I’d have said—I’d scripted my reply, rehearsed it in my head many times, the casualness of my delivery, the tone of my voice jaunty and absentminded by turns—“I didn’t? Really? Huh. I thought I did.” Technically I hadn’t been doing anything wrong. Nothing remotely romantic or flirtatious was going on in those dialogues. Mostly I’d listened as Jamie went on about how confused he was by the way my sister had ended the relationship, how wrecked that she’d left him, how much he loved her still. But if the interactions truly had been so innocent, I wouldn’t have kept them from her. And I remembered that during that period, when she and I were talking or hanging out, there’d sometimes be a pause and I’d feel a tickling sensation—of guilt or excitement, possibly both—at the back of my throat.
I tuned back in. Jamie had finally loosened up, was going on about tomorrow night’s Fourth party becoming an annual thing (his parents spent every July in a villa outside Florence, and, as of last summer, no longer insisted on taking him with them, good squash courts, coaches, and hitting partners being tough to reliably find in rural Italy), how many kegs he had on order, who was bringing what weed from which county in Northern California. While I waited for him to stop talking, I touched my lips experimentally with the tips of my fingers, the flesh there so dehydrated it felt like dried sponge. I began to think about how I hadn’t slept much in the past few days because I’d run out of pills, and how nice it would be to place a couple under my tongue, let them dissolve, drip slowly down my throat, then curl up in bed, burrow deep into those sheets I hadn’t changed in weeks and just drift off.
“So, anyway, you should stop by,” he said, caught up in his enthusiasm, and then, remembering who he was speaking to, got a look on his face like he wished he could snatch his words out of the air, shove them back in his mouth.
He visibly relaxed, though, when I said, “I definitely will,” which we both knew meant I definitely wouldn’t.
“Cool,” he said. “Cool, cool, cool.”
And then we fell into a silence, this time agitated on my end. Thinking about the pills had made me want the pills. I was almost desperate now to be alone with them. And because he showed no signs of moving on, was, in fact, zoned out, tapping the beat to some song playing in his head against his collarbones, I knew that I’d have to prompt him.
“So,” I said, “you should probably get going, right?” Then, realizing how that sounded, “I mean, I wouldn’t want to make you late or anything.”
Jamie, getting the message, nodded. We said our good-byes, went our separate ways: him to fresh air and sunshine, me to my musty bedroom and drawn shades. And that, I thought, was that.
Except it wasn’t.
I had no interest in going to the party. I had no intention of going to the party. And yet I went to the party. Why? When I say I don’t have a clue, I’m being literal, not flip. The drugs I loved so much, the ones I was now frankly and unambiguously abusing, didn’t just cut me off from other people, but from myself, as well. My mind and body were totally disconnected. Even physical sensations felt distant and not quite real. Sometimes I’d be smearing gloss on my lips, and the information coming from my fingertips would directly contradict the information coming from my brain, insisting that the warm, smooth skin and the hard ridges of teeth underneath belonged to a person other than me.
All of which is to say my motives were a mystery. I can’t fathom why I did something so inexplicable and ugly as showing up at a party where I wasn’t wanted. And that wasn’t even the most inexplicable and ugly thing I did that night. No, the most inexplicable and ugly thing I did that night was dressing head to toe in my dead sister’s clothes, the very ones she’d worn the year before.
It was as if I was sleepwalking. I entered Nica’s room, walked over to her closet, pulled out the items I was looking for one by one. I changed into them, then tucked my blond hair under a dark wig I had from an old costume. (The Halloween before last, Nica, Maddie, and I had gone as the original Charlie’s Angels, Nica as Farrah Fawcett, Maddie as Kate Jackson, me as Jaclyn Smith.) Stepping into the bathroom that Nica and I had shared, I opened the medicine cabinet door, removed the bottle of perfume Mom had mixed for her at a fragrance shop in Martha’s Vineyard. After dabbing a bit of the liquid—a blend of blood orange oil and vanilla bouquet oil, an unexpected scent, both sharp and sweet, rough and tender—on my neck, behind my ears, I shut the medicine cabinet door.
Looking back at me in the toothpaste-flecked mirror was a reflection so like Nica’s it shocked my heart, stopped it cold for a second or two. The resemblance between us had always been strong, closer to that of twins than sisters. Only our coloring was different. But no, not only our coloring, something deeper, something under the skin, something in our spirits or our souls was different, as well; so that, finally, even though we looked exactly alike, we looked nothing alike. She was beautiful and I wasn’t. Or maybe I was but nobody, me included, could see it.
The differences, though, whatever they were, were disappearing right before my eyes. I tried to focus on my image, hold it steady, but it kept slipping, Nica’s falling into its place. And then behind Nica’s image came something else, a memory. I shut my eyes to ward it off, only shutting my eyes didn’t work. It simply played out on the inside of my skull:
There we were, the two of us, Nica and I, getting ready for this party one year ago. My jeans were in the dryer so I was in a T-shirt and shorts, lying in the bathtub, a cushion from the downstairs couch behind my back, keeping Nica company. She was moisturizing her legs, chain-smoking, and talking to me all at the same time. When she finished massaging lotion into her calves, she looked for a towel, couldn’t find one, pushed up my shirt, wiped the excess on my stomach. Then she tossed her cigarette out the window, flipped her hair upside down. Through the dipping V-neck of her thin cotton sweater I could see her bouncing breasts in a black lace bra, and I wondered where she got it, when exactly she’d switched from the plain beige ones with the tiny pink flowers in the middle to the kind I thought only adult women wore.
It was a fledgling memory, not fully formed—a fragment. Still, it made me want to bash my head against the medicine cabinet until it fell out. Instead, I washed down a couple generic Xanaxs with tap water, then a couple more. After removing the chalky white pill residue from the corners of my lips, I grabbed my bag. I made certain not to look in the mirror again before walking out the door.
Over the years, I’d been to the houses of a number of classmates and some, though not many, were bigger than Jamie’s. But his was, to me, the most beautiful by far, the way its physical splendor was touched, just slightly, by decay—the gables and turrets faded and weather-eaten, the brick of the chimney worn to a dull brown, the wood of the boxed gutters starting to splinter—giving it a kind of grandeur, a majesty. It was set back from the rest of the street, nestled into the side of a hill.
The driveway was long and serpentine and sharply graded, and I knew if I parked in it, a fast exit would be impossible, so I left my car at the end of the block. I found the gravel path at the edge of the property. I began to follow it. The gravel was slippery, and each time I looked down to see where I was stepping, I’d get a small shock, the sight of my legs and feet in the high-heeled shoes I’d never worn before striking me as altogether alien, as if I were sharing my body with another person.
At last I came to the end of the gravel path. Instead of heading to the front door as everybody else was, though, I continued on a different path, this one running along the side of the house, and still ascending if not as steeply. I passed the garage where the Amorys’ cars slept, the toolshed, the box hedge, the garden with the jonquils and the daylilies, the sundial at the center, pausing at a door. I pressed down on the latch, expecting resistance but finding none.
As soon as I was inside, I moved away from the party sounds, the voices and the music and the laughter, slipping through the line of chairs meant to serve as an informal barrier to the back of the house, down the hall, beyond the dining room with the Queen Anne drop-leaf table, the billiards room with the odd-shaped alcoves, the library with the shelves that went all the way up to the ceiling, the conservatory, a room I used to think only existed in the game Clue. Finally I reached the maid’s stairs. At the top was Mr. Amory’s study: lots of dark