Chris and I are sharing a bowl of leftover gnocchi in the living room when Margot comes home from dropping Kitty off at her swim team’s end-of-season barbecue. “Oh, hey,” she says. Then she spots Chris’s glass of Diet Coke on the coffee table, sans coaster. “Can you please use a coaster?”
As soon as Margot’s up the stairs, Chris says, “Gawd! Why is your sister such a beotch?”
I slide a coaster under her glass. “You think everyone’s a beotch today.”
“That’s because everyone is.” Chris rolls her eyes toward the ceiling. Loudly, she says, “She needs to pull that stick out of her ass.”
From her room Margot yells, “I heard that!”
“I meant for you to!” Chris yells back, scraping up the last piece of gnocchi for herself.
I sigh. “She’s leaving so soon.”
Snickering, Chris says, “So is Joshy, like, going to light a candle for her every night until she comes back home?”
I hesitate. While I’m not sure if it’s still supposed to be a secret, I am sure that Margot wouldn’t want Chris knowing any of her personal business. All I say is, “I’m not sure.”
“Wait a minute. Did she dump him?” Chris demands.
Reluctantly I nod. “Don’t say anything to her, though,” I warn. “She’s still really sad about it.”
“Margot? Sad?” Chris picks at her nails. “Margot doesn’t have normal human emotions like the rest of us.”
“You just don’t know her,” I say. “Besides, we can’t all be like you.”
She grins a toothy grin. She has sharp incisors, which make her look always a little bit hungry. “True.”
Chris is pure emotion. She screams at the drop of a hat. She says sometimes you have to scream out emotions; if you don’t, they’ll fester. The other day she screamed at a lady at the grocery store for accidentally stepping on her toes. I don’t think she’s in any danger of her emotions festering.
“I just can’t believe that in a few days she’ll be gone,” I say, feeling sniffly all of a sudden.
“She’s not dying, Lara Jean. There’s nothing to get all boo-hoo about.” Chris pulls at a loose string on her red shorts. They’re so short that when she’s sitting, you can see her underwear. Which are red to match her shorts. “In fact, I think this is good for you. It’s about time you did your own thing and stopped just listening to whatever Queen Margot says. This is your junior year, beotch. This is when it’s supposed to get good. French some guys, live a little, you know?”
“I live plenty,” I say.
“Yeah, at the nursing home.” Chris snickers and I glare at her.
Margot started volunteering at the Belleview Retirement Community when she got her driver’s license; it was her job to help host cocktail hour for the residents. I’d help sometimes. We’d set out peanuts and pour drinks and sometimes Margot would play the piano, but usually Stormy hogged that. Stormy is the Belleview diva. She rules the roost. I like listening to her stories. And Miss Mary, she might not be so good at conversation due to her dementia, but she taught me how to knit.
They have a new volunteer there now, but I know that at Belleview it really is the more the merrier, because most of the residents get so few visitors. I should go back soon; I miss going there. And I for sure don’t appreciate Chris making fun of it.
“Those people at Belleview have lived more life than everyone we know combined,” I tell her. “There’s this one lady, Stormy, she was a USO girl! She used to get a hundred letters a day from soldiers who were in love with her. And there was this one veteran who lost his leg—he sent her a diamond ring!”
Chris looks interested all of a sudden. “Did she keep it?”
“She did,” I admit. I think it was wrong of her to keep the ring since she had no intention of marrying him, but she showed it to me, and it was beautiful. It was a pink diamond, very rare. I bet it’s worth so much money now.
“I guess Stormy sounds kind of like a badass,” Chris says begrudgingly.
“Maybe you could come with me to Belleview sometime,” I suggest. “We could go to their cocktail hour. Mr. Perelli loves to dance with new girls. He’ll teach you how to fox-trot.”
Chris makes a horrible face like I suggested we go hang out at the town dump. “No, thanks. How about I take you dancing?” She nudges her chin toward upstairs. “Now that your sister’s leaving, we can have some real fun. You know I always have fun.”
It’s true, Chris does always have fun. Sometimes a little too much fun, but fun nonetheless.
5
THE NIGHT BEFORE MARGOT LEAVES, all three of us are in her room helping pack up the last little things. Kitty is organizing Margot’s bath stuff, packing it nice and neat in the clear shower caddy. Margot is trying to decide which coat to bring.
“Should I bring my peacoat and my puffy coat or just my peacoat?” she asks me.
“Just the peacoat,” I say. “You can dress that up or down.” I’m lying on her bed directing the packing process. “Kitty, make sure the lotion cap is on tight.”
“It’s brand-new—course it’s on tight!” Kitty growls, but she double-checks.
“It gets cold in Scotland sooner than it does here,” Margot said, folding the coat and setting it on top of her suitcase. “I think I’ll just bring both.”
“I don’t know why you asked if you already knew what you were going to do,” I say. “Also, I thought you said you were coming home for Christmas. You’re still coming home for Christmas, right?”
“Yes, if you’ll stop being a brat,” Margot says.
Honestly, Margot isn’t even packing that much. She doesn’t need a lot. If it was me, I’d have packed up my whole room, but not Margot. Her room looks the same, almost.
Margot sits down next to me, and Kitty climbs up and sits at the foot of the bed. “Everything’s changing,” I say, sighing.
Margot makes a face and puts her arm around me. “Nothing’s changing, not really. We’re the Song girls forever, remember?”
Our father stands in the doorway. He knocks, even though the door is open and we can clearly see it is him. “I’m going to start packing up the car now,” he announces. We watch from the bed as he lugs one of the suitcases downstairs, and then he comes up for the other one. Drily he says, “Oh no, don’t get up. Don’t trouble yourselves.”
“Don’t worry, we won’t,” we sing out.
For the past week our father has been in spring-cleaning mode, even though it isn’t spring. He’s getting rid of everything—the bread machine we never used, CDs, old blankets, our mother’s old typewriter. It’s all going to Goodwill. A psychiatrist or someone could probably connect it to Margot’s leaving for college, but I can’t explain the exact significance of it. Whatever it is, it’s annoying. I had to shoo him away from my glass-unicorn collection twice.
I lay down my head in Margot’s lap. “So you really are coming home for Christmas, right?”
“Right.”