Authors: Eliot Schrefer
The Deadly Sister
Eliot Schrefer
For David Levithan
I
have always been the one to protect my sister.
I protected her when she was in fourth grade, standing down the bully who used to steal her lunch. I protected her when she was in seventh grade, yanking the hair of the girl who kept writing
slut
on her locker. I protected her when she was in eighth grade, lying to Mom and Dad when she stayed out all night. I protected her when she was in ninth grade, hiding the fact that she stole my homecoming dress money, working an extra shift to quietly earn it back. Every time my parents kicked her out, I found her and brought her home. Her behavior and her attitude kept getting worse, and each rescue got harder to pull off, but I never gave up. She’d been my best friend since she was born, and that never stopped mattering.
She was so cute when she was little. No one could stop gushing about her, our parents least of all. She was the focus of every dinner party; old ladies in grocery stores called her an angel; strangers would start conversations with her when she’d peer at them over the backs of restaurant booths. She was the spotlight sister, and I was the shadow sister. She started adventures. I cleaned them up once they became disasters.
She’d always been easily distracted, and as soon as she started school, the diagnoses began. ADHD, that kind of thing. Before then, my protectiveness had been fierce and uncomplicated. I told her I’d do anything for her, and her face would get all serious and she would solemnly repeat
the words back to me. But a cold little barrier went up once doctors got involved. She was still the same sister I’d loved so much, and I still knew instinctively what she was thinking, but I stopped knowing what she was feeling. She was just as fiercely a part of me, but I was dazzled by her. I turned from an older sister to one of those mother cats you see raising a puppy, stubbornly blind to the core differences and exhausted by a creature she’s driven to help and yet can’t understand.
In the beginning, the drugs she took were all prescribed—until my parents thought the psychiatrists were overdoing it and cut back. That’s when she started buying her own. At first, she got more of the drugs she’d already been taking, the ones she hoped would make her normal. Then she started buying any drug that made her feel good. And with these new drugs came new friends and new disasters.
She slammed her car into a light pole. The police found her partying in a construction site late at night, high out of her mind. When the school threatened academic expulsion, I vowed to find her a tutor so she could get her GED. I lied to our parents about where she got the wad of rolled-up bills they discovered in her messenger bag. I kept quiet when she pawned the china our grandmother had left our parents; they wouldn’t know it was gone until they tried to set the table next Thanksgiving. Every secure thing she pried up in our lives, I quietly followed behind and glued it back down.
I might have been able to protect her forever.
Until Jefferson Andrews showed up dead.
I
found his body during my Saturday run. I’d been doing a little training so I might have a prayer of making Vanderbilt’s soccer team when I started in the fall. I paused a few miles in to let my dog, Cody, catch up. Once she did, she started to sniff some low-hanging branches. I stroked the wiry fur between her ears and was surprised to find her alert, staring somewhere between the razor fronds of low palms and then down to the river. I placed my hands on either side of her snout and tried to force her to look into my eyes. But Cody stayed rigid, kept looking toward the river.
When I asked her what was wrong, she started growling.
Scrambling to the bottom of that ravine was the last thing I wanted to do. But as soon as I let go of her, Cody disappeared in that direction. What else could I do but follow?
As I vaulted a fallen tree, slick green fungus rubbing onto my sweatshirt, a crashing noise came from a thicket below. I spotted Cody running the last few yards to the riverbank. There’d been an explosive thunderstorm the night before, and the river was surging a foot higher than usual; grasses and the bases of small trees were all underwater. Cody barked at something downriver, near a spot everyone at school called the Bend.
After I’d gone a few feet, I saw a bright orange windbreaker, blue stripes at the elbows. It was mostly submerged, but the sleeves were hitched on to an exposed root, the jacket puffy and full of water and mud.
I edged around the riverbank to get a better view. It sounds stupid, but I called out “Hello?”—I guess to see if anyone was around and watching.
Cody began to bark again, sharp rhythmic lashes in the still air. I stalled, then got close enough to confirm that in the jacket was a body.
I put my hand over my mouth. The scene seemed both real and unreal. Done and undone. Happening and not really happening.
I didn’t want to look any closer. But I had to.
It was Jefferson Andrews, unmistakably. His jawline angled toward the sky. His thick, curly hair tangled around his face.
But he wasn’t saying anything.
He wasn’t breathing.
