I smile, trying to ignore the ache in my chest, trying to pretend there’s no truth in our jokes. Maybe it won’t be a hot naked model—although now I won’t be able to get that image out of my head; thanks, brain—but I’ve always known she deserves someone better than me. Someone who will do something with his life. Someone who won’t drag her down like a heavy chain, sinking us both.
I clear my throat, then tug at the hem of her Grey’s Anatomy T-shirt. “But I don’t think you get to be the judge of who is and is not broken, anyway, given your embarrassingly bad taste in pretty much everything.”
She smacks my arm playfully. “Shut up. I like what I like. Don’t media-shame me.”
“I don’t have to shame you; you should already be ashamed.”
“You are such a butt.”
“As long as I’m your favorite butt.”
“Nope. That honor goes to Chris Hemsworth.”
“Wow, I did not need to know that information.”
“Sorry—you sleep at my house, you have to talk about Avenger butts with me. Those are just the rules.”
“Fine. Which Avenger do you think has the worst farts?”
“Gross.”
“You are the one who demanded we talk about Avenger butts.”
“I take it back. You’re the worst.” She groans but doesn’t make any move to extract herself from my side.
Which is fine by me. I would happily stay like this forever.
At some point, we fall asleep, and later, Alyssa drifts back up to her room. Once she’s gone, though, I lie awake, missing her heat, her scent, the steady sound of her breathing.
We are just friends, I remind myself over and over again. Best friends. Bamboo-shoots-under-my-fingernails platonic freaking soulmates, even.
But that is all we are, and all we can ever be.
Chapter Ten
ROSE
“Girls, let’s go!” Diane’s voice rang through the house as Rose and Lisa crowded in front of their shared bathroom mirror, putting the finishing touches on their hair and makeup for the morning’s photo shoot.
Or rather, Lisa was putting on finishing touches. Rose kept starting over, each attempt to make herself presentable even more disappointing than the last.
“Just a minute!” Lisa called down the stairs, leaning close to the mirror to dab at her eye shadow with her finger. Rose watched her sister enviously, wishing she were even half as beautiful. No matter what she tried, or how closely she mimicked what Lisa was doing, she always wound up looking like a kid playing dress-up, while Lisa could’ve stepped straight out of a magazine.
Rose frowned, pulling her ponytail holder free yet again and shaking out her mane of dark hair. She didn’t have the stick-straight obsidian hair of her father’s side of the family; her mother’s Irish genes had thickened and lightened it just enough to turn it a rich, wavy brown. Sometimes, she appreciated that her hair was just a little bit different from all the other girls at school.
But not today.
“Nothing is working,” Rose whined, sweeping it all onto the top of her head and frowning at the bumps.
“You want me to try?” Lisa asked, fastening her earrings. “I’m pretty much ready.”
“Please,” Rose said gratefully, shifting to stand in front of her sister and handing over her hairbrush.
After her mother’s accident when Rose was five, her father hadn’t paid much attention to Rose’s hair—or anything else, for that matter—and it had grown long and wild, tumbling down her back in thick tangles. It was Lisa’s mother, Diane, who had put a stop to her wild-child phase, inviting her over one day after kindergarten and combing through the nest of knots while Rose and Lisa perched on kitchen chairs, sharing a bowl of potato chips and watching The Price Is Right on their grainy kitchen TV.
Lisa’s dad had come home from work to find them like that. He’d laughed—he was still vibrant and burly back then, barely resembling the gaunt ghost he’d become three years later, toward the end—and said they looked like a set of mismatched twins.
Lisa had frowned and told him that didn’t make any sense. Twins were supposed to match; if they didn’t, they weren’t twins.
He’d just shaken his head and chuckled, letting the subject drop.
Funny how things worked out.
“You remember that game we used to play when we were little?” Rose mused as Lisa tugged at her hair. “‘Teenagers’？”
Lisa laughed. “When we thought we’d be married with kids by fifteen?”
“We were eight. We had no concept of anything.”
“I remember you were always putting your toys in time-out. Just a creepy row of Barbies and Weebles all facing the wall because ‘the children were misbehaving.’”
“I was a weird kid.”
“Weird like a child of the corn.”
Rose laughed, shaking her head at the memory. “Didn’t you decide you were going to marry the mailman or something? I remember you kept saying how you loved a man in uniform.”
“No, even worse, it was the garbageman.” Lisa groaned. “I think I must have heard someone say it on TV once? I don’t know.”
“Hmm, should we tell Shawn he needs to borrow a pair of his dad’s coveralls?” Rose joked.
Lisa’s laugh felt like it came a second too late and a smidge too high, like she was forcing it. But when Rose looked at her in the mirror, Lisa grinned back at her, and Rose wondered whether she was simply losing her ability to read her sister’s mood. Was all the time they’d been spending apart lately turning them into strangers?
Lisa gave Rose’s head a friendly pat. “All done,” she proclaimed, stepping back to examine her handiwork. Rose turned her head from side to side, admiring the way Lisa had tamed her stubborn waves by weaving them into braids on the sides, then securing everything in the back with a bright-green clip that matched Rose’s dress.
“You’re the best,” Rose said in relief.
“I know,” Lisa said cheerfully.
In the car, their little sister, Emmie, squeezed between Lisa and Rose in the back seat, while Diane and Rose’s dad, Jim, sat up front. As Diane drove, Jim twisted around in his seat to smile at the three of them.
“So, girls,” he said brightly, “just so you know, Veronica will have already placed our order by the time we arrive. We know that’s a little unusual, but she thought it was important to consider the overall look of the table in the photo so that, you know—”
“It’s fine, Dad,” Rose said, saving him the trouble of having to explain, yet again, how closely their family was being scrutinized for this campaign. Everything they were wearing, down to Lisa’s reserved gold hoops and Emmie’s pink hair bow, had been approved by Diane’s campaign manager, Veronica, earlier in the week, and Rose was sure she’d paid a visit to Shawn’s house to sign off on his outfit, too. But it wasn’t just that; they’d been reminded a hundred times to be careful about who they spoke to, where they went after school, what they bought at the grocery store, since they never knew when a reporter might be lurking nearby.
Even Lisa’s friendship with Charlene had briefly been a point of contention, until Diane insisted that no member of her family was going to be forced to give up friends for this campaign. Eventually, Veronica had relented.