CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SHE HATED THIS. Hated remembering it. Hated talking about it. Hated absolutely everything about the subject of Vanessa. She and her parents avoided the topic, and when they had to discuss her it was usually coded.
She hadn’t known life without her sister for the first sixteen years. They had been in the womb together, born together. Every birthday party, every milestone shared. She had been Olivia’s other half in so many ways.
The bright spark to Olivia’s steady rock. When they hit adolescence, it hadn’t been an easy relationship. Olivia was too boring for Vanessa a lot of the time. Vanessa was always daring. Adventurous. Vivacious and fun. She had definitely added sparkle to their house. But she had also been the one who was consistently rebellious. Part of Olivia had envied her.
Vanessa had always worn loud, trendy clothes, and if somebody said they didn’t like them, Vanessa was the first to tell them where to shove their opinions. She had thought nothing of charging headfirst into various schemes, preferring to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. But then, as she had gotten older she hadn’t even asked for forgiveness.
She had stopped wanting to spend time with Olivia. And Olivia had been... Angry. Jealous. Vanessa was like a magnet, and she drew people to her. And at the same time shoved Olivia aside.
Olivia had done a lot of stewing about it while she had thrown darts down in the basement, when Vanessa had been out at night with groups of friends doing God knows what, and Olivia wasn’t invited.
That was when she had concocted her plan to be included. The plan that had ultimately wrecked everything.
That had proven to her the importance of staying on her own path.
“I didn’t mean to,” Olivia said, her voice small. As small as she felt whenever she thought about Vanessa. Whenever she thought about that horrible day when, after talking to her father in his office, they had a family meeting in the living room and Vanessa’s fate had been handed down.
She could still remember the look on her sister’s face. Could still remember the venom in her voice.
This is your fault. I hate you.
“Of course you didn’t mean to do anything that hurt anyone,” Luke said, so willing to believe her.
It was strange, because she wouldn’t have said that Luke would defend her, or her motives, but there he was. Doing just that. It felt right, too. Like it was the natural thing for him to be on her side.
“I was being self-righteous,” Olivia said. “It’s my natural setting, or haven’t you noticed?” She laughed, a brittle sound.
“You like things a certain way,” he said. “You have a strong sense of what you think is right and wrong. I’m pretty flexible on a lot of those things, but let me tell you, I find you refreshing. Because I always know where I stand. And so do you.”
“Right now, I’m lying,” she said, raising both hands off the covers and spreading her arms wide. “So, I think maybe we were both wrong.”
“Tell me about Vanessa,” he said, his eyes serious.
“She didn’t like hanging out with me anymore. When we were thirteen, she and a group of our friends decided they wanted to go skinny-dipping when we were hanging out at one of the ranch properties during this big barbecue. The creek was hidden in the woods, but there were people there and I... I didn’t want to. Vanessa said...” She cleared her throat. “She said I might as well because we were identical so once everyone saw her it would be the same as seeing me. I was afraid we’d get caught. But I didn’t want to be left out. I wanted... I wanted so much to take a chance and be accepted. I didn’t do it, but I agreed to be a lookout.” Olivia shook her head. “A boy saw them. And he went and told everyone that the girls were naked in the creek. And at that point everyone scattered. My mom was furious. She asked me who was involved and she said she couldn’t believe I’d allowed something so inappropriate to happen. She said...she said she expected it of Vanessa, not of me.” Her throat felt scratchy and her eyes were dry. It was such a small thing, a silly thing. Keeping a lookout while the other girls were naked in a creek. It wasn’t like anyone had been hurt. But even now the memory of how she felt made it feel enormous. Like she’d let her parents down. Like she’d somehow let herself down because she was supposed to know better. To be better.
She continued. “She asked for the names of everyone involved, so she could talk to their parents and I... I gave them to her. After that I had a reputation for being a tattletale. Nobody wanted my sister to invite me to anything, and my sister didn’t want to, either.”
“Maybe you were a little bit of a tattletale,” Luke said, sounding defensive of her, “but they pressured you to do something that made you uncomfortable.”