He was the opposite of alive. A word I took a moment to get to, because with it came the full reality.
Dead.
A surge in the current buckled me. Shaking with cold and horror, I half swam, half dragged myself to his side. His face was so pale that no blood could possibly be flowing in him. A thick scab mottled his hair, sent crimson tendrils along his forehead. He had bled heavily before he died. He
might have been dead before he hit the water, even. I went into emergency mode, forcing myself to be calm and distant, like a veteran doctor able to handle the sight of any body. I bent in closer. Whispered his name. Got no reply.
The river had parted the windbreaker. Waves pulled at the stray black hairs at the base of his muscular throat; grit from the riverbed speckled his flesh black and red. I wanted to reach out and wipe away the dirt, and almost touched my fingers to his dead skin. He was still handsome, just…tired. He looked tired beyond the range of the living. Then I saw that the speckles were fire ants. One had its pincers in the smooth plane below his cheekbone, slashing through the water-softened flesh. I looked down instinctively and saw ants swarming my feet. They were biting my ankles, where my wet socks had fallen down. I didn’t feel them.
I didn’t know whether to leave him or pull him onto the shore. The humane thing to do would have been to bring him onto land. But already I was thinking in terms of evidence.
Plus, it was so hard to see him like this. Dead like this. Handsome boys take hits in baseball games, twist and crumple to the roar of a disbelieving crowd. They get cancerous blood and inspire vigils around the flagpole. They’re last seen waving out of sunroofs, punch cups in hand. They run out of strength trying to bust in the windows of sinking cars. Heavy-limbed and straight-backed, they take flights in camouflaged planes and never return.
I couldn’t help but think:
Boys like Jefferson don’t die like this.
Slammed on the head, left to bleed and drown.
The horizon narrowed, and all I could see was the rocky soil where Cody paced, her barks unrelenting.
Something there caught my eye. Half embedded in the mud, an old phone, pink with edges rubbed gray. Crowned by a telltale puffy kitten sticker.
My sister’s phone.
I should say that I wasn’t entirely surprised to find it. I knew she’d come to this area last night. I knew she’d been looking for Jefferson. She’d rushed off as soon as I’d told her I’d heard he was meeting up with some girl here.
She’d made a big mistake going. And even bigger mistakes after, it seemed.
Since Jefferson was dead…
And my sister had been here…
I knew what conclusion people would reach.
I splashed across the river, quick gasping screams coming from my mouth. I grabbed the phone and scrambled up the side of the ravine, my muddy sneakers dragging through the underbrush. My dog was running circles around me. Tight, protective, hysterical.
I knew Jefferson should have been my priority.
But he was already dead.
Maya, though—Maya was alive.
And in trouble.
It was time for me to play the protector again. It was time for me to go through the motions of saving her.
Because I had to. I simply had to.
Her phone was at the scene of the crime, but no one had seen it there but me. How could she be so stupid as to leave it? I remembered what she’d been like last night, drugged and emotional, totally out of her mind. She was probably holed up somewhere now, in a park or on the street. Not knowing who to turn to, her phone and all the numbers in it gone.
I had to find her.
She couldn’t refuse my help this time.
I was all she had left.
J
efferson Andrews had never treated my sister well.
You’d have thought he would’ve been a great influence on her. Valedictorian. Co-captain of the debate team. One of the stars of the swim team. Winner of Mr. Cougar, the school’s goofy beauty pageant. The first invite to any party. Unendingly loyal to his friends. I proposed him when Maya needed some tutoring to get her ready for her high school equivalency test, and my parents thought he was a great choice. His family didn’t have any money, so we’d even get to feel good about giving an ambitious poor kid some spending cash.
But I knew Jefferson better than that, and I suggested him against my own better judgment. Adults loved him, sure. His friends worshipped him. But those of us who weren’t in his tight circle—he toyed with us. Deigned to mess around with girls with annoying laughs or fat knees only to dump them once they started to expect anything of him…then got party crowds roaring with stories about his “dumb psycho stalkers.” Dealt drugs, and not in a “Hey, I can score a dime bag for Saturday” way but systematic, felony-level stuff, with a network of runners within the school to do his bidding and take the fall. Heavier stuff, too, like coke and speed. He knew that adults wouldn’t suspect
him—he manipulated his superstar image into the perfect cover.
