“Where are you?” Tai says, and she sounds out of breath but still sparkly, always like a song you want to play on repeat. “Something huge happened.”
“Meeting some friends at a bar,” I reply.
“Oh, fuck off.” She laughs shakily. She’s walking somewhere—I hear the clacking of her heels. Tai is always in heels, dagger-sharp. “You’re watching a movie at the IFC alone—don’t lie.”
My jaw would set if I let it, but we’ve played too many rounds of this game for that. “Aren’t you supposed to be in Paris, influencing?”
Tai is the one with beautiful gemstones of stories that she’s sharpened to points, to use on people like weapons, to convince them of her specialness in jabs and prickling scores. I’ve seen them all on her social media accounts: how Scorsese pulled her knotty hair into pigtails on the forest patio; how Tilda Swinton wrapped her in a towel and told her, between bloody plates of barbecued beets, that she detested the Harry Potter films (the ones Tai wasn’t allowed to watch, at age six) because they romanticized the cruel, lonely setting of boarding school.
But Tai doesn’t need our parents’ shine or those old stories to convince people she’s special anymore. Everyone just sees her precious gleam for what it is: something you brush up against once in a lifetime, something you want to bottle up and keep close.
“I leave tomorrow,” she says. “I told Marion I left tonight so she would get off my case. Listen, where are you?”
When the Kells asked me to come, they also asked if Tai was free. I said she was gone.
“Come on. Tell me. It’s important,” Tai adds, as if I’m the younger sibling, stubborn and silly.
“Corner of Hudson and Tenth.” I lower my voice, with a sidelong glance at the bouncer, rubbing his hands together. “I’m, uh, I’m in line at the door.”
“See you soon,” she says, hanging up before I can wonder why she didn’t snipe back, In line? Something really huge must have happened.
I settle on a stoop down the block, the December chill nipping at me, burrowing under my clothes. Trembling a little—from nerves or embarrassment or what, I don’t know. The bouncer has forgotten about me. He welcomes in a leggy couple—in softly rumpled leather and denim—like royalty. And less than three minutes later, Tai clacks toward me, creepy-shadow tall, in a floor-skimming midnight sleeveless coat, her arms covered in whisper-thin cashmere, her hair a signature curtain of jet black.
Her blue eyes sparkle like crushed ice when she smiles.
I stand and brush the stoop dirt off my jeans, but she strides past me, swooping into the arms of the bouncer, who beams at her and laughs disarmingly.
“My baby girl!” he says, hugging her hard. “Happy birthday month, my love. I didn’t know you were coming tonight.”
“Dom,” she says, turning around to face me, “how did I never tell you I have a sister?”
“She’s with you?” he asks, half frowning. The she sounds like an it.
“That she is,” she says, patting me on the cheek with faux tenderness. “She even blew off a movie at the IFC for me.”
* * *
The bar’s interior is warm and perfumed, and so is Tai. We don’t spend much time together anymore—even though she’s a year younger, she runs with a crowd a decade older—but being with Tai is like magic. Everyone stares at her when she arrives, then softens into the space around them, like watching her hasn’t made them jealous, competitive, or wary. Watching her has taken them out of themselves for a minute, transported them into her world, where she pads around, full of verve and viv and utterly carefree.
It’s a lie, but it’s more beautiful than many truths.
“Sit,” she says, pulling me down next to her into a very private nook, before I can even look for Kell and crew. A waiter in a white tuxedo jacket appears, blocking our view into the rest of the bar, with two coupes of pink champagne on a silver tray.
One glass has TFH etched on it. I kid you not. That’s the one she plucks from him, with the most gracious, appreciative smile.
“Thaïs Foix Hammick,” I say aloud, just as the model-beautiful waiter clears his throat so that I’ll take the other glass. I grab it, but before I can crane my neck for Kell, much less clink glasses with Tai, she’s setting hers down and pulling her phone out of her pocket.
TFH, reads the monogram on its custom leather case. It has our mother’s Viloki crest painted on it, too. A white fox curled beneath the blood moon.
“Look at this,” she says, music swelling just as I notice her midnight-manicured hand shaking, phone extended toward me.
Dearest Tai, an e-mail reads, from a French name I don’t recognize. The editor in chief and I would like to be the first to invite you and your sister to be the guests of honor at a black-tie retrospective of your mother’s work, sponsored by Dior and held at the Foix Institute in Limatra, on May 24, 2019—
Bile burbles up the back of my throat. “That’s the day she disappeared.”
“Ten years ago to the day,” Tai whispers back, eyes navy-rimmed saucers.
“That’s … inappropriate.” What I mean is grotesque, obscene, cruel. But I don’t think Tai would take kindly to my bashing Dior, her future “employer” when she drops out of high school after this year. She’s their “fresh Viloki face,” and she won’t let anyone forget it. Even though all it means is that they miss cashing in on Mama.
“It’s an honor!” She plucks the phone from my hand and points at the message. “Guests of honor!”
“Has deciding to drop out of high school killed off your last two brain cells?” I ask, before I can stop myself.
“We have to go,” she whispers back, ignoring me. “We have to. It’s our heritage, and our country, and we belong there.”
I’ve never heard a worse canned speech, but I still can’t tear my eyes away from hers.
“I called Teddy—”
I pull back. She already called our beloved uncle Teddy, our father and Marion’s little brother, tech billionaire and world traveler. Mama was close with him, too, ever since she saved his life in Palm Springs when he was young. He was chatting obliviously on his satellite phone, developing the product that led to his first million, and Mama crept up behind him, hooking the rattlesnake at his feet around a bent branch and flinging it into the desert. That first product, Pocket Girlfriend, is used by a massive number of men and women on Viloxin and abroad—it’s essentially a sophisticated Tamagotchi. A girlfriend you can keep in your pocket, I guess. He dedicated it to Mama.
But now his company has more products and takes up twenty-five hours a day, as he likes to say. He has far less time for two orphaned misfits. “He said he’d get Stökéwood and the Limatra apartment set up for us.”
I try not to feel the sting of being left out of this phone call, and consider her glassy, pleading eyes again. “Why do I feel like you need something from me?”
She licks her lips like a cat, and I realize: She needs me to clear the trip with Aunt Marion. My closest confidant. Tai calls us “two peas in a puke-green knitted pod.” Aunt Marion saw how destructive the media attention in Viloxin was after Mama disappeared. She’s let us spend only a handful of weeks in our birth country in the past decade.