Tell Me a Secret (4 page)

My mother couldn’t control the weather in Seattle, but she could predict it. She picked one of the last sunny Sunday afternoons to keep us in a dim, hundred-year-old church for Christmas montage tryouts. The only hope streamed in through the enormous stained-glass windows, painting shards of colored light across the pews.

Mom wore her hair in a ponytail with a pen tucked behind her ear, looking like the hip director in a white tee and Editor pants. Everything was drawn on, from her eyebrows and plum-colored eyes to her mouth, as if a perfect exterior could mask a woman capable of spawning one hellion after another.

Everybody showed up to read for various parts, but Mom
already had her people staked out. Mrs. Hayes, the Kindly Old Woman (sorry, Mrs. Vandermar). Mr. Arthur would play the wise father. And I would be good old Brenda, the female lead. Which made it kind of sad that Essence showed up with “I wanna be Brenda” written all over her face. Even sadder, she deserved it.

Essence’s bedroom had always been lined with show posters where she had played a chorus bird or a maid or, more recently, the lead’s best friend or mother. Delaney was right. She wasn’t lead material. She was chunky, whiny, on the underside of pretty. Just right for comic relief.
Someone who’s holding you back,
Delaney had said.

Essence stayed after church to help set up for auditions, and I realized I was part of this bizarre love triangle: Essence wanting my mother’s attention and my mother wanting mine. If only Essence was my mother’s daughter, then everybody might be happy.

“How was your summer?” I asked.

“Fine.”

We were in the same spot where we’d met in second grade, the day Xanda showed up at the Mother’s Day fashion show in a dress identical to mine and Mom’s, only hers was shredded and paired with biker boots. We landed on the front page of the
Seattle Times’
“Arts and Living” section under the headline
PRETEEN PUNK FASHIONISTA CRASHES CHURCH FUNDRAISER
—the succubus, the church lady, and me. A new girl stood by in awe—about my age, with freckles and a tan from someplace
far removed from the Northwest. She and her mom wore long, crinkled skirts and peasant blouses with strands of clay beads. Definitely not from Seattle.

The girl came up to me after the show, bubbling over with smiles and excitement. “That was your sister?” I nodded. I could hardly believe it myself.

Before long, we were inseparable, even if my sister found her annoying and my mom found her undesirable—Essence’s family fell in easily with Seattleites militant about fair trade, growing their own organic food, and recycling everything from plastics to clothing—exactly what my mom found distasteful about the Northwest. When her mom joined the prayer chain, mine made sure she was on the opposite end. Still, Essence tried out for every one of my mom’s plays without fail.

Apparently some things hadn’t changed.

“Honey,” my mom called from upstage, “could you read some of this script? I’m trying to see if it will be a good section for the tryouts.” Which was weird, because clearly she had already put painstaking thought into every detail. My reading would be of no consequence.

Essence jumped to my mother’s side. “I could read, Mrs. Mathison,” she gushed. “I think your work is amazing. In fact—”

My mom barely gave her a glance. “All right, Essence. How about you read for the father.”

“The father?” Essence’s smile faltered. “Um, okay, Mrs.
Mathison. But I’d really like to try out for the part of—”

“Mandy, you read for the part of Brenda.” Essence looked like she wanted to take my mother right up to the baptismal waters and introduce her to some redemption. But she took the script.

The two of us got up on the stage, towering over the pews. I tried not to think about performance night, when they would be filled and each line I spoke would be a nail pounding into my throat. I never wanted to be on this stage again.

So the two of us read while my mother blocked out the scene with masking tape. Essence made a better father than I made a Brenda. I would have told her if she hadn’t been giving me the nastiest look she could muster—prim, exaggerated, almost cartoonish. At that moment I could see her exactly the way Delaney did. Part of me hated myself for it.

When others started showing up, my mother waved us down. “Don’t want to let any cats out of the bag,” she sang. If any cats were going to escape, I was hoping to be the first.

“All right,” Mom said in a loud, competent voice, “I want to keep this fairly simple. We’ll do leads first, then the supporting cast so I can get an idea of whose talent is suited for what.” This was the control-freak dream—everyone looking to her to tell them what to do. Everyone but me. She started handing out a stack of script excerpts, and then dumped the remainder in my lap. “Mandy, help me out here.”

