“I’m not,” I lie.
“Things will get better. You’ll see.” Now she’s lying.
I sink down farther, completely submerging myself. It’s down here where I feel most safe, where the headaches retreat, where the roar of the water drowns out the thrum.
Chapter Two
I hear her tapping her foot, her impatient sighs, her orchestra of little noises demanding I start my day, but I refuse to open my eyes. I was up all night with a migraine, an anxious mother, and a father pacing back and forth until he wore a path in the carpet. If I open my eyes, I have to accept that it is Monday morning, the Monday morning all of Coney Island and I have been dreading for months.
“Lyric Walker, I know you’re awake. Get your butt out of that bed.”
“Go away.”
I slide farther under my sheet and curl in on myself all roly-poly-like, hoping she will see my resolve and go to school without me. If I can just get small enough, she will have to give up, right?
“We’ve got to get you ready,” she says as she rips off my cocoon. When I scramble for pillows, she snatches them away too. There’s nowhere to hide, and when she turns off my sound machine and pulls up my blackout blinds, I surrender. I’m going to school.
“I hate you, Bex Conrad,” I growl.
“Blame the Big Guy. He told me to wake you up,” she says as she turns her attention to my dresser drawers. She peers inside each one, digging for buried treasures she’s overlooked the hundred or so times she’s already gone through them. Bex covets my clothes—all of them—because, one, I have the best clothes, and two, her mom is a screwup who can’t hold a job and wouldn’t give two thoughts if Bex wore a paper sack to school. Today, however, she’s fierce, wearing a black miniskirt and a Hello Kitty T-shirt that’s easily two sizes too small for her. She’s got on the Mary Janes she swiped from under my bed last month that add a couple of inches to her already tall-ass frame. Her hair is clean and sleek, her makeup sick. Everything about her shouts, “Jealous, much?” Which means she is not here at this ungodly hour for my clothes.
“Tammy let him back in the house?”
She shrugs. Tammy is her mother in the loosest form of the word. “Him” is the devil incarnate—her stepfather, Russell.
“What does he have to do before she’s had enough?”
“I guess something worse than assault and battery,” she says flippantly.
I frown. Bex’s problems are hidden by walls made of jokes and smiles. Even after all this time, I am rarely allowed inside.
“Bex, I—”
She finds a black bangle I bought at a yard sale and slips it onto her wrist. Then she takes a peek in the mirror. “This is now mine.”
“Bex, seriously. Are you okay? Is he still drinking?”
“Where are all your sexy clothes? You have to look hot.”
“Bex, don’t change the subject.”
“We might be on TV.”
Bex continues rummaging through my things. She has said all she’s going to on the subject. She’ll share when she’s ready and not a moment sooner.
“Let’s skip school,” I say.
“They’re arresting everyone who tries.”
“My dad’s a cop.”
“You think the Big Guy won’t arrest you?” She laughs, then opens another drawer. “Where are the skirts, Lyric? Where are the tank tops? Are you Amish all of a sudden?”
“Who cares what we wear? No one is going to notice us. Not today.”
Bex stops and stares at me with a mix of horror and bewilderment. “They’ll notice us! There will be cameras everywhere, and I guarantee you we will both be on some website like Hot Girls of Fish City dot-com. Unless you try to pull the little-matchstick-girl look again, which I am here to prevent.”
I lumber to the window and cringe at what I see below. News trucks are parked up and down my street, each with a massive satellite dish mounted on its roof. Reporters spring from them like jack-in-the-boxes and charge across the road with camera operators in tow. They claim their inch of the sidewalk and prep for their “live at the scene” reports. There are a few news choppers buzzing around in the sky too. The whole world is looking into our fishbowl today.
Bex abandons my dresser and moves on to my closet, where an enormous overstuffed backpack blocks the door. It’s the kind you take for climbing mountains, and it’s packed tight. When she tries to shove it aside, it topples over, nearly taking her with it.
“Will you do something with this, already? It’s always in the way. What the hell is in it?”
“Just some stuff I’m going to donate to Goodwill,” I lie.
“Hey! I get first dibs on everything,” she says with mock offense. She goes to work on the zipper before I pull it away.
“It’s just socks and underwear.”
“You’re donating used socks and underwear to the poor?”
With all the bull I shovel every single day, I should be getting pretty good at it, but I’m a total amateur when I have to lie to Bex. I wish I could tell her the truth about everything, like what is in the backpack, at the very bottom, loaded and ready, just in case. It would be nice to tell someone—I would feel a lot less lonely—but the truths I keep from her, and everyone else, are just too burdensome to share. They’re the kind that stand on your neck and won’t let you up.
“That’s gross, Lyric,” she says, then shoos the backpack away like it . . . well, like it’s really full of used socks and undies. The closet doors fly open, followed by a symphony of squeals. Inside are thrift-store treasures: artfully ripped jeans, vintage band T-shirts, authentic 1950s housedresses, day-glo bangles, cocktail dresses, big clunky shoes (both awkward and terrible for walking), and dozens of peculiar hats stored in hatboxes. I’ve been collecting it all since I was ten, digging through bins at the Salvation Army and stalking eBay. I had big plans for these clothes, but now my closet is a museum dedicated to a life interrupted. I can’t wear any of it, not if I want to fade into the background of this town. Not that I want to, but it’s safer that way.