“Fuck you,” Anna said. “Oh, wait, that’s what you want to do anyway, isn’t it?”
Leo says he doesn’t remember raising his hand to slap her across the face, but Lindsay told me he had this look, like he wanted to hurt her. Now every time Leo sees her, he says he feels like a monster. One of them has to go. So, it will be Anna. I’m okay she’s leaving. Last week she caught me trying on one of her bras and she ripped my summer reading assignment in half. But I’m sad for her, too. Because I know she’s scared and homesick, even before she’s left. And I know she wishes our mother had chosen her.
I sit on the edge of her bed and watch while she packs the last few things into her suitcase. I pick up a pair of click-clacks from her doorknob.
“Don’t touch my stuff.” She grabs them from me and throws them into the back of her closet. “And if you wear any of my clothes, I’ll kill you.”
“Can I have this?” I pull an old issue of Tiger Beat out of her wastebasket. Donny Osmond stares at me.
“Fine.” Anna sits down on top of her suitcase and tugs the zipper closed, then looks around the room, concerned, like she’s forgotten something. There’s a small bottle of Love’s Fresh Lemon on her bureau. She walks over to it. “Here,” she hands it to me. “Since I won’t be around for your birthday.”
She has taken her posters down, but there are still thumbtacks everywhere and dark smudgy rectangles that look like shadow frames. A small ripped corner of glossy paper is trapped behind a tack. It’s all that is left of Anna’s stuff: a puzzle piece of Sweet Baby James, the rest of him crumpled in the trash.
“Why can’t I have your room?” I ask. “Why does he get it?”
Anna bursts into tears. “I hate you,” she says.
The worst thing of all is that Anna is being replaced. Conrad’s mother has decided she can’t handle a thirteen-year-old boy. She will keep weird Rosemary and her creepy obsession with Gregorian chants and original sin, and we will get Conrad. Horrible, staring Conrad with his short, thick wrestler’s body. Anna says it’s because his mother caught him jerking off into the toilet. We are picking him up at the airport after we put Anna on the boarding school bus. Anna is scared of traveling alone, and Mum knows it, but Leo insisted Mum be there to welcome his son into the family, so she can’t drive Anna to New Hampshire. “I can’t be two places at once,” she told Anna.
“You should go live with Dad,” I say now.
Anna goes to her desk, opens the bottom drawer and pulls out a blue airmail envelope. “I wrote to him this summer. I told him about how bad everything was with me and Leo. I asked if I could come live with him in London.” She hands me the envelope.
Dad’s letter is short. He says he wishes Anna could come live with him but they can’t afford a larger apartment right now. Things are tight and Joanne needs privacy to write. If it were up to me, he says, of course you could live with us. He’s sure things will get better. Leo is a good man. It is signed: Love, Dad.
“He didn’t want me,” Anna says.
“He says if it was up to him,” I say.
“It is up to him, moron,” Anna says.
When it’s time to go, Anna locks herself in the bathroom. She turns the faucet on full blast, but I can hear her crying. Leo is out running last-minute errands, so there are no angry goodbyes. The ride downstairs in the elevator is silent. We watch the landing of each floor slip upward until the elevator man stops the brass handle with a lurch and pulls open the cage door.
“Bon voyage,” our wiry doorman Gio says as we file through the lobby, keeping our eyes on the black-and-white marble floor. “Come home soon, Anna. We’ll miss you.”
Anna manages a smile. “Apparently you’re the only one.” She gives my mother an icy glare.
“You girls need a taxi?”
“No, thank you, Gio,” my mother says. “We’ll manage. If my husband comes home, please tell him we’ve taken Anna to the bus. Eleanor, help your sister with that suitcase.”
We trudge down Lexington Avenue, past Lamston’s, past the drugstore, past the coffee shop that makes root beer floats, down the hill to the corner, where the boarding school bus is waiting.
“Maybe it’ll be like camp,” I say to Anna. “You always wanted to go to sleepaway camp.”
“Maybe,” Anna says. She grabs my arm and puts it through hers. “I wish you were coming with me,” she says. It is the nicest thing she has ever said to me.