“I just had some very unclean thoughts about my sister go through my head. I feel disgusting now.”
I offered a weak smile of apology.
“You look different.” He pointed to his own hair and face. “Are you wearing crap all over your face? I shouldn’t be worried that you work in the red-light district at night, right?”
I wadded up my sweatshirt and threw it at his head. Since his question was rhetorical as far as I was concerned, I continued upstairs, grabbed my pajamas, and then jumped in the shower.
I scrubbed at the makeup on my face, wanting it gone. At home, that other part of my life seemed so foreign.
When I emerged, I found Gage sitting on my bed, along with Nathan.
I rolled my eyes.
“She doesn’t look any different to me,” Nathan said.
Gage shook his head and pointed at my face. “Her hair was wavy or something and she was wearing lots and lots of makeup. Her eyelashes and her lips and her cheeks—”
“Gage. Out.”
“Not until you explain.”
“Ugh. It’s nothing. I’ve just been the mannequin for a makeup line.” I thought about my choice of words and the stupid mannequin in Linda’s store. I felt like that lately—like all my pieces had been taken off and put back together lopsided.
“What?” Nathan asked. Then he looked to Gage when I didn’t answer. “What does that mean?”
“Do you mean modeling? You’ve been modeling?” Gage asked.
“Not really. Just sitting there while a girl puts makeup on me. Now get out before I beat you both.”
“Does Dad know?”
I groaned. “No. And he doesn’t need to.” He’d die if he knew I’d been lying to him about this. They both looked at me skeptically. “Can I buy your silence? I’ll give you each fifty bucks if neither of you says another word about this.”
“What are you, Ms. Money Bags now? Exactly what kind of modeling are you doing?”
“Oh. My. Gosh. Get out.”
Gage pointed to my dresser in a lightbulb moment. “That girl. Amber. You really do know her. You work with her.”
“Your brilliance knows no bounds.” This time I grabbed him by the arm and dragged him to the door. Nathan followed willingly. Before he left, Nathan turned back and said, “If you don’t tell Dad, you know I’ll have to.”
“Of course I know that, Nathan. You’ve never broken a rule in your life. Are your insides twisting up right now with my secret?” It was supposed to be a joke, but my insides were the ones all twisted up.
Nathan smiled but didn’t deny my accusation.
Gage, whose arm I still held and who I was trying to shove out the door, finally stepped out, but not before he said, “Since when do you keep secrets from me?” The way he said it, and the sadness in his eyes, hurt. Before I could defend myself, he’d walked away.
Chapter 20
I tossed and turned until the clock read midnight. I slid out of bed and padded to the bathroom, where I splashed cold water on my face. I leaned into the counter and stared at my bloodshot eyes. Water dripped down my face and onto the counter. I grabbed a towel and patted it dry.
Downstairs, I pulled out the box of pictures my dad kept in a drawer beneath the coffee table. I flipped slowly through the ones of my mother. I wanted them to tell me something different. Something they’d never told me before. Clues about her life. Her personality. But they didn’t. They just told me what they always did.
She was beautiful. People said I looked like her, and maybe our faces resembled each other, but her body was wispy and soft. Even in pictures I could tell she was graceful. Maybe she could’ve taught me to be graceful. I wondered if she would have been disappointed with a sporty daughter. Or maybe she’d have been disappointed in who I’d become lately—a liar and a fake.
I tucked the pictures back in the box and headed to my room. The light was off, so the first thing I saw when I walked in was my lit-up cell phone. It was a text from Braden: Are you awake?
Yes. On my way out.
“Everything okay?” I asked him at the fence.
He didn’t answer for several beats. “Fine.”
“Braden. Don’t lie to me.”
He sighed. “It’s just the same old stuff. What’s the point in talking about it?”
“Your dad?”
“Yes.”
I bit my bottom lip, not sure how to help him with this. “Why don’t you talk to him?”
“About what?”
“I don’t know. About how he is with you and your mom.”
“It won’t help.”
“Have you tried?”
“No. But my mom tries all the time. You’ve heard the results.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Eh.” He shrugged with that sound. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it well. “It could be worse. What about you? Why are you up so late? More nightmares?”
“Yes.”
“Are they getting worse?”
Yes. “I don’t know.”
“You said before that sometimes you dream about the car accident. What happens in those dreams?”
I thought back. It was definitely the dream I had the most. “Different things every time. I basically just see my mom’s crash. Glass. Blood.” And I didn’t want to talk about this anymore. “My brothers found out something I didn’t want them to tonight and now I have to tell my dad something I don’t want to tell him.”
“Please be more vague. I think you’re speaking too clearly.”
“I’ve been modeling makeup.” I coughed out the word, and he had to ask me to repeat it twice.
“Modeling?”
“In the loosest sense of the word.”
“And why can’t you tell your dad?”
“I could’ve at first. But I didn’t. And now it’s like I’ve been lying to him. He’ll wonder why. He’ll think it’s a bigger deal than it is. He’ll think I’ve gone off the deep end.”
“Have you?”
I laughed.
“I want to see.”
“See what?”
“You at work.”
I thought about it. Showing the disembodied Braden might not be so bad . . . but . . . the real Braden . . . “No, I can’t, it’s too weird. It feels so outside of myself when I do that. And then when I see myself I feel like I’m looking at someone who isn’t even me. It’s like the anti-me. Almost as if I have two lives.”
“Sometimes I feel like that.”
“Yeah?”
“This life, our fence life. And then our day life.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Why do we do that? Why do we pretend during the day that this doesn’t happen?” Our backs must’ve been perfectly aligned against the fence tonight because I could feel his voice vibrating through the board between us.
I thought about his question, wondered why I couldn’t talk about this during the day with him. “Because this is like a dream. It doesn’t have to be real. It almost feels like we’re floating just outside of consciousness and we can say whatever we want, and in the morning, like with dreams, it just slowly melts away. It’s like you’re up in your bed sleeping and I’m in mine and our subconscious minds are talking.”
“And the daytime me . . . the conscious one . . . you don’t like that version?”
“What? No. Of course not. I love that version. That’s my Braden. I don’t want to lose that to this sniveling version of myself.”
“There’s nothing at all sniveling about you, Charles.”
“But your subconscious knows I’m weaker out here at night, because you started calling me that.”