The Beauty That Remains Read online

  “Hey, Mom,” I say. “You’re back pretty late.”

  “I know, sweetie. I’m sorry. Did you finish your homework? Have you eaten?” She starts walking toward the kitchen, and I wonder if I’ll ever fill out like her—get the hips she’s had for my whole life, or a butt that can actually make a pair of jeans or a skirt look good.

  I dodge her first question. “I had something to eat at the show.”

  I stand behind her as she fills our electric kettle with water to make herself a cup of tea. She pulls down two mugs, and then I think it hits her; the mistake she’s made. I’m not the twin who was an Anglophile—who drank tea and read British literature for fun and watched BBC documentaries with her every Friday night. I’m not Sasha, even though I look like her. Mom glances at me anyway, and I shake my head. I’m the twin who likes coffee, who likes music magazines, and who likes watching BMX videos. She puts one of the mugs back into the cabinet.

  I pour myself a big glass of water and hop up to sit on the counter, like we’re going to chat, because she and Sasha used to talk for hours. (I have no idea what about.) We both end up looking at our phones instead of saying anything else to each other, though.

  When she says “Don’t stay up too late” and heads for the stairs, I ease toward Sasha’s room.

  I open the door and just stand there for a moment, trying to decide how much I can handle today. With the song Rohan played still fresh in my mind, and my palms already turning a little sweaty, I decide I’m too on edge to attempt to lie in my sister’s bed tonight and read the poetry and song lyrics she painted across her ceiling. I slide down by the door to sit on the floor because I don’t want to walk in any farther, but I don’t want to leave, either.

  I turn on her TV and queue up our favorite show, Intervention. Rohan and I used to lie in bed with Sasha and watch hours of it on the weekends. I lean against the wall and watch as a girl only a little older than me tells the camera that she’s been hooked on heroin since she was sixteen.

  Sasha’s favorite beanie, an all-black one with two cat ears stitched onto the top, is sitting in a basket by the door, the peak on a mountain of all the knit hats my sister collected once she’d lost her hair. I grab it, shove it over my own messy curls, and finish up the episode. Then I actually do my homework, trying to soak in the Sasha-ness of Sasha’s room until I feel as calm as I would have if she were here beside me.

  When I open the bedroom door to leave, I hear Mom in the kitchen again. I stand there for a second, hoping to wait her out because I don’t want to have another awkward nonconversation.

  “No, it’s not that,” I hear her say. She must be on the phone. “Sasha was so open, you know? She told me everything. But Shay doesn’t talk to me, so I don’t know how she’s feeling or how to help her.” She pauses, and I step into the hall, ready to assure her that I don’t need any help, that I’m completely fine. I’m seconds away from turning the corner to the kitchen when she speaks up again, and her voice sounds almost weepy. “I just want her to be okay.”

  I stop. I take a few steps back toward Sasha’s room, unsure of what to do. I knew Mom was sad about Sasha, but I had no idea she was sad about me too. I don’t know what I could have done to make her worry.

  When Mom goes back to her room, I head back to mine. But I can’t get her words out of my head, which makes it impossible for me to fall asleep. Only twenty minutes pass before I creep back downstairs, lace up my running shoes, and grab my jacket.

  Outside, in the cold, my feet pound the pavement, and my breath is a puff of white in front of my face. Besides music, running is the only thing that consistently helps to keep me calm. I run to the end of my street, then around my block.

  I keep running. Past my old elementary school, its playground creating a shadowy silhouette in the moonlight. Past my high school, where Rohan, Deedee, and Callie cheered me on in a track meet earlier today. Up the hill that leads to the park where me and Sasha used to swap secrets on the swings, and farther still, to the parking lot of the hospital where my sister died.

  I slow down and jog over to an empty spot in the lot. I lie down on the cold asphalt, and I feel unmoored, like I’m a ship, and the black concrete around me is the sea. While I wait for my pulse to slow, I stare up at the seagulls circling the lot—maybe they think it’s a body of water. Sasha was my lighthouse, my north star, so I search for a sign of her in the dark.

  Some people visit their loved ones’ graves to talk to them, but for some reason, I like talking to my sister at the hospital. Maybe because this was the last place I saw her alive.

  “Mom’s worried about me,” I say out loud. “But I don’t really know why.”

  It’s Momma, Sasha says inside my head. She worries about everything.

  “Yeah, but I’m a pretty good kid,” I say.

  You are, but she must know something else is going on.

  I shake my head. “She doesn’t know about me staying out late.”

  Because she’s never there.

  “Right. She knows I go to shows all the time, but she has no idea about the smoking. And I guess my grades could be better,” I say. Sasha doesn’t answer, but I know she agrees.

  I turn my head, almost expecting to see my sister beside me, because we would lie in bed all the time and have talks like this. She always stayed quiet when I talked about school because she hadn’t been in one for almost a year. I close my eyes so I can picture her as clearly as I can summon her voice.

  What about the running? Sasha asks.

  “Track?”

  No, the flipping out. The running away? I’m sure that worries her, too.

  I open my eyes and look up again. “She’s never seen it happen, though.”

  I’m sure she wouldn’t be happy if she knew about it. And it’s Momma. She probably knows about it.

