It’s exhausting.
Anyway.
I go through the mudroom to get out, because Handsome and Fritz would never forgive me if I left without saying goodbye. I sit down and let them bombard me with dog-dreams and news and sheer unbridled affection. They both try to shove their noses into my backpack. Even though they listen when I tell them to leave it alone, I get up and go pretty fast. It doesn’t feel right, sitting there with Josh’s head and his all-wrong heart and letting the dogs tell me how great I am.
Nothing feels right.
I walk home. It’s only about a mile, and the fresh air is nice. It’s early enough that not many people are awake. I pass the places where Marcelina and I used to ride our bikes around when we were kids, before we knew that magic was more than just a game we played. Houses that we’d decided were haunted, or where we said a murderer probably lived. Sidewalks that we dusted with chalk rainbows before rainstorms, so that when the weather started to turn, we could watch the colors run.
I wonder when the days stopped feeling endless. It was definitely long before I had a backpack full of body parts to dispose of.
My house is just like all the other houses on the block. It’s squat and square and has a big window in the front and a little yard next to the driveway. It’s light blue, and the one on the left of it is white and the one on the right of it is brown, and that color pattern repeats over and over for about eight blocks in every direction.
The only thing that makes my house stand out is my dads’ garden. It’s one of the many Couples Hobbies they’ve taken up together over the years in an attempt to stay “connected.” It’s not that their relationship is bad or anything—it’s just that they’re both trial lawyers, which means that they’re both always busy. I guess when you’re that busy, it doesn’t matter if you’re madly in love with the person you want to spend the rest of your life with—it’s still easy to drift apart. So my dads have golfed and tennis’d and biked and run marathons, and now they’re gardening. The front lawn is a patchwork of garden beds that are exploding with flowers—mostly orange and pink ones right now, although they put some blue hydrangeas in for me.
I feel weirdly guilty whenever I see the hydrangeas, even though I know that they planted them to make me happy and it’s not a big deal. I don’t like feeling like I disrupted their color scheme. But then, if I ever told them I felt bad about it, they’d make a big deal about how it’s not a big deal. So I don’t say anything, and I tell myself that it’s not something I should feel guilty about.
I walk inside as quietly as I can, thinking I’ll be able to sneak into my bedroom without getting noticed or talked to, but as soon as I step inside, I’m thwarted by my little brother. Nico’s wearing his soccer uniform and he’s got his cleats on, even though he’s not supposed to wear them in the house and Pop will definitely kill him if he sees.
Nico looks nothing like me, which makes sense since we were adopted from entirely different families. Where my hair is brown and curly, his is black and straight and stands up in every direction even when he doesn’t put too much gel in it. We both have brown eyes, but mine are dark and his are light in a way that I’m sure girls his age think is dreamy. He’s two years younger than me, and he goes to a STEM magnet school that’s annoyingly close to my school. He’s getting taller every half hour or so, which means that his elbows are pointy and his neck is weirdly long and he’s developing horrible posture because he doesn’t know how to be tall yet. He’d be really good-looking if it wasn’t for the slouch. And if he wasn’t my little brother. And if he wasn’t constantly underfoot, like he is now.
“What are you doing up?” I ask. He looks down at his soccer cleats and then raises his eyebrows at me like I’m ten cents short of a dime, which … fair.
“Dad said you weren’t coming to my game today because you’d probably be hungover from prom,” Nico says.
“He did not say that,” I snap back at him. I want to yell at him to stop slouching, just to annoy him. I don’t have that many months left to be an annoying older sister who yells at my kid brother.
He rolls his eyes and heads toward the kitchen, his cleats pulling at the carpet.
“Whatever,” he yells over his shoulder. “Dad, Pop, the prodigal daughter has returned!”
I love my little brother, but he’s at an age where he thinks he’s clever. Normally I would say that I want to kill him, but … that’s a little close to home right now. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to say that again, to be honest. I turn down the hallway that leads to my bedroom, hoping against hope that I’ll be able to get there without interruption, but apparently, it’s not a good morning for hoping.
“How was prom?” Dad pokes his head out of the bathroom. He looks a lot like Nico, which he swears wasn’t intentional, but which makes people think that Nico is his son from a previous marriage or something. He has the sticking-up-everywhere black hair and the lighter-than-mine brown eyes and the altitude. But his black hair is starting to become salted with white, and his brown eyes have a web of laugh lines around them, and he’s what people call “olive” where Nico is just vampiric.
He’s my dad, and he’s got toothpaste foam on his chin, and he’s kind of the best. And I would give anything to not have to talk to him right now, because I’m tired and I have body parts in a bag and what if I get mad at my dad and hurt him somehow? I wasn’t even mad at Josh when I killed him, but it still happened.
You weren’t mad at him, something in me whispers. You were lying to him.
“Prom was fine,” I say, and that lie doesn’t kill my dad, so I push away the thought that it might matter.
“Just fine?” he asks, and I want to scream.
“It was great,” I answer, forcing a smile. “I’m just tired.”
“Okay, well, we didn’t even know that you’d be back this morning, so you’re free.” He sticks his toothbrush back into his mouth and makes a series of unintelligible noises. I decide to interpret them as “By all means, go lie in the dark in your room and try to figure out how you’re going to dispose of that nice boy’s head.”
“Love you,” I say, and he waves at me, and his salt-and-pepper head disappears back into the bathroom. I walk into my bedroom, shut the door, and allow myself an all-out dramatic sigh, complete with a slouching lean against the door.
I think I’ve earned some melodrama.
I pull out my phone before I’ve finished crossing the room to flop onto the bed. I have a million notifications, and I dismiss all of them except for the text messages. I don’t have the energy for social media yet.
I have a bunch of texts from Maryam.
She’s doing that thing where she’s anxious, but she doesn’t want to put what she’s anxious about in writing, so she’s over-explaining and being vague at the same time. She wants to know if everything’s okay, and if everyone’s on the same page, and if there’s anything she should know about, and if we can have a phone call, or maybe a phone call’s a bad idea, and maybe we shouldn’t even be texting, and can I delete her texts just in case?