Tell Me a Secret (9 page)

That’s how I ended up at Dylan’s Halloween party, sneaking out after my parents disappeared for the night. My mission: to get a photo of Kamran and myself, whatever the cost. And maybe something more.

I looked like a cross between Boris and Natasha in Dad’s trench and Xanda’s raven-haired wig. I found it deep in the passage between our bedrooms, where I had once found Xanda’s safety-pin dress. I would have worn it if it fit. Dylan would have recognized me on the spot.

As I fought through the man-eating ivy bordering Dylan’s yard, a flash from out of nowhere sent a rush through my veins—a white-faced ghoul bared his teeth in a drunken grin, made more ghoulish by the porch’s yellow light bulb. He took
my invitation and tossed it into a pile on the grass.

A cluster of assorted witches, vampires, aliens, and leather-clad anorexics too cool for costumes mobbed the rickety porch staircase, exchanging smoke like kisses. Their eyes followed me with smirks of contempt. As I disappeared into the house, I heard one of them say, “Isn’t that Miranda
Mathison
? What happened to
her
?” followed by, “
Xanda’s
sister? Oh, my God.”

The same house where Delaney had brought me long ago was now shrouded in darkness and crowded with people. I recognized some of them, juniors and seniors from Elna Mead, a few Elna Mead graduates and people I’d seen at Chop Suey. The smell—a mixture of alcohol and incense—reminded me of Xanda’s hair.

I wove through the living room. When I reached the kitchen, I realized what had drawn me there. Another layer of notes, pictures, and magnets covered the fridge like a palimpsest, but I saw my sister’s face peeking out from the cobbled patchwork. With the party whirling around me, I carefully rearranged the layers and slipped the photo into my pocket.

It was crazy, I realized, to hope to see Kamran apart from Delaney. Maybe they were off in some bedroom together, or lurking behind one of the sea of rubber masks. The cell phone swung in my other pocket like a pendulum.

Then I saw Kamran, gazing out over the crowd. Spidery arms sprouted from his shoulders and fangs from his teeth. His eyes didn’t rest on me, didn’t recognize me under my disguise, though we were standing only a few feet from each other.

I could speak to him—tell him about Lexi, about Delaney’s lies. Or if I couldn’t speak, I could at least capture him on film. I turned on my phone’s camera, held it at arm’s length, carefully covered my face with the long, black hair, stepping backward until I sensed his nearness.

Someone squealed as the camera clicked.

Across the room, a group of Q-tips—out of the box and wreaking havoc—laughed boisterously. Their tall, cottony heads knocked against each other. I couldn’t help but smile.

I retreated to a corner with my phone and found myself looking at a tiny picture of me, Kamran, and a fly leaping into the spider’s arms the moment the picture snapped. I didn’t need to worry about Kamran seeing me. He was too busy devouring Delaney.

One of the Q-tips trilled a bit more loudly than the others at the center of the group. I would have recognized Essence anywhere, even with her head swathed in white and wearing faded blue scrubs.

“What’s she doing here?” I muttered, mostly to myself.

“They’re cool,” said a laid-back voice, as if I had been talking to him all along. And I found myself face-to-face with Dylan, our illustrious host, dressed as himself: black tee and beat-up jeans, looking exactly like Delaney but tall and muscular. And all hotness.

“You’re Dylan.”

“Wait a second.” He narrowed his eyes, searching my face. “Don’t I know you?”

Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea, crossing this threshold. The house was probably full of people who knew Xanda. Even Andre could be here.

“Yes,” I said, blushing. “Well, sort of. I hang out with…well, I used to hang out with Delaney sometimes.”

“Oh, right. Right.” He was still staring, unsatisfied, looking through the long black hair for a hint of the real me. “But there’s something else. Did we used to…” He got a sheepish smile on his face. Then he noticed the slight bulge of my belly, and the smile dropped instantly.

“You know my sister. Or, you knew my sister. Xanda Mathison.”

This was unexpected, I could tell. His questioning look transformed into shock and something deeper. Fear? Anger? Then the laid-back expression returned—a door slamming in my face.

“I knew your sister. She was a bitch, what she did to Andre.”

It was that Andre’s fault
. I knew it, even if I didn’t want to.

“What are you talking about?” I countered. In a flash, I could picture with crystal clarity the second she walked out the door: the look on her face, Andre putting his arm around her to protect her from my mother’s screaming, only to cause her death an hour later. The secret she would never tell me, lost.

“Shit. Never mind. You probably don’t even know. You were a kid.”

“I know enough,” I said. The crowd around us was getting closer and louder in the dark room, threatening to suffocate me. “I know he was drinking and his driving killed her.”

It still hurt to say it. It felt impossible to reconcile what my parents told me with what I knew of Andre. He brought me stuffed animals and candy bars and didn’t call me “Blandy” or “Brat” or any of the other names Xanda had officially dubbed me. None of Xanda’s boyfriends had ever been like that.

