“Please,” Vivi said. I handed her a glass of milk and sat at the breakfast bar while Cate scrambled some eggs.
Vivi had an easier relationship with our mother than Grey did. Cate had always been overprotective—how could she be expected to be any other way, after what she’d been through?—which Grey had taken as a personal threat to her freedom. Vivi, on the other hand, was never bothered by our mother’s rules, because she never followed them. If Vivi was busted, which wasn’t often because she was so good at sneaking around, she would apologize with handwritten cards and breakfast in bed.
They were very different women who had lived very different lives and were interested in very different things, but somehow—despite each considering the other an anomaly—they usually managed to find some middle ground. They spoke on the phone at least once a month. They teased each other constantly: Cate sent Vivi links to tattoo removal clinics, Vivi sent Cate links to pictures of body modders with split tongues and their teeth filed to points, captioned Do you think this would suit me? When Vivi sent recordings of her new music, Cate responded with comments like I think you sent the wrong track? This is a recording of cats being murdered. They were silly with each other. Sweet with each other.
“Have you heard from Grey?” I asked Vivi.
Vivi shook her head. “Cate doesn’t seem to think we should worry.”
“Grey can look after herself,” Cate said. The way she said it without even looking up from what she was doing made me purse my lips.
My thoughts went to the night Grey left home. They had been at odds with each other for months, Cate and Grey, squabbling over curfews and boyfriends and parties and alcohol. Grey was pushing the boundaries, seeing what she could get away with. One night, she stumbled home rotten drunk and vomited on the kitchen floor.
Cate was furious and grounded her on the spot. Grey was a seventeen-year-old girl, filled with the rage and power of a thunderstorm curling beneath her skin. When she snapped, she put her hands around our mother’s throat, forced her against the wall, and whispered something in her ear. A needle. A pinprick. Something that was so small, so quiet, I didn’t hear it. Cate was still. Then whatever Grey had said splintered through her, electrifying her. She was a tree split by lightning. One moment a woman, the next something wild and ruptured. She slapped my sister so hard across the face that Grey’s lip split; there were still three brown specks on the wall where her blood had soaked into the plaster.
“Get the fuck out of my house,” Cate had ordered in a low, steady voice, “and don’t ever, ever come back.”
The sudden violence of it had made me hyperventilate. For years, as my father’s delusions had swollen inside his mind, I’d become more and more afraid that he would hurt us, put a pillow over our faces while we slept. It wasn’t unusual to wake in the middle of the night to his shadowy form hovering at the end of my bed, whispering softly. “Who are you? What are you?” Yet even as the spools of himself unraveled, he never laid a finger on us.
Then here was Cate Hollow, a small, gentle woman who had done something so brutal, so indefensible. I still wasn’t sure what terrible thing Grey had said to her to make her snap like that, to pull her so far out of herself.
Grey hadn’t cried. She’d set her jaw and packed her bags and done what our mother asked: left the house and never come back, except once, to clear out her room. They hadn’t spoken since that night, four years ago now.
“Should we call the police?” I asked. “Should I not go to school?” It was a tempting thought. I wondered what fresh punishment JJ had in store for me for embarrassing them last night.
“You are going to school,” Cate said as she pointed from me to Vivi. “One day of cutting class with your miscreant sister is tolerable, but no more.”
“I think you meant to say ‘genius rock-goddess sister,’ but okay,” Vivi said.
“I would like a doctor in the family,” Cate said, her fingers crossed on both hands. “Or at least one daughter to finish high school. So go and get ready.”
“What if we don’t hear from her?” I asked.
I looked to Vivi, who shrugged. I was immediately frustrated by the sense that if Grey were here and Vivi were missing, Grey would know exactly what to do. There would be forward motion. There would be a plan. Grey was like that: There was no problem so large that it couldn’t be solved. The universe seemed to bend to her will. Vivi and I, in comparison, were too used to being foot soldiers under our eldest sister’s rule. Without our unifying central command unit, we were lost.
“I was supposed to fly back to Budapest this afternoon, but I guess I can push my flight until tomorrow,” Vivi said. “I’ll call her agent and manager after nine. I’m sure they’ll know where she is.”
7
I called Grey on my walk to school and again between each of my classes, already knowing it would go to voicemail. I checked Find Friends—Vivi and Cate were both at home—but Grey’s location came back as unavailable. I was distracted in class, refreshing Instagram and Facebook to see if she’d posted anything new.
By lunchtime, I wondered if JJ might just let me get away with the sin of having Vivi for a sister. Justine had ignored me in English, and I hadn’t yet seen Jennifer—and then, when I sat down to eat, I found the picture. A piece of printer paper had been folded twice and slipped into my backpack. On it was a medieval image of three women burning at stakes, their hands clasped behind them in irons as flames licked at their toes. Their faces had been digitally altered to look like my sisters and me. There was no accompanying note, though the message was loud and clear.
You will burn.
I sighed. My first instinct was to throw it away or take it to a teacher. Instead, I folded it up and put it back in my bag. Grey would like it, would probably find it funny, would appreciate the artistry that had gone into making the burning women look like us. It was the kind of thing she would have framed and hung on her bedroom wall when she was my age.
I picked up my phone to call her, forgetting, for a moment, that she was unlikely to answer. Instead, I called Vivi for an update, but her phone rang and rang and rang. When her avatar disappeared from Find Friends a few minutes later, I was left with a panicky feeling in my stomach that whatever had happened to Grey had happened to Vivi too.
I cut class for the second day in a row and jogged home through the spitting rain. When I got there, Cate’s car was gone and the house was shut up, dark.
“Vivi?” I called when I unlocked the front door.
No answer.
“Vivi?!”
“Up here!” she answered. “In Grey’s room!”
I ran up the stairs, my heart thrashing. Vivi was in Grey’s old empty bedroom, sitting on the floor with Sasha in her lap and the Vogue magazine open in front of her.