As I passed out the scripts, I couldn’t help but glance over
the paragraphs she had typed up for the tryouts: Brenda discusses faith with her father and newly cancered mother as they prepare to face the future together.

Barf
. Her completely transparent vision for our family. Even worse, Brenda was probably some weird fusion of Xanda and me: the prodigal girl coming home.

When I finished handing out the scripts, I parked myself in the back of the room with my sketchbook while my mother directed three of the readers. Essence and her hissy
s
’s kept floating into my ears as she paced back and forth, reciting the lines in a stage mumble. Her voice reached that pitch that never used to bother me until Delaney pointed it out.

The stained glass, lit by the late-afternoon sun, found its way into my sketchbook. My lines tried to trace the shape of Jesus in the stained glass—
focus on faces
, my art teacher would say—but the pieces kept fragmenting and recombining into a spidery lair.

A blue patch of light stretched across my sketch and I smiled, remembering how Xanda and I used to draw pictures of the minister and choir. We would sit with Essence as far back from the minister as we could get away with.

Even at twelve my drawings were smooth, balanced, carefully rendered. Xanda’s were angular and dramatic, with dark lines and unexpected details. Like the eyes of the soloist, one of them bigger than the other, or the too-loose blouse on the Elder after her mastectomy. Essence drew them as stick figures, acting out their secret sins on a stage and sending Xanda
and me into snorts of laughter.

One Sunday Xanda and I sat in the very back pew while the minister preached on the deadliest of the deadlies: pride, vanity, and envy.

“Let’s draw them,” Xanda whispered to me. I thought of what pride would look like, a jowly old guy in a smoking jacket. Vanity was a tall, beautiful woman with a face like a mask. Envy was a treasure-hoarding dragon, dainty and diabolical. As I sketched in the dragon’s face, I gave her eyebrows like mine, my turtle necklace around its scaly neck.

Xanda drew them as cliffs and valleys, irrevocably linked—pride as a mountain, envy a valley, hating its lowness and longing to reach, overtake, conquer. She drew vanity as a volcano with an abyss at its core.

Xanda took my drawings and eyed them critically. Hers said everything I wanted to say, the giddiness of pride and the void of envy. I waited for her to shred mine, tell me how they didn’t measure up. The sticky pout of her mouth could go either way—dazzling smile or frown or even a spontaneous combustion.

A giggle erupted, causing one sour lady to purse her lips with a gigantic “Shhhh.”

Xanda’s hand flew to her mouth. “Did you realize this dragon looks like Mom?”

I could see it—the brows we shared, the heavy-lidded eyes. The dragon was not me, it was Mom.

“And Mr. Pride here looks like her, too,” she whisper-
laughed. We giggled together at the paradox of our mother, both pride and envy, the mountain and the valley.

“Well, I think that’s a wrap,” my mom said now as she approached me. Everyone else was already chatting in groups, with Essence scooping up empty latte cups and leftover scripts. Her thoughts were written on her face: Maybe this time she would get the part.

Mom peered over my shoulder onto my sketchbook, eyeing my drawing of spiderwebbed Jesus. I had given him stained-glass scales and a sweeping tail.

“I’ll never understand the way you see things, Mandy,” she sighed. “You take a beautiful drawing and turn it into something hideous.”

“It’s just a drawing, Mom,” I replied, closing the sketchbook. “So how did the tryouts go?”

“Well, let’s say I saw what I needed to see.” She smiled and patted me on the shoulder. “I’ll be posting the results next Sunday. This is going to be fabulous!”

A flash of Brenda the Bad popped into my head: hair tightly bound, holding her belly, monologuing about redemption. Not the Brenda my mother had in mind.

On the way out of the sanctuary, I snapped a phone pic of stained-glass Jesus. I would finish my drawing later.

“Mi
ran
da, what’s the holdup?”

The next weekend, Delaney and Chloe were in my room getting ready for Milo’s first party of the year. One more tour through my closet didn’t produce anything but a paint-splattered T-shirt and a couple of skirts I knew would be too tight.

“Whatever possessed you to wear that?” Delaney asked me, giving my yoga pants and tee a withering look. I wondered if Delaney would be able to see right through me the way Xanda always could.