  “I hope not.”

  I think of Mom’s words tonight: I just want her to be okay. And it’s funny because I just want her to be okay. She shouldn’t be worrying about me after she spent the last five years worrying about Sasha. She deserves a little peace.

  I should go home right now. I never should have left. It’s late, and I’m not stupid—I know I shouldn’t be out by myself, running recklessly through the dark. But I think I’ve decided this is my last night doing things that would worry Mom if she knew about them, and I want to enjoy it.

  I stand up, turn on the loudest song on my phone, and run in the direction of the beach. The wheels in my head are turning, and since I wouldn’t mind being less like myself right about now, I hatch a plan to become the kind of kid Mom won’t have to worry about.

  JAN. 17, 3:19 A.M.

  My mom said I have to go back to school on Monday, so I’m not talking to her.

  Tavia may not be on Hangouts right now. She’ll see your messages later.

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Sent: Jan. 20, 1:41 a.m.

  Subject:

  Alexa was crying when I saw her in the hall my first day back, and seeing her crumpled against her locker made me want to run to her. But when I got a little closer, she wiped her face really fast and pulled out her phone, and tried to seem surprised when I tapped her on the shoulder.

  Because Alexa never wears makeup, she can look almost normal after crying. Her nose is all pink, and her brown eyelashes are pinched together because they’re still a little wet, but no mascara is running.

  It makes me remember how you’d attack her with liquid liner before we went to parties. How you’d send me links to your favorite Asian vloggers’ makeup tutorials, hoping I’d follow the instructions to make my own eyes “pop.” And I’m seconds away from bringing up your makeup obsession with Alexa. But then I realize she’s pretending that she wasn’t crying. She wants me to think everything is fine, and I don’t really want to upset her
again. So I try to stop thinking about makeup—about how much lip gloss and bronzer you owned—and I bump her shoulder. She smiles a little, and neither of us says a thing about you.

  We walk to class together, and Margo and Faye join us on the second floor, but the balance of the way we take up space is off. Faye is supposed to be in front—walking backward telling a story, or facing forward, like we’re a ship and she’s at the helm. Margo and Alexa should be in the middle, and Alexa should be turning her head to tell me everything Faye is saying. Margo should be adding her own commentary to make us laugh. Your arm is supposed to be threaded through mine—the fifth point in our star.

  Instead, Faye is next to me. She says, “How was your weekend?” But she doesn’t sound normal. Her voice comes out a little higher pitched than it should be, and her eyes are too wide and wet-looking. Her head is tilted slightly, like I’m a small child or a puppy, and I know she means well, but I hate when people talk to me using their Sympathy Voice.

  I don’t say anything at first. But the truth is, I want to tell her everything: that my weekend was terrible, that I’ve been sleeping at your house, that being back here is harder than I thought it would be. That it took me twenty minutes to find something clean to wear and that everything with Dante is weird and complicated now. But telling her things that I can’t tell you first feels strange.

  Eventually, I say, “Weekend was fine, I guess.” But still Faye stays beside me, looking concerned. Margo has her arm around Alexa’s shoulders, and she hasn’t said anything funny at all. Alexa hasn’t looked at me since we were at her locker, and no one’s really talking when usually, we don’t shut up. I can tell Faye wants to say something else or wants me to, but when I stay quiet, so does she. She waves to some guy she knows and then touches my shoulder before she goes over to talk to him instead of me. I already want to go home.

  I keep pretending everything is normal, even though nothing is normal, because I’m not sure what else to do. I roll my eyes when a teacher makes a dumb joke in homeroom, and I try to ignore the gaping hole your empty chair carves right through me. I compliment Margo’s shoes before our next class, and she tells me where she got them, but her explanation is way shorter than it would ordinarily be. I even laugh when we watch an embarrassing video in health class, but when Faye looks at me as if I’ve done something wrong, I bite my lip. I feel like I have.

  Between periods, a few people hug me or touch my shoulders as they tell me they’re sorry that you’re gone. They talk to me in their everyday voices, and it’s a relief to hear them saying your name. I hug them back and say thank you. For some reason, it’s easier for me to talk to random people than it is for me to say anything to our friends.

  After a few more classes with the three of them barely speaking to one another or me, I decide to eat lunch alone. I’m tired of not knowing what to say or do around them, so I sit at the table near the bathroom, the one that smells kind of bad. I see Alexa look around for me when she first gets into the cafeteria, but Margo pulls her toward our usual table. Faye says hi to about a million people, the way she always does, but eventually, she goes to our table too.

  I watch our friends until the scene makes my chest feel like it’s caving in. I don’t know where I fit inside the picture of us without you.

  I’ve always felt a little…optional to them, and the lack of you in the lunchroom makes me feel more unnecessary than ever. Your absence is more shocking here than it’s been almost anywhere else, like in one of those spot-the-difference games where something essential has been erased from one of the pictures. I’m an extra cloud in an already-cloudy sky, but you were the leg of a table. You were our sun.

  Perry sees me sitting by myself, and before I can run away from his gaze, he comes over.

