“Just…Can you not play that song, again? At least for a while? I can’t stand it.”
I look back over at him, and the way he’s looking at me makes me wish for a different face. I love my sister, but he loved her too, and I can’t help but wonder how much of her he sees when he looks at me. I think the same thing about Mom.
He nods, and stops talking, but he follows close behind until I turn onto my street. As soon as I park my bike and pull out my keys, he drives away.
When I open the front door, Mom’s not home (because she’s never home), and I should be used to it. She’s always worked a lot, but I miss her more at night now than I did before. Music will have to keep me company for now.
I unplug my portable speaker from the charger and sync it to my phone. I turn the volume all the way up. I just left a show headlined by Our Numbered Days, but I pull up my Unraveling Lovely playlist. My whole hand feels like its vibrating with bass as I carry the speaker from my dresser to my bed.
As I sing along to the soundtrack of last summer, I pick up my phone to check on the photo of Rohan I posted earlier instead of doing the homework I still haven’t finished. It has 437 likes and dozens of comments, and I hope it will be enough to win Ro’s forgiveness for missing the majority of his first show with his new band. Without really deciding to, I flick through my pictures, back to three months ago, when my sister was still here.
In the last photo I posted with Sasha, she and I are curled around each other on the roof of the hospital, wrapped in piles of blankets like newborns. It was October, two weeks before our sixteenth birthday, and when Rohan and I asked Sasha what she wanted, she said, “To see the stars.” Rohan helped me sneak her into the elevator in a wheelchair; then he carried her up the last flight of stairs and out onto the roof. He took this photo of us.
Mischief managers, the caption reads. It has more than a thousand likes, and as in the comments of any picture of Sasha, all anyone ever says is that they miss her. It makes me feel less alone even knowing most of our followers don’t really know her at all.
I’m feeling a little calmer after reading a few comments, and after the first UL song ends, but in that dreaded two-second gap between the first and second tracks, I hear the front door slam. A moment later, Mom’s voice is fighting its way up the stairs, competing with Logan’s as the next song starts.
“Shay, what have I told you about that noise? Turn it down before you and I both go deaf!”
I cut my music and examine my face in the mirror before I head downstairs. I look okay; not like I sobbed all the way home. I reapply some of my eye makeup, just to be safe. She’s stepping out of her heels when I get to the bottom of the stairs.
“Hey, Mom,” I say. “You’re back pretty late.”
“I know, sweetie. I’m sorry. Did you finish your homework? Have you eaten?” She starts walking toward the kitchen, and I wonder if I’ll ever fill out like her—get the hips she’s had for my whole life, or a butt that can actually make a pair of jeans or a skirt look good.
I dodge her first question. “I had something to eat at the show.”
I stand behind her as she fills our electric kettle with water to make herself a cup of tea. She pulls down two mugs, and then I think it hits her; the mistake she’s made. I’m not the twin who was an Anglophile—who drank tea and read British literature for fun and watched BBC documentaries with her every Friday night. I’m not Sasha, even though I look like her. Mom glances at me anyway, and I shake my head. I’m the twin who likes coffee, who likes music magazines, and who likes watching BMX videos. She puts one of the mugs back into the cabinet.
I pour myself a big glass of water and hop up to sit on the counter, like we’re going to chat, because she and Sasha used to talk for hours. (I have no idea what about.) We both end up looking at our phones instead of saying anything else to each other, though.
When she says “Don’t stay up too late” and heads for the stairs, I ease toward Sasha’s room.
I open the door and just stand there for a moment, trying to decide how much I can handle today. With the song Rohan played still fresh in my mind, and my palms already turning a little sweaty, I decide I’m too on edge to attempt to lie in my sister’s bed tonight and read the poetry and song lyrics she painted across her ceiling. I slide down by the door to sit on the floor because I don’t want to walk in any farther, but I don’t want to leave, either.
I turn on her TV and queue up our favorite show, Intervention. Rohan and I used to lie in bed with Sasha and watch hours of it on the weekends. I lean against the wall and watch as a girl only a little older than me tells the camera that she’s been hooked on heroin since she was sixteen.
Sasha’s favorite beanie, an all-black one with two cat ears stitched onto the top, is sitting in a basket by the door, the peak on a mountain of all the knit hats my sister collected once she’d lost her hair. I grab it, shove it over my own messy curls, and finish up the episode. Then I actually do my homework, trying to soak in the Sasha-ness of Sasha’s room until I feel as calm as I would have if she were here beside me.
When I open the bedroom door to leave, I hear Mom in the kitchen again. I stand there for a second, hoping to wait her out because I don’t want to have another awkward nonconversation.
“No, it’s not that,” I hear her say. She must be on the phone. “Sasha was so open, you know? She told me everything. But Shay doesn’t talk to me, so I don’t know how she’s feeling or how to help her.” She pauses, and I step into the hall, ready to assure her that I don’t need any help, that I’m completely fine. I’m seconds away from turning the corner to the kitchen when she speaks up again, and her voice sounds almost weepy. “I just want her to be okay.”
I stop. I take a few steps back toward Sasha’s room, unsure of what to do. I knew Mom was sad about Sasha, but I had no idea she was sad about me too. I don’t know what I could have done to make her worry.
When Mom goes back to her room, I head back to mine. But I can’t get her words out of my head, which makes it impossible for me to fall asleep. Only twenty minutes pass before I creep back downstairs, lace up my running shoes, and grab my jacket.
Outside, in the cold, my feet pound the pavement, and my breath is a puff of white in front of my face. Besides music, running is the only thing that consistently helps to keep me calm. I run to the end of my street, then around my block.
I keep running. Past my old elementary school, its playground creating a shadowy silhouette in the moonlight. Past my high school, where Rohan, Deedee, and Callie cheered me on in a track meet earlier today. Up the hill that leads to the park where me and Sasha used to swap secrets on the swings, and farther still, to the parking lot of the hospital where my sister died.