He was always grateful, quick to tell me he knew he could count on me. That I was a “team player.”
Except I wasn’t. Not really. Because no matter how grateful my dad claimed to be, no matter what he bought me to say thank you…he never did anything differently. To be a team player, there had to be an actual team, people working toward a common goal. And all I’d had was one parent making a mess of everything while the other avoided acknowledging said mess, leaving all the responsibility to fall on me.
I cleaned up after him.
I froze, the realization ringing through my head loud and clear. Yes, my mother had needed me to take care of her alcohol-induced messes…but my father had needed me to take care of her so he’d have the luxury of avoiding it. He’d used me, every bit as much as my mom had.
I felt sucker punched. He’d dumped his responsibilities on me and then forgotten all about me as soon as I was gone. Buying one pretty headstone was all it took for his guilt to be assuaged, apparently.
My mother had long accused him of always chasing after the newest, shiniest object in the vicinity without feeling or regret, be it the latest car, gadget, or wife. I’d thought being “special” had exempted me from that. Guess not.
With effort, I leaned over and yanked some of the too-tall grass away from the base of my ridiculous headstone, my eyes stinging suddenly.
This is why people shouldn’t stick around after they die. It’s lonely and miserable, and it makes you think too much. Or, if you have to stick around because of unresolved issues, then you sure as hell shouldn’t be sent back after you’ve addressed them. I mean, what is that about?
I tossed the loose blades of grass away, but the breeze caught them and sent them fluttering across my grave, just as it would the leaves in a few months and then the snow after that.
I pictured my former self snug in the white casket in the ground below, immune to all the drama and chaos going on up here. And for a second, I wished I was with her. Just gone.
“Why am I here? Why did you send me back?” I asked for probably the millionth time in the last two months, this time aloud instead of in my head.
But the answer was the same. Silence.
Of course. Because that was sohelpful these days.
I spent longer at the cemetery than I meant to and had to hurry to get back home before Mrs. Turner and Tyler returned. Still, hurrying or not, I should have known something was wrong the second I reached my bedroom window. If I’d stopped and thought about it, I would have remembered that I’d left the window open, and it was now closed. I might have checked things out before barging in.
But my brain was on a constant loop of unhappy thoughts, and I was in a rush. So, it was only after I’d pried the window up from the sill—it’s much harder to do that from the outside than you’d think—and stuck my head into the room that I realized two very important things.
First, unless I wanted to end up on my face, it would have been better to start with my feet.
Second, Tyler Turner, Lily’s younger brother, was standing in the middle of the room and glaring at me, his arms folded over his skinny chest.
Busted.“I went for a walk,” I said weakly.
Tyler was the second hardest thing about this gig, coming in just behind Mrs. Turner. It wasn’t his fault, exactly. I had no idea how to be an older sister, any more than I knew how to be hisolder sister, specifically. He was three years younger than Lily (four years younger than me) and a complete and utter mystery to me.
Sometimes he seemed to hate all the attention his parents, particularly his mother, put into me. He constantly pointed it out when I answered their questions incorrectly (“No, purple is your favorite color”) or I didn’t “remember” something I should have (“But you hate mustard!”).
Other times, like when I had a headache (or found it convenient to say I did), it seemed to send him into a panic. He would sneak around to check on me every fifteen minutes, while pretending not to, or bring me a glass of water and Tylenol with an anxious frown.
I couldn’t figure him out.
But Tyler was the one who’d first noticed that something was different about Lily, the day that I’d first taken over, even before I’d grabbed his wrist. He saw it somehow. He knew his sister well.
And sometimes I wondered if he knew I wasn’t her. That would be trouble. Big trouble.
Tyler shook his head at me. “You went out for a walk through the window?” he scoffed. “Right. Better not try that one on Mom.”
This is what I’d been missing by not having siblings? No thanks. My only experience with younger brothers came from being around Misty and her family. But her half brothers were still in diapers, and the worst they ever did was steal a lipstick to use as a crayon.
I sighed and backed out of the window, preparing to climb in properly. If he was going to sound the alarm, I wanted to be inside, at least.
In an awkward motion, I swung my bad leg and then my good one over the sill. I grimaced, bending my head to fit beneath the frame, and let myself down in a barely controlled fall to the floor. The impact sent a jolt of pain through my injured leg, and I stumbled forward a step, bumping into the desk. The desk lamp and a bunch of books and magazines crashed to the ground.
“Shhh!” With a quick glance at my bedroom door, which was half open, Tyler edged closer to me. “Do you know how close it was?” he demanded in an undertone. “Mom sent me down here to tell you we were back early. What if she’d come down here herself instead?”
I stared at him as if he were speaking a foreign language. So he wasn’t going to tell on me? “She would have been pissed?” I felt that was a fairly safe—and true—answer.
Now it was his turn to stare at me. “What is wrong with you? Of course she would have been—” Tyler shook his head impatiently. “Never mind. You didn’t even tell me you were going this time.”
He sounded almost…hurt. I shifted, uncomfortable. I really wanted to sit down, take the weight off my leg, but obviously he wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon without some kind of conversation. Great.
“Okay,” I said slowly, trying to piece all of this together and come up with some kind of Lilyesque response. Clearly, because Tyler and I had never had a discussion about my sneaking out before, he and Pre-Coma Lily must have. So, wait, Pre-Coma Lily had been sneaking out? Where? Why? I knew she wasn’t perfect, but this went even beyond what I’d suspected. Then again…Lily had “dated” Ben Rogers for a while, and he wasn’t exactly the show-up-at-the-front-door-and-meet-and-greet-with-the-’rents type. Kind of interfered with his whole pillage-and-plunder-the-naive-but-willing plan.
But she hadn’t mentioned sneaking out to meet him in her diary. Then again, maybe Lily was brighter than I’d given her credit for. It was one thing to describe a date you probably weren’t supposed to be on; another to spell out in big bold letters the specific crimes for which you could be punished if a parent went snooping. Besides, everything she wrote about back then was Ben-related. The getting-out-of-the-house part probably hadn’t been all that important to her.
I realized Tyler was still waiting for a response. “Uh, sorry?” I offered.
“Forget it,” he muttered. He plopped himself down on the edge of my bed.