room last spring.

“It's perfect,” she said as she typed it. All one word, lowercase letters. Now my new password for the new computer Dad got me.

“It's a play on words,” she said. “Get it? You're second in the family
and
you're sloppy.” She laughed so hard, she cried. I remember I did too. Everyone was all in when Leah was happy.

And now, I stand here in front of a painting that's more hers than mine. My head starts spinning, and I get dizzy. I'm that purple line, holding everything together. I wonder how long I can keep this up without letting my crazy explode.

Leah chews on her fingernail. “I know what you're thinking. You think you're crazy, but you're not. You're just sad. Trust me, I know the difference.”

Maybe she's right. Maybe I'm just sad. But what's the difference between sad and depressed? What makes her a suicide and me suicidal? I mean, if that's what I am.

“You never wanted to do it. I knew that.”

I close my eyes and try not to think about how I wasn't strong enough or committed enough or good enough to make a pact with Leah. How I lied to her the whole time.

Mr. Kispert nods at my newest creation. “Great work. Okay, everyone, let's clean up. Bell's going to ring.”

I meet Nick at the big sink. “You're very talented,” he says.

I turn to him. Get dizzy. My hand reaches for the edge of the sink for support.

He cocks his head. “You okay, Allie?”

“I'm fine.” I avoid his eyes. I'm feeling all strung-out and raw, and I don't exactly need his attention right now.

“Call you later?” he asks.

“Definitely,” I say, making my head move in exactly one north-south movement.

I stagger to the bathroom, hoping not to run into Emery or Max or Mr. Hicks on the way. When I get there, my eyes are glassy and bloodshot. I pull out my cell. Two hours till lunch. Not that I'm hungry. But I'm not exactly sure how I'll make it through honors U.S. history and honors biology—the two roadblocks that stand in my way. I lean over the sink and throw water on my face. When I lift my head, Leah's there.

I jump. “Shit, Leah, you scared me.” I look around to check that we're alone.

“No one's here. We're good.”

“I need a way to get through this,” I tell her.

Leah looks at me and nods. “Don't skip classes. That's a rookie mistake.”

“So how am I going to do this?”

“You got any NoDoz? Any caffeine at all?”

“Excedrin. That has caffeine, right?” I paw through my purse, my fingers raking for the pills I should have in there.

“Take two and get your ass to class. Before you're late. Also, do not start getting detentions. The key is not to draw any extra attention to yourself. Got it?”

I want to ask her if she thinks that's the best plan, considering: a pill to bring me down, another to wake me up. Like Alice in Wonderland, I'm stuck. When does it stop?

“You gotta get moving,” she whispers.

I take one last look over my shoulder as I go. She's slumped against the wall.

Leah aims her gaze at me. “It's hard to be dead.”

I leave the bathroom, the door banging behind me.