“I think they call that being a teenager, Luke. And you can see how that didn’t make me very popular. I wasn’t fun.” She took a deep breath. “When we were in high school, Vanessa never wanted to spend time with me at all. She had a different group of friends, and I wasn’t included. She was always getting in trouble, and whenever there were waves...my parents were worried we were both getting into bad situations. Vanessa got detention, she’d get grounded and go out anyway. Then my grades might slip and I’d get the same punishment Vanessa would get if she were caught with beer. I felt like I was walking on eggshells with everyone.”
“That’s not fair,” Luke said.
“Maybe not. But I think they were afraid I could be influenced to behave like Vanessa if they didn’t crack down. And Vanessa...they couldn’t control her at all. So they focused on me. It was hard, and in all that, I missed my sister. I was angry because I was home alone all the time and...and I wanted to be part of the group again. I wanted a chance to prove I wasn’t just an annoying tattletale. I thought that if I could get myself invited to one of the parties that she was going to maybe I could fix our relationship. Maybe I could find a way to bridge the gap between us. And I think... I think deep down part of me was jealous.”
It was like spitting out nails, admitting that. Because it made everything that followed more murky. Made her less of the benevolent good child and more the petulant, angry sister who got treated like she might rebel at any moment without getting any of the fun of rebellion.
“I was spending Friday nights at home alone studying, trying to please our parents, and she was going out partying. I felt hungry for that. For friends. For fun. But it scared me, because I wanted to do the right thing, too. I wanted to do what my parents wanted. I was tutoring this girl that Vanessa used to hang out with in math, and I ended up weaseling an invite to one of the parties out of her. Or more, I weaseled the information out of her—she didn’t explicitly say that I could show up. But I did.”
Shame, sadness, all came crashing down on her chest.
“What happened?” he asked.
“I went to the party and there was drinking. I was prepared for that.”
“You had all of your ways to say no firmly in place,” he said, the corner of his mouth lifting upward slightly.
“You joke, Luke, but I did.”
“Of course you did.”
“I had been prepared for there to be drinking. But I wasn’t prepared for the drugs. And I’m not talking marijuana. There was some harder stuff. Someone had stolen Oxy off of their parents, and everyone was taking pills. Vanessa took some,” Olivia said. “I knew that we had gotten further apart, but I had no idea that she was doing stuff like that. I went straight home, and I told my parents.”
In part because she’d been scared. But...
“The next day, when Vanessa came home, we had a meeting. And my father announced that he was sending her to a school for troubled girls.”
“That’s why she left,” Luke confirmed.
“Yes. But I’m sure that you’ve heard all the rumors about that.”
He lifted a shoulder. “Sure. There certainly weren’t any rumors that she had gone off to an art academy or anything.”
“I think at that point everybody knew that Vanessa Logan was trouble.” Olivia swallowed hard. “And I was the good one.”
“And you still are,” he said.
She nodded. “Yes. The good sister, that’s me. It was easier with her gone though. And that...that’s the worst part. That I enjoyed her being gone, because it seemed like they weren’t quite as hard on me without Vanessa around making them worry. It was all fine when I imagined that being at the school might save her. That it might pull her out of risky behaviors and all of that.”
“Let me guess,” he said, his voice heavy. “It didn’t.”
“No. It didn’t. If anything, it just gave her more access to people who had done more things. She ran away from the school. And my parents had trouble tracking her down. They looked, of course, sent out search parties down in Southern California, where she was, but they didn’t find her. And then they quit looking.”
She looked up at the ceiling, counted the wooden slats there. “She would resurface from time to time, just to give a phone call and let us know she was alive. And then she was eighteen, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. She wasn’t missing. Not really. Oxy became heroin. And then everything else. We used to be identical. Drugs took that from us, too.”
Her face and throat felt hot and scratchy. She wished she could cry. But she’d had too much practice with not crying over Vanessa. How could she? She had a stake in this place her sister had ended up.
Her mother and father had the right to cry.
Olivia had the right to behave.
“It’s been about six months since we’ve heard from her now though. God only knows. She could be dead of an overdose somewhere, and nobody would care, Luke. No one would care at all. Because she’s a junkie. Except she’s still my sister.”