I shrugged. I didn’t tell her my regular clothes had started to hurt, and the pressure made me want to hurl. Hoodies and fat jeans were my new uniform.

“Oh, whatever,” Delaney said. “I know you’ve got some great stuff—”

“—that has somehow made it into your closet,” I countered. Chloe snickered and held up an abandoned slip dress.

Delaney dropped her mascara into her purse and rolled her eyes. “Stand aside.”

While she rummaged in my closet, I dove back into the bowl of cheese puffs. I couldn’t get enough of them these days, now that my nausea had mostly morphed into a relentless, terrifying hunger.

“Don’t you have a red bra someplace? I could swear…aha! Here it is.” A wide-necked red top and bra flew out, landing in a heap.

“Wait. A. Second. Oh, my God!” Then came the sound of a million pennies sliding into each other. The veins in my throat closed. “You have to let me wear this!”

I knew what she’d found even before she emerged from the depths, the tinkling of metal on metal as clear as the day I’d first put it on. Chloe sat up with interest.

“This is magnificent!” Delaney held the safety-pin dress in triumph as she emerged from the closet. “Where did you find this? Did you
make
it?”

“Put it back.”

“Oh, please, you can’t just hide this—”

“Put it back!” As soon as the words escaped, I wanted to suck them back in. Chloe looked shocked.

“Of course.
The sister.
I should have guessed.” Delaney
handed me the dress, letting the chains slip through her fingers. “Though you should wear it sometime. It would look amazing.”

We finally came up with outfits—me in a plaid skirt and shiny boots, a Lolita for the new millennium. Xanda would be proud—not that I could say it. Not after Delaney stopped me in front of everyone last spring and said, “You keep talking about your dead sister. It’s creeping me out.”

As I looked in the mirror, I admired my new body benefits. Chest, even hips. More and more, I saw my sister. My waist, on the other hand, seemed to be a thing of the past. Any day now, Delaney would gently suggest I lay off the puffs.

I wanted to tell them. I was dying to tell them. Chloe might be a shoulder to cry on, and Delaney—Delaney would know what to do. “Wait, I have something to tell you.” Chloe looked at me with her round brown eyes, and Delaney looked up before carefully applying another layer of eyeliner. “What?”

But saying the words would make it too real. I wasn’t ready for that yet. Instead, I pointed to my clock. “It’s nine already. We’d better go!”

At the end of a long road of dilapidated dwellings sat the shack Milo shared with his brother. The shack had been the site of many an Elna Mead party. Delaney and I had been here plenty last spring—she and Milo became fast friends after she was kicked out of View Ridge Prep. Tyvek sheets served as curtains—bachelor decorating at its best. Even the walls and shaggy brown carpet were permeated with the odor of one
too many parties. My mother would be appalled.

Crammed inside the house was every person under eighteen I knew, bodies crushed like cigarettes and pulsing to the beat of a ginormous stereo. As I looked around the room, lit up by a red bulb in the corner, faces slowed down into grotesque laughter and shouts of greeting. Everyone was glad to see us—the leggy one, the curvy one, and the one who could stop Elna Mead traffic. I reached inside myself and pulled out “party girl,” modeled after Delaney and Xanda herself. I smiled at the faces around me, calling out loudly and giggling. The real me floated up to the corner of the room.

“Hey, hey, hey, look who’s here,” called Milo, raising a frothing plastic cup in greeting and sloshing half of it onto the carpet. He spotted the bottles we carried. “Even better—keg’s in the back.”

“Salut! Comment ça va?”
Delaney declared to a group smoking ultrathins and sipping cups of Two Buck Chuck. They had already commandeered a couch whose right side had long ago ceased keeping up with the left. “Here,” she said to me, handing me the bottle of Sapphire. “Take this back for me?” Chloe handed hers over, too, and they both wove their way to the couch to
voulez-vous
with the French contingency.

The bartender’s back was turned when I approached, mixing cheap vodka with orange juice. But I knew that form. I even remembered the white shirt I could never get her to wear because she thought it was too revealing. “Just chill, be there in a second.” The voice crackled like Styrofoam.

How Essence ended up at this party, I didn’t know—then again, she had found her way to Delaney’s cabin last July. At least this time, Delaney wouldn’t think I invited her.

