Authors: Norah Olson
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Social Themes, #Death & Dying, #Family, #Siblings, #Mysteries & Detective Stories
Twisted Fate
For Sebastian
I
’m not saying that I was right in the end. In fact maybe I’m to blame: the way I was caught off guard; the way I walked out of school that late afternoon with my eyes wide-open, thinking I had a plan, that I could fix everything all by myself, never dreaming how wrong things could go at the harbor.
I had my headphones on and Death Cab for Cutie blasting. I put my board down on the road and skated toward the slips. The autumn air rushed through my hair, and cars whizzed by close enough for me to feel them, and I thought in those moments, giddy and a little high, how I was going to fix things, make everything right in the world. I was going to save us both; protect Ally above everything—even though I could barely stand her half the time, even though we could go for weeks without speaking. But still I was determined to make it all okay. I thought there
was no way it could go wrong and so I let myself be happy while I headed to the ocean. And that happiness felt like it was something coming from Ally’s head or maybe Ally’s heart. And I remember in those moments knowing that we were more alike than I ever could have admitted. Knowing that things between us were different, were finally somehow understood. After all, a sister in many ways is like a second self.
Back before it all happened I felt like one of us must have been adopted. Besides being what our mom breezily calls “pretty” when she takes us all dressed up to one of her fund-raisers or parties, we don’t even look alike. Ally has long blond hair that’s straight as a board and green eyes and her skin is milky pale and smooth. For as long as I could remember she’d been the good girl, the standard beauty. And I’ve been her shadow, a photo negative, where all the light spaces, the bright happy spaces, turn to dark. And make no mistake, I am dark. Not just dark thoughts and dark humor. I have dark curly hair, dark eyes, freckles instead of the romantic moonlight-paleness of her face. How we came from the same parents is a complete mystery to me.
If it sounds like I’m jealous of her I’m not. I would not have wanted to live her life or have gone through what she went through in the end. And I’d never in a million years have been naive enough,
stupid
enough, to become friends with Graham Copeland, part skeleton, part zombie in his
expensive Diesel jeans, all blond and pretty like Allyson and too stuck up or shy or obsessed with his own weird world to talk to anyone. I could see right away that something wasn’t right. The way he looked at her, the way he could never look me in the eye quite the same way.
I remember it so clearly, the day that would change our lives forever: watching the moving van pull out of the driveway of the big old post-and-beam house next door. It was the nicest house in the neighborhood. Rockland is full of these places—mansions actually. Perfect old slate-roofed estates waiting for rich folks to move in. Or weathered stately old gems that people fixed up. Even though it was right next to Graham’s, our house was the latter. Rambling and not as square as a place should be. Our dad was a boat builder and he bought it when we were little and fixed it up himself—well, he was still occasionally fixing it up—might be fixing it up forever for all we knew. He was so busy sailing and doing restoration carpentry on other people’s mansions that he wasn’t around a lot and our house didn’t quite get the attention it needed. And that made Mom crazy, or at least gave her a good excuse to have some hysterical meltdown every time she got nervous about her high-society plans: drop cloths in the living room when company was on the way, when she was hosting another ridiculous benefit or kissing up to historical-society ladies. Our mom’s parents would invariably shell out whatever was necessary to make the place exactly what she wanted, but Dad always insisted on doing the work
himself—he’d been a carpenter since he was a kid. Even with our nice house Dad’s family was a little too close to the windbeaten lobster-trawling trash our mother liked to pretend didn’t exist. Dad always had sawdust in his hair.
But next door it was a very different story. You could tell once the moving van wasn’t blocking the black Mercedes and the red Audi that were parked in the driveway that the people who moved in wouldn’t be getting much plaster and paint in their hair. I caught all these details right away. Ally of course was out by the wooded edge of our property picking blueberries like she did every Saturday and humming to herself, not having the slightest idea what was going on next door.
She walked over and gave me a handful of blueberries and we stood near the wide-trunked pine in our front yard munching them together. Then a boy came out of the garage and walked between the two fancy cars. We watched him.
