“Nothing.” I kept my head right where it was.
Lia leaned over me, dumped her shit on my desk, and pulled my laptop out from underneath my forearm so she could see it. Honestly, nothing was sacred when you lived with your twin.
Except my crush on her best friend.
“Oh,” she said meaningfully.
“What?”
“Did your neck break? Are you incapable of moving?”
“I’m comfortable.”
She chomped on something loudly. Carrots. Or celery. When she swallowed, she spoke again. “Cyberstalking Brooke again?”
Instead of answering, because I didn’t particularly want to lie, I grunted.
“Didn’t we decide she was in India?”
With a sigh, I stared at the wood grain on my desk and tried not to think too hard about how easily we could discuss the fact that the woman who gave birth to us was Lord knows where in the world, and we didn’t even really care anymore that we didn’t know where.
The sound of a clicking mouse preceded a thoughtful hum from my twin sister. “Nope, someone tagged her in … huh, a concert in Germany. She’s on the move, I guess.”
“Oh, good.”
Lia sighed loudly. “Have fun with that.” With two patronizing pats on the back, she left me alone again.
When I heard cupboards slamming in our postage-stamp-size kitchen, I lifted my head.
“Chicken shit,” I whispered to myself. Like she’d somehow be able to see my “picture of Finn in scrubs” feelings stamped on my face.
This was what happened when my feelings couldn’t be muted by my brain. They were louder than I wanted, and I hid them less successfully.
Turning my laptop back to me, I drummed my fingers along the edge, trying to decide what to work on next.
The paper for my Early Childhood Intervention Strategies class was in desperate need of revisions, but even one of my last classes before I graduated with my Bachelor’s in Developmental Psychology wasn’t enough of a distraction.
But I knew what was, which was why it’d been my default in the first place.
Searching the internet for glimpses of your mother brought about strange emotional reactions. Unless you’d experienced those reactions, it was hard to put them into words. Occasionally, we’d get a postcard from her with an updated address, or a caption-less picture would show up on the usually quiet Facebook account she still had access to. Those tiny snippets were the only way my sisters and I knew where Brooke was currently spending her days.
Not that we ever sent postcards back.
Or reached out to her.
She’d lost that privilege years ago.
Even though I knew it wouldn’t actually make me feel better or even distract me much from Finn, I found myself scrolling down her page.
My heart and my head warred mightily when I studied the last few pictures she’d posted. I wasn’t furious at the thought of her; it was hard to be when we had such a happy life in her absence. But I didn’t feel nothing either.
Sometimes, I wanted to punch her.
Sometimes, I wanted to hug her. Most of all, I wanted to sit across from Brooke Ashley Huntington-Ward and pick apart her brain. That was the most desperate feeling of them all, fighting for first place in my head. I wanted to understand why, and it drove me abso-friggin-lutely batshit crazy that I might never have that understanding.
As I scrolled through, counting five pictures posted in the past three years, my twin sister’s phone lit up on the desk next to me where it was charging. My eyes cut to the screen, a force of habit because it was often a group text from one of our other sisters or Paige.
It wasn’t from any of them, though. What appeared was a text from Finn, and like I’d trained my body to do it, my heart sped up at the sight of his stupid name.
Finn: Lia, PLEASE, I’ll owe you a million favors if you help me out.
“I’ll help you,” I mumbled miserably. It didn’t even matter what he needed help with. I’d do it.
But I didn’t close my eyes because picturing my twin sister’s best friend was another thing that made my head and heart war mightily. And every single time, my head won.
Leave him alone.
It would be too weird.
He doesn’t even look at you that way.
Those were all the things I told myself when my crush on Finn flared out of control. And it had helped for years. It had helped all day.
“Text from Finn,” I yelled.
“What does he want?” Lia called from the kitchen.
I swallowed heavily as I read the text again. “Help. He’ll owe you a million favors.”
Lia groaned. “He could offer two million, and I still wouldn’t be able to do it.”
“What does he need your help with?”
“Some fancy-pants dinner and award ceremony on Friday night. He needs a plus one, and since he refuses to find himself a date, his mom practically demanded that I go with. I think she actually put my name on the guest list because she assumed I wouldn’t say no.”
My heart clenched with unwelcome jealousy. “It’s just dinner. Why not go?”
“I can’t. There’s this amazing guest lecture that same evening, and I am not missing it. I’ve wanted to hear her speak for years.” She waved her hand. “He thinks I’m just being stubborn, but this is about my education.”
“Of course, it is,” I muttered.
Lia was physically incapable of admitting when she was being stubborn, which was about ninety-two percent of her existence.
The sound of her footsteps approached my doorway, quick and loud. Determined. Those were determined Lia steps, and it made me nervous. “Wait,” she said.
I spun my chair to face her. “What?”
Don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it, a frantic voice chanted in my head. Because I knew.
A devious smile spread over her face.
“No,” I said instantly.?Twin telepathy, y’all. It was a real thing.
“Oh, yes.” She rubbed her hands together. “We haven’t done a twin swap in years, Claire. Come on, won’t it be fun?”
While my head tried desperately to wrap around the idea of pretending to be my sister for the first time since high school, it was a faint whisper compared to what my heart was doing.
That particular organ buried in my chest was roaring and thrashing, screaming at me to do this one thing
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.