I set the bottles down on the counter with a clunk. “Here.” Essence spun, fresh drink in hand with a sprig of mint peeking out.

“No, thanks,” I said. “Just juice.”

“Oh, it’s you. Get your own.”

“Whatever,” Delaney said behind me. The two of them bristled for a moment. Then Delaney laughed, as if Essence’s defiance wasn’t even worth registering. “Sorry,” Essence mumbled, so that even her extra layer of chub seemed deflated. She poured me a glass of OJ.

You can’t buy that kind of power. Essence, God help her, had dared to cross it.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Delaney had laughed. It was last spring, after I’d been spending more and more time with Delaney and less and less with Essence. “She thinks I’d try to steal
Eli
? As in,
Autoerotic Eli
?”

I blushed, remembering I had come up with that brilliant moniker myself. “Well, you do flirt a lot, but Essence thinks…” I stopped, feeling annoyed. It was getting easier to blame Essence for a lot of things.

That was the day Delaney took me to her brother Dylan’s house for the first time.

Delaney wound her car around traffic circles and hills
while everyone else was slaving over fifth period. She parked across from a house that looked like the last holdout in the war on weeds, badly in need of a paint job. The porch door hung open with a note stuffed into it saying,
BBL, needed Stuff—D.

“Crap.” Delaney shoved the doorknob. We spilled into the living room, a weird combination of IKEA and abandoned-on-the-sidewalk decorating. We sat down next to the picture window to watch for Dylan.

“Come on, Rand. I can’t help it if Eli thinks I’m hot. It’s not like I’m
doing
anything to get his attention—are you kidding? And I don’t mean to be bitchy here, but if you’re comparing me and Essence…well…”

“I know.” I backpedaled. The insult to Essence didn’t even really register. “You’re right. It’s just…this is her first boyfriend.”

“I can’t help that,” Delaney said callously, switching from interest in the window to hunting through a hunk of her hair for split ends. “I don’t know why you hang out with her anyway. All of her whining is rubbing off on you.”

“We have a history,” I said. I didn’t tell her the whole truth—Essence was woven into our family like another sister, stripped away thread by thread since I had met Delaney.

She located an elusive split end and plucked the entire hair right out, as if its very imperfect existence was offensive to her. “People are starting to notice you, Rand.
Guys
are noticing you.”

I blushed. “Really?” I thought of my sister, whose presence
commanded attention in ways I never could. The same way Delaney did.

Her smile was encouraging. “Yes, really! You hadn’t noticed?”

“Well…” The truth was, I had. At parties, clubs, places that had once been closed to me—as long as I was still with Essence.

“Essence is exactly what you said—your history,” she said gently. “Maybe it’s time to leave history behind you and see what the future holds. Besides,” she added lightly, “I’m tired of sharing you.”

Essence and I weren’t even really friends anymore. Different interests, different friends. She was embroiled with Eli and drifting further into the drama crowd, and I had Kamran on my horizon. She probably wouldn’t even miss me, and if she did, we were still partners in chem lab, and I still saw her at church and in Mom’s drama productions. The logic of it only magnified the swell of happiness I felt at being chosen by Delaney.

And though she hadn’t come right out and said it, Delaney was giving me an ultimatum: her or me.

Delaney hopped up. “I’m sick of talking about Essence. Let’s get a beer.”

I followed her to the fridge, collaged with rent checks, naughty magnets, and tiny black-and-white fragments of poetry.

Then I saw it.

The photograph.

Xanda.

A picture of my sister, Andre, and a guy who had to be Delaney’s brother, Dylan—mouths open in exaggerated laughter, piled haphazardly on the couch where I’d just been sitting. Xanda, who looked as alive in that photograph as the day she walked out our door. Heavy-lidded eyes like mine, the same age I was right now. It could have been me in that picture. And strangely, Andre could have been Kamran.

And suddenly the choice between Essence and Delaney became much simpler.

“I can’t wait to bring you to one of Dylan’s parties,” Delaney was saying as she poked around in the fridge. “They’re unreal. And my brother would think you’re completely hot.” She got a sly grin on her face. “But then, you’ve been hanging out with a hottie of your own these days. What’s his name again?”