He was thin and his shoulders were broad and his hands were covered with engine grease. His hair was an unruly blond mess, his bangs brushed over to the side, and he looked like he’d just woken from a long nap. He had big blue eyes that looked like they were just beginning to focus, like a baby’s eyes, like some kind of dazed animal. He had a wrench in the back pocket of his jeans and you could see his ribs through his shirt.
“Nice hairdo!” I called out to him. He flinched as I said it and started walking quickly to his house, flattening his
hair down with his dirty hands. But then Ally called out again. Of course she did—the good girl, the sensitive girl that she was.
“Want some blueberries?” she asked him in that way she had, that sweet way like nothing is ever really wrong. “I just picked them. They’re special welcome-to-the-neighborhood berries.”
She crossed our driveway and handed him the basket. And I watched him standing there, looking at her, then looking down, awkwardly eating blueberries with his dirty hands. Then he smiled. I remember his teeth were unnaturally straight and white and his face was smooth like he didn’t need to shave yet—or like he was one of those guys who might never really need to shave. An angelic face but something else behind his eyes.
“What grade are you in?” she asked him.
I could barely make out what he said because he spoke so quietly.
“I’m taking some time off,” he said, and then cleared his throat as if he weren’t used to talking much. “Ah. I just got here.”
She should have walked back into our yard right then and gone inside. But she stood chatting like she always did. The professional hostess’s daughter. The golden-haired good girl, unable to see what damage looks like, even when it’s staring her right in the face.
That was then. This is now. If you can call this period of time anything at all. It feels like simply waiting. I guess all that exists is the present. We know what the past got us, and the future . . . well, the future is unwritten. All I know is that I’m almost out of time. I’ve got less than twelve hours to save myself and to make sure no one, absolutely no one, has to go through what Ally went through. I’m hoping she told me everything she knew, but given the things I found out—the things I know she didn’t or couldn’t tell me—that seems unlikely. If I could only get the details straight. If only there wasn’t something ominous and terrifying floating just below the water’s surface out by the slips.
But if I’m going to wish, if I’m going to say “if only,” I would go back much further than that. I’d go back to when Ally and me were just kids and I’d fix things before they got bad.
W
hen I go over it in my head I always start with the morning we met Graham.
I was up early helping Mom get the house ready because the ladies from Rockland Historical Society were coming to look at our widow’s walk. Dad had restored it just the way it was in the town’s records from the 1920s and now you could go and stand up there and see the whole harbor; you could actually see some of the boats Dad built out in the slips, tall and majestic, and rocking easily on the cold waves. It was beautiful.
I baked some muffins and made some lemon curd and then helped clear up some of Dad’s junk. One of the ladies visiting that morning was my boss, Ginny Porter, who owned the Pine Grove Inn. I still couldn’t believe I got to have a job in that old mansion. There was a glorious view from nearly every window. On one side you could see the
close majesty of tall pines, on the other there were cliffs and the rocky shoreline and the lovely old lonely lighthouse standing tall in the harbor. Because of that job I also got to meet interesting people coming to our town from all over the world. People passing through for a night, or staying for a few days to take it all in. People trying to get away from the city and just relax.
Mom was mortified thinking that our guests would show up early that morning and Daddy would still have his blueprints and models spread all over the dining room, but I was more worried about Sydney, who could be unpredictable when we had company. Either she would say something rude or sulk around in her black skinny jeans and uncombed hair looking like someone owed her something. And if people talked to her God only knew what she’d say. It could be brilliant—like really brilliant, reciting some poem or doing some cool card trick Dad taught us when we were kids—or it could be just plain vicious, calling people snobs or philistines. She loved the word
philistine
. I’d had to look it up. I never heard anyone but her and maybe my social studies teacher use it. This was the thing with Syd: she seemed all dark and tough and low-class if you didn’t know her, but she spent so much time with her face in a book she had this vocabulary that shocked people. Since we were little she was like this. Anyway, the word means someone who is hostile to culture. Which I think is completely the opposite of Mom’s friends. They all care so much about culture and
about the town’s history and about genealogy. But whatever. It’s not like Syd and I ever really saw things the same way.