The Deadly Sister (20 page)

Alcaraz and I arranged that I would go get you so I could turn you in to the police. But you and I got wrapped up in Blake and Keith’s drama, of course. Blake started throwing out those wild accusations. But what she was trying to accomplish was too little, and too late.

I had you in my grasp. And I turned you in.

You thought I was leading you to safety. But I’d planted Jefferson’s car key in your jacket. I’d had it since the night I killed him and was waiting for the right opportunity to use it. Even though you were wary, you had faith in me to the end. Trusting me was your fatal mistake, and you committed it over and over.

It was cold in the visiting chamber, and I saw Maya shiver in her baggy orange sweatshirt. “Will they let me go get you something warm to wear from my car?” I asked.

Maya shook her head. She’d stopped accusing me and was only staring at me grimly. She was gone, and it was so much worse than when she’d been fighting with me.

“What was that thing you were going to tell me, what you thought you had on me?” I asked.

She shook her head savagely. If she’d had any tears left in her, I might have seen some. “This is not how I imagined this going,” she finally said quietly. “You’re not going to offer me anything, are you?”

“Are you done?” I asked, keeping my voice level even though my heart was quaking. “Mom and Dad are expecting me.”

“You made your choice,” Maya said. “I don’t totally blame you.” She gave me a defiant look, like she’d taken some unknown high ground, that in some obscure way I was the one who’d been defeated.

No, Maya. You’re the one in prison.

I stood up, and the guard started walking over to bring her back to her cell. I couldn’t resist one last try: “You’re not going to tell me what that thing is you think you have on me?”

She didn’t look resigned or angry. Instead she flashed me—shockingly, impossibly, mind-flutteringly—a smile. It was the same unknowable expression she had given me back when we were kids fighting in the backseat of the car:
I have something on you. I am larger. I reach further.

“Nothing,” she said. “You left me nothing.” The smile never left her face as she was escorted away. It was almost as though she was impressed that I’d finally met her level. She was…proud.

I passed through the hallways and gates and left the prison. Cheyenne was waiting for me outside, and gave me a long hug. Some thaw happened during that hug. I thought I’d be able to remain in control forever, but suddenly I was sobbing. It was like how, in the food court so long ago, I thought I wouldn’t tell Cheyenne about Jefferson’s death, and then I couldn’t stop myself.

People talk about how guilt works slowly but will eventually destroy you, how a killer will turn himself in years after the crime or will be found hanging from a rafter, a note around his neck describing long-forgotten events from a previous decade. We read that Poe story in class, about the telltale heart beating its accusations against the floorboards. I don’t feel any of that. But don’t get me wrong. I feel something just as intense, just as heart-filling. I want to be known, and I’m sure I never will be. Nobody knows what I’ve done.

“Cheyenne,” I said.

“Shh.”

I pulled back and looked her in the eyes. “No, Cheyenne, I need to tell you something.”

“No,” she said somberly, “you don’t need to tell me anything.”

“It’s about Maya. Something I did, that I have to admit to someone. Something huge.”

Cheyenne unlocked the car door. “You don’t have to admit it. Because I already know what you’re going to say.”

She disappeared into the car. I stood there a moment, stunned, and then got in beside her.

She started the car and we were soon on the interstate heading south, to home and holidays and security. Cheyenne spoke. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about what you did. You’re still the most important person in the world to me. You’ve done the cruelest thing anyone could ever imagine, and yet I somehow understand it. But you don’t get to
vent. You have to sit with it. I’ll be here for everything else you need in life, but not that.”

My tears vanished. Cheyenne and I drove in silence. She’d figured it all out—but we would never talk about it. That was the cost: I would never be able to live a transparent life. I would never be known.

“This is the real reason you stopped being friends with me for a while, isn’t it?” I asked.

Cheyenne didn’t answer, just concentrated on the road.

“How did you figure it out?”

“I know you,” she said simply.

She and I might have been best friends, but it was Jefferson who’d had my soul. It was Jefferson who had made me forget to speak and to breathe, Jefferson I’d wait three hours in the rain to glimpse. Jefferson who, in the end, had been profounder and more interesting than me and had dumped me for profounder and more interesting girls. Jefferson who, I now realized, I’d become worthy of through the very act of killing him. By framing my sister, becoming someone filthy and exciting and superhuman, I’d become the one girl who might have held his interest.

But he was dead.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t look at Cheyenne. I couldn’t speak.

And so it was she who spoke to me. “No one will believe Maya. And I won’t tell anyone.”

She squeezed my arm, and then returned her hand to the wheel.

She couldn’t face all of me. She couldn’t take on my dark side, like Jefferson had done…and lost.

But she knew what I had done. And she was still here with me.

“I could be honest and choose Maya, or I could lie and choose you,” she said. “And I choose you.”

I stared out at the road.

She chose me.

Copyright © 2010 by Eliot Schrefer

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First edition, May 2010

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