  “Hey, Autumn,” he says. He puts his tray down on the table. He’s thinking about staying, but I hope he doesn’t. He plucks at the front of his baggy T-shirt, like he’s hot, and lifts his blond eyebrows higher than he needs to when he starts talking.

  “That history test was intense, right? Tavia’s like, a history genius, so I used a couple of her memorization tricks.”

  He smiles and taps at his temple, but that’s when I notice that the whites of his small gray eyes are red, and I wonder if he’s been crying, or having a hard time sleeping, or both. It’s hard to look at him for too long knowing you were on your way to see him that night. I know you still loved him, but he doesn’t.

  I don’t know how to process everything that seeing him makes me feel.

  “Sorry, Perry. I gotta go,” I tell him as I stand up. I’m too tired to come up with an actual excuse.

  I’ve had my phone on all day. Between periods, I look at pictures of you with it hidden in my locker so it doesn’t get confiscated, but right now, I don’t really care. I call my sister and put the phone right up to my ear before I even get to the door of the girls’ bathroom.

  “Autumn,” Willow says. There’s a frantic edge to her voice, but she’s working hard to sound like her normal self. “Everything all right?”

  “Not really,” I say. I tell her about Perry. Then about everyone else.

  “Alexa has Margo, and Faye has never really needed anyone. It’s like I suddenly don’t have a place to stand. Like I don’t fit anymore.” I pause when a girl comes into the bathroom, and I wait for her to go into a stall before I say anything else.

  “I guess I didn’t think I would feel so out of place without her,” I whisper, hoping the other person in the bathroom doesn’t hear. Willow sighs, so I know she knows I’m talking about you. “And I thought I wouldn’t want to talk about her, you know? But not talking about her is worse. It feels like we’re ignoring the fact that she’s missing. That she’s gone.”

  “Sounds like they don’t know how to process what’s happening,” Willow says after a pause. “They’re probably not dealing with it, or whatever. Or maybe they feel weird because they don’t know what to say since the two of you had been friends for so long before you even met them. She was yours first. But even if they don’t know what to say, they should be trying harder to be there for you.”

  I can tell my sister’s trying to analyze them, just because she declared her major recently: psych. But I can’t deny that I find comfort in the fierceness of her love. I cling to her words about you: She was yours.

  “I love you, Will,” I say to her, even though we don’t say that to each other very often. And that tiny truth is something I wish I told you every day. “It’s just that…losing her was hard enough. I don’t think I can handle it if I end up without them, too.”

  “I get it,” Willow says. “But don’t forget that you’re not the only one hurting.” I picture Alexa’s face, and I try not to feel my own pain multiply. “You guys should be supporting one another right now, not, like…ignoring everything. Maybe try to do something small? Show them what you wish they’d do for you?”

  It’s not a terrible idea, but I’m not sure I can do it today. “Yeah. I’ll try to figure it out.”

  “Call me later, okay?” Willow says. And I just tell her I love her again before I hang up.

  I stay in the stall and text Dante. He isn’t back at school yet, and he probably doesn’t really care, so I don’t bug him with the Alexa-Margo-Faye drama. But I do tell him about Perry.

  I just don’t get why he’s talking to me, I send. He never talked to me like this before, even when they were dating.

  Yeah, Dante sends back. But that’s all he says.

  Where are you? I ask. He never answers my question.

  After school, I ask my dad if it’s okay, and I drive to your house instead of mine.

  I do my homework in your den, like you’re right there beside me the way you used to be. I watch Teen Mom on your couch with your mom, but you liked that show more than either of us, so we switch to a weird indie movie. When it’s time for dinner, I
help her make a salad and pour your dad some wine. We listen to some contemporary classical, and they say it’s a shame that I quit playing the violin. I talk about school when they ask me about it, but I don’t tell them about how weird things are with our friends.

  Dante isn’t around all afternoon or evening, and part of me is relieved. But when my mom calls around ten and asks when I’m planning to come home, he comes through the front door, looking rosy-cheeked and pissed. When he sees me, his face doesn’t exactly light up, but it’s suddenly a little less shadowed.

  “Is it okay if I stay the night?” I ask my mom while he’s still watching me.

  She covers the mouthpiece, but I still hear her muffled voice when she says to my dad, “I’m worried she’s spending too much time over there, aren’t you?”

  That’s when I remember that I wasn’t talking to her for a reason.

  “Maybe it’s helping her, Abby,” I hear my dad answer. “Maybe we just let her do whatever she thinks she needs for a while. Autumn’s not Willow,” he adds, as if I’m more fragile than my sister, as if I need to be handled with more care. And something about the way he says my name makes me angry. My face must have changed because when I turn toward him, Dante asks me our question with his eyes.

  You okay?

  I nod, deciding that maybe I shouldn’t be speaking to either of my parents.

  “Okay,” my mom says, to me, finally. “Okay. Do you need a change of clothes?”

  * * *

  —

  Dante finds me in your room after midnight.

  I’m sitting on the floor beside your bed, and I’m holding that thin, hot pink scarf I bought for you because you said it looked like a wish. You were always saying stuff like that—making everyday things seem like magic.

  Dante sits on the floor beside me, and he leaves a few inches of space between us.