My mom welcomed him into our house with arms wide open. Hugged him and thanked him profusely when he first arrived to tutor Maya. Set up a pitcher of lemonade at the dining room table, two ladybug glasses, legal pads and freshly sharpened pencils. Maya was seated at the far end, at first unwilling to be tutored at all, and then mortified to have someone so hot ordered to help her to learn.
It was a thrill to have Jefferson Andrews in my house—I won’t deny it. I’d concoct reasons to walk past the dining room, once (daringly, or so I thought) wearing a bikini top. He didn’t ever look at me. But I looked at him. I couldn’t help it. Forearms cut and biceps tan, face strong and skin soft, always smiling in a teasing, arrogant way, as if amazed at the world’s capacity to keep him amused. Perfectly long, perfectly lean, perfectly rosy, perfectly at ease.
And, Maya would come to learn, perfectly cruel. Those first few tutoring sessions he’d circle her wrist with his fingers as she drew a radius, would stare into her eyes while she read a passage, drinking her in so hungrily that she’d be blushing by the end. She resisted him at first—he was so unlike any guy she’d ever have gone for, way too clean-cut and preppy. She confided in me that he’d asked her out but she’d said no. The very next session he was all business, barely even said hello. I spied from the hall, saw her get tearful when he snapped that she didn’t have what it took to pass the test.
The next session, she was the one placing her fingers on his wrist. Suddenly, she began trying to win him back, without ever having wanted him in the first place. She’d spent the next few weeks like that, panicked and anxious and dizzy, assuming she was in love. That was how Jefferson worked—he steered and positioned the people around him, without their ever realizing it.
My mom was euphoric about the whole situation, because Maya was finally learning something. But my dad is wiser than my mom in many ways—or at least warier. Jefferson was so polite and adult with them, always asking whether they’d had a good day and if they had an opinion about the candidates for town commissioner. Mom was charmed off her head, but Dad’s hackles went up. Once after a tutoring session, Jefferson mentioned noticing the heart medication on the counter and offered to introduce my dad to swimming, because it had done such wonders for his own dad’s blood pressure. Dad grunted a no. At dinner, Mom said she thought Jefferson had been so sweet to have said that, but Dad just growled and said, “Something’s off with that kid.” Before I could intervene, Maya flipped and said that of course it would work that way, that the moment she found someone she could actually learn with, Dad would try to sabotage it. Dishes were hurled into the sink, then there was yelling all up and down the house. The usual Maya-Dad routine.
I totally got what my dad was feeling, though. Jefferson
had snooped and then used the information he’d gained to worm in closer. It wasn’t right.
Soon, the tutoring sessions had moved down to Maya’s room, and just happened to be scheduled at times when our parents weren’t around. I warned Maya to watch herself, but she preferred to watch him instead. I started to make sure I wasn’t around, either, so all I had to deal with was the aftermath—Maya insecure, Maya ecstatic, Maya needing me to get her contraceptives because all the local pharmacists knew her a little too well.
It’s not as though Maya thought she was the only girl Jefferson was sleeping with. Everyone knew that Rose Nelson, our student government president, was the only one of Jefferson’s conquests who got to officially call herself “girlfriend.” But there were plenty of others. Even someone as outside the important gossip circles as me knew that. Still, Maya let herself be stolen from under my parents’ noses, crept out the front door when she heard Jefferson’s car roll down our block at a predetermined nighttime hour. Powerless to stop her, I watched her disappear inside. She’d always have a messenger bag with her, the same bag I saw her dealing pot from after school.
I worried about her so much. It was so obvious that he was waiting for the most dramatic moment to pull the rug away, to see her love for him proven through tears and screams. I’d seen it happen with him time and again. I tried to warn Maya, but she wouldn’t listen.
The more I tried to get her to give him up, the deeper into his arms I pushed her. I told her about Cara Johnson, whose parents caught her carving Jefferson’s name into her arm and sent her away to rehab. I told her about Donna Meadows, who made the mistake of telling Rose that Jefferson had slept with her, only to get a slap from Rose and a cold-turkey cutoff from Jefferson. I pointed out Rachael McHenry, who told Jefferson she’d given up her virginity to him only to hear him say, “Well, I wish I could give it back.”
“None of that’s true,” she’d tell me, and I had to wonder if she had any notion of what was true anymore.
Now Jefferson had set his sights on my family, and all I could do was get prepared to clean up the mess. Little did I know that the mess would be Jefferson Andrews himself.