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.”
“What?”
“Charles. That’s the name you called me when we were little.”
“No, if you remember right, that’s the name I called you when we talked more. We used to talk more.”
I could usually picture Braden’s expressions in my mind when we talked like this, but right now I couldn’t. His voice sounded even, almost expressionless, so I couldn’t tell how he felt about what he’d just said.
“I know. What happened?”
“Gage.”
“What?”
“You grew up, and then Gage would look at me funny when I would search you out or when we’d join him after having been alone together. I felt like his looks were his way of saying ‘It’s time to distance yourself from my sister.’”
“Really?” This was news to me.
“I think he didn’t quite trust me. He thought I had ulterior motives.” Again, his expressionless voice was leaving me blind to how he felt about all this.
And did you? I wanted to ask. But that question wouldn’t come out. There was too much to lose with that question. “He trusts you. You’re like our brother.”
“But you’re their sister.”
“And yours.”
“You’re not my sister, Charlie. And they know that. They are very protective of you. More than you could possibly know.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” It sounded so cryptic.
“You said this is our alternate reality, right? Where we can say anything?”
I was wary. “Yes.”
“I need to tell you something. . . . I think it might help. . . .” He stopped. “But I need to come over there to do it.” Without waiting for my reply, he had hopped the fence and his disembodied voice stood above me, very much bodied. Now I understood why his voice had sounded emotionless—because his eyes had claimed all the emotion. They were so intense that my heart leaped in my chest.
I stood and backed up against the fence. “Wow, you should be a high jumper. Did you ever try that at school?” If I just pretended like this was normal maybe my heart would stop trying to escape. I didn’t want things to change. I didn’t want him to tell me whatever had him standing in front of me with fire in his eyes. He was my friend. My best friend, I realized. There was too much to lose.