“And you think you have to be good enough for both of you now? This is why you have to text your parents and make sure they don’t worry?”
She sat up, clinging to the blankets. “They have a daughter they have to worry might die in an alley somewhere,” she said, shaking her head. “Shouldn’t I make it easy for them? Shouldn’t I let them know where I am? And yes, I do need to be good. Because if I’m not, then what was the point of being such a rigid, awful little tattletale? If I’m not everything that I’ve always pretended it was so easy to be, if it’s actually not easy when you’re faced with your own particular brand of temptation, then where did I ever get off?” She looked at him. “I guess I never had a leg to stand on. Because you seem to be my brand of temptation, Luke Hollister, and I resisted you all of two weeks.”
“Technically,” he said, “you’ve known me for a long time. Factoring in age of consent and all of that, I’d say you resisted for about seven years.”
“You know what I mean.” She frowned.
Luke let out a slow, heavy breath and reached out, cupping her chin in his hands. “I’m going to tell you something, Olivia, and I want you to take it to heart as much as you can. You can’t make choices for someone else. And being good, never making a mistake, is never going to erase the mistakes your sister made. It’s never going to erase what you’re afraid are your mistakes. You did the right thing, as far as you could see it at the time. Your parents did, too. Were you supposed to look away and let her continue on in addiction right in front of you? You would blame yourself for that, too. But in the end, you can’t blame yourself for any of it. Because you didn’t inject anything into her veins, you didn’t make her smoke anything or snort anything, didn’t make her take off her clothes to go skinny-dipping in the first place all those years ago. She made her choices and you made yours. End of story.”
He lay back, closing his eyes. “You can’t make someone walk a path they don’t want to be on. You can’t even make them breathe if they don’t want to anymore. That is their choice. And it’s their life. You can’t make your whole existence a fucking monument to that. Otherwise, what’s the point in your good behavior? What’s the point in continuing to be alive if you’re not really living? You were going to marry some guy you weren’t even tempted to jump into bed with because... Why?”
“Because I thought that it would make me safe,” she said. Her throat had gone unbearably tight, her eyes stinging with unshed tears. “Because deep down I’m afraid that if I put one step out of line I’ll end up like her. We’re twins. What separates the two of us from each other? Genetically, almost nothing. I know my parents were worried about that. It’s why they were so hard on me. I’m not sorry about it, either. It was that hardness that gave me the life I have, and it’s better than the life Vanessa has, let me tell you.”
“You thought marriage would protect you?”
“I don’t know if I’d put it that way. But I knew it would...make my life settled. For me. For my parents. Then I can have all those things, and in the right place. I can have sex, and I could have it with commitment. And if I got pregnant, then at least I would have a husband.”
“That’s a lot of flawed reasoning there, darlin’,” he said.
“Yes,” she said slowly. “And when I say it out loud I can see that. But when I felt it inside of me, when it was just a whole lot of pressure crushing down on my brain, it seemed reasonable enough. Bennett was safe. That was the beginning and end of it. I never really thought of it in all those different terms until just now.”
“And what about me?” He brushed her hair back away from her eyes. “What am I?”
“I don’t know. The first thing I’ve ever let myself have that I just wanted. The first time I’ve ever indulged.”
“I can do that. I can be that.”
“Okay,” she said, her lips feeling numb.
He was the first person she had ever said all of these things to. She had admitted it to herself at the same moment she had admitted it to him.
And she had already committed one of those grave sins she had tried to keep herself from committing. Had already dropped her guard, released her hold on her control, let herself feel, instead of think.
Luke was... He was safe. As rebellions went. She knew him. He would never hurt her, not on purpose. He certainly wasn’t going to marry her, and she didn’t want to marry him, either.
They had chemistry. It might be fun to chase that for a while.
To hold it. To have this small, reckless thing that she could claim as her own, and then set aside when they were finished.
“Okay?”
“I mean... Please,” she said. “Please be my reckless thing.”
He smiled slowly, and for just one second it looked to her like the smile didn’t reach his eyes. But then it arrived, and she didn’t ponder that anymore.
“With pleasure.”