“Damn it.” Dylan was looking away, anywhere but at me. “I don’t even want to get into this with you.” He muttered something I couldn’t quite hear over the din of the party. An unholy trio of witches pushed past us, saturating the air with the fresh, gritty odor of cigarettes. Dylan leaned in closer to me to shout into my ear, “I’ll tell you this: Things didn’t go down the way you think. With Andre. Ask your parents. Hell, don’t ask your parents. They’ve been lying to you all along. You should just ask
him
. He should be here any minute.”

A sparkling green fairy followed in the witches’ wake, standing on her tiptoes to look over the crowd. She squealed Dylan’s name, spreading her arms low and wide and pressing her hand into my stomach to clear the way for giving him a flirtatious smack.

It might have been temporary insanity, but all I could think about was protecting Lexi from the hand pushing into me and the mountain of anger rumbling and choking me with its force—at Dylan, for not telling me what the hell he was talking about. At my parents, for the secrets they were keeping.
At Xanda, for dying, and for leaving me with the fallout. At Andre, for whatever he did or didn’t do to make it so. And most especially at the fairy. The blood pounded in my brain, my stomach still grinding from the smoke and churning with this new threat, and the rage bubbled over with one, singular thought in my mind:
How. Dare. You.

And it probably was insanity, when I caught sight of Delaney standing on a chair and hugging Kamran to her hip. I forced all of the strength and rage into shoving that fairy away from Lexi. She fell backward into the crowd, as if she were an extension of Dylan, my parents, Andre, and Delaney, who shouted, “Oh my God, Rand!” as the fairy flailed her arms, caught by Hellboy and a
Fight Club
reject, guys I thought I recognized from our algebra class last year but who suddenly looked a lot bigger and meaner. They helped the little fairy to her feet and I saw who it was behind the green sparkles and wings: Chloe, looking shocked and wounded and like I hadn’t shoved her body but her soul.

I stupidly wanted to explain to Dylan that I hadn’t meant to spoil his party or cause a scene. That I wasn’t this person who would push someone—a friend—virtually unprovoked. And he must have seen this in my eyes, a hesitation, so he yelled, “Get out! Just get out!” while Chloe leaned on him for support and looked at me with those sad, brown eyes. Several of the Q-tips tittered, “Catfight!” while two of them batted their heads together like swords. Delaney pushed through the crowd to get to Chloe—or maybe to kill me—and was saying,
“You had better start running now,” with Kamran’s face as unreadable as a black hole. Dylan’s voice bit at my heels, “You’re as crazy as your sister!” As I pushed my way through the crowd, I knew if I didn’t escape
right now,
I would never find my way again.

Eyes of my classmates followed me out of the house, a thousand darts of condemnation. I had shoved Chloe, the most harmless person in the universe. I wouldn’t have blamed Delaney for chasing me out the door and taking me out. Chloe was crying.

And I thought I was going to fall down the stairs, or somebody was going to push me, when a cloaked figure moved into the space between me and the concrete below, and I was grateful for a warm body who would keep me and Lexi from pitching to our deaths on Dylan’s sidewalk. When he looked up, those eyes connected with mine and a chill of recognition shot through me like a lightning rod in my spine.

“Andre,” I said.

“Yeah. Do I know you?”

Oh, God, he didn’t recognize me. He couldn’t see Xanda in my face, or the grief he’d etched with his own hand.

Or did he?

I didn’t respond. My mouth was already numb. I pushed past him, past the boy I still couldn’t shake from my memory, away from the party and into the night.

I remember the day Dad brought him home.

Dad never brought workers by the house. You couldn’t trust those boys, Mom said, with their leering eyes and hands that were never clean, wandering into the bathrooms or the office or the bedroom and leaving a trail of construction dust, taking God knows what. Jewelry. Bank statements. Your daughter’s virginity, if you let them.

I guess Dad thought Andre was different. Maybe that’s why he brought him across the threshold and into the orbit of our family. Close enough to touch our things. Touch us.

He was seventeen, I think, when he started working for Dad. They stopped by the house on the way to some job in our neighborhood. Dad wanted to grab a ginger ale and a nail
gun. Andre had to use the bathroom.

I saw him first.

And I never would have told Xanda, but I loved him first, too.

Two men’s voices murmured downstairs. A door slammed shut. Rattling in the kitchen. Mom was out, having left us with strict instructions to finish our homework before she got home. Of course I was the dutiful one, wrestling with a research paper and word problems. Xanda was busy with an old copy of
Jane
magazine, dissecting anything with DIY potential and rifling through her supplies. “A star’s got to have style,” she’d say.

Xanda wasn’t talking to me again. In my twelve years, I had learned to live with her ups and downs.

Another slam, and curiosity got the better of me. I crept to the balcony Dad had designed to overlook the hall opening into the kitchen and family room.

And there he was—young enough to be a possibility, but old enough to be a complete enigma.

He was standing around with Dad, drinking soda in the kitchen.
It was a hot day
, Dad protested later.
I couldn’t just leave him in the truck
.

The boy was almost as tall as Dad, but with a wiry, slim build. The better to reach into tight corners, said Dad. The better to evade the border guards, Mom would say. His skin was creamy, but with a layer of brownness from working outside. Black hair, with a curious tint of blue in the light. Wearing boots and torn-up jeans with a chain stretching from pocket
to waist, a well-worn T-shirt featuring a cartoon piece of toast chasing a pat of butter. Odd.

Oddly appealing. Especially when his face turned toward mine and he smiled a huge, bright smile, pretty much stopping my twelve-year-old heart. No one smiled at me like that, like I was the only girl in the universe—or at least the house…until his eyes traveled upward, beyond me. I hadn’t heard Xanda sneak up. She stood there on the landing, spellbound, as entranced as I was by this mystery Dad brought into our midst. She put her hand on my shoulder, like she needed me to keep her standing. Her hand was shaking. Maybe if I had been closer to him, I might have seen if he was shaking, too.

I was suddenly conscious of the dirty socks I was wearing, and how visible they were under my too-short pants. I was always growing out of my clothes—too tall and skinny to wear Xanda’s old ones instead of the dorky ones Mom bought for me. Xanda wore her white peasant blouse, shredded and reconstructed to skim her shape, a skirt that used to be Mom’s, but completely transformed into Xanda’s signature antistyle, with striped knee-highs. She looked fabulous.

“This is Andre,” said my dad, clearly oblivious to the triangle of electricity quickly becoming a line between them.

It was always like this, because Xanda couldn’t help but be Xanda, and people couldn’t help but be stopped in their tracks by her. This boy, I couldn’t blame him. He was about to become the latest in a long string, caught in her irresistible gravity and crushed by its weight. But then something happened.

The boy turned his gaze back to me, and he smiled. An inclusive, charming smile, like the line of electricity between them had opened up. There was room for both of us in that smile.

Then the moment was over, as soon as Dad took a final gulp and slapped Andre on the back. “Let’s hit the road.”

In a flash, Xanda was doing what I could only imagine, running down the stairs to waylay them with some pretense—anything that would keep the blue-hued boy from walking away forever. I leaned over the rail to watch. As Xanda would say,
Watch and learn
.

“Are you working on the Hanson project?” she asked Dad. The Hanson house was just over the ridge, on the view side of the hill. Trey Hanson was in the class above mine and was well known for torturing small animals and me, until Xanda threatened to kick his ass last summer if he didn’t leave me alone. He never bothered me again.

“Yup,” said Dad. “We’re installing the hardwood today. You two girls want to come help? I think I’ve got an extra mallet around.”

“Uh, no thanks, just wondered. How late you gonna be there?”

“I’ll be home for dinner. Can you order pizza or something before your mom gets home? Or,” he said, raising his voice to me, “we could get Mandy to cook again. That spaghetti you made last night was pretty good.” I blushed at the compliment. Maybe someday I’d be making spaghetti for Andre, too.

They left, and I headed back to my homework while
Xanda went to her room. Her lock snapped shut, but through the passage, I could hear her singing her favorite Splashdown song.

And later that night, after the sun had set, I looked out my window and saw Xanda slip through the shadows in a swishy red halter dress, her hair whipping behind her as she hurried to meet her date—and maybe her destiny.

Every night after, she slipped out to meet the boy, Andre, at the end of our block. I came to recognize the rumble of his green Impala as the days grew shorter and the nights colder, and Mom dove deeper into the Christmas montage and Dad into his work. The only thing left was me, trying to hold all of them together.

The office light was on when I drove up our street. Mom working late, or maybe Dad settling some accounts. The bars on the office window—left over from when it was still Xanda’s bedroom—were white in the daylight, practically unobtrusive. In the dark, it looked like an eye with great, rigid lashes. By the time they installed the bars, it had been far too late.

It felt strange to be seeing the house as Xanda so often did, on the night my life might have been swapped for hers.

Nik would say you had to walk in someone else’s shoes to understand the path they were on. My mother thought my path should be straight. She couldn’t begin to imagine me following the turns of Xanda’s life.

If I really wanted to walk Xanda’s road, I would have shimmied up the maple tree and the trellis, but I doubted they
would bear my weight now. Lexi had been in enough danger already this evening, so I opted for the front door.

I was crossing into my bedroom when light flooded the hallway. It was Mom, with her hair down and dressed in her nightgown.

“Hi, honey,” she yawned, sleep overtaking the usual hard edges of her voice.

“You’re probably wondering why I was out.” I hadn’t prepared anything. Even in her nightgown, my mom could detonate at any moment.

But the impact never came. In the glow from Xanda’s old bedroom, my mother looked almost vulnerable, like someone I could trust. “No, I’m not,” she sighed. And I could feel my guard beginning to drop.

I stood on the edge of telling her everything, and asking what really happened to Xanda.

Until she spoke.

“I went through this with your sister, and now I’m going through it with you.” Her eyes were sharpened, like splintered glass. “To tell you the truth, this time maybe I’d rather not know.”

She left me there, speechless. Alone with my memories of the party, Andre, and another dead end.