The Words We Keep
: Chapter 6

Pack the lunches.

Write a poem.

Extra credit for bio.

Laundry.

My mind ticks through my to-do list as I spread mayo on bread for tomorrow’s lunches for Dad, Margot, and me.

Staci (yes, that’s right, with an i and only an i; don’t get me started) loiters around the kitchen nervously while I work.

“I can help, you know,” she says.

If I didn’t have a down-to-the-second system already in place, I’d probably let her pitch in. Alice and I had a fine-tuned method for running this place before Staci and Dad got married last year, and I’m still doing just fine as a one-man band. Nothing screws up the rhythm more than someone else getting in on the act, especially Dad’s brand-spanking-new wife.

“Thanks. I got it.”

“I’m just standing here.”

She reaches out to put the apple slices into the baggies. I slide them over to me.

“Seriously, Staci, I don’t need help.” I slap the top of each sandwich into place. We’ve managed just fine without a mom for ten years, and we’re not in the market for a replacement. She leans against the countertop with a heavy sigh.

“Everyone needs help sometimes, Lily.”

She watches me put apples and lemon juice into baggies. The tense silence makes my heart speed up, which is the last thing I need after my epic freak-out today. Fortunately, Dad strides into the room, armed with an over-the-top smile and Scrabble.

“Hashtag family game night?”

He jiggles the box, sending the tiles clinking against each other.

“Do we need to have the hashtag talk again?” I say.

“What?” He holds up his hands innocently. “I totally used that right.”

“If you’re older than fifty, you did not use it right.”

He chuckles and slings his arm around my shoulder, pulling me tight against him. Even though I’m gaining on his six-foot height, my head still fits perfectly in the space between his chest and shoulder. Always has. When I was little, pretending to be asleep so he’d carry me to bed, I believed this pocket of space was mine—a little piece of Dad carved out just for me.

“Well, hashtag my bad,” he says.

Groan. “Dad. Seriously. It physically pains me.”

His chest shakes as he laughs. “All right, all right, I get it. Your old man is not cool. But I might just be smart enough to kick your butt.” He shakes the box again, trying to ply me with my favorite game. Dad’s a self-proclaimed logophile (aka “lover of words”) just like me. “How about it?”

On the floor, my backpack bulges at the zipper. My stomach squeezes—it’s gonna be another late night. Geometry chapter test, Spanish oral on camping trips (because learning how to say Let’s pitch the tent in español is going to come in handy one day), and now this poetry project with a partner who doesn’t give one flip. After today’s episode, all I want to do is sleep, but if I’m going to outrun whatever is wrong with my brain, I can’t stop.

I keep my freak-out and the list in the back of my planner to myself. Dad has enough to worry about.

“C’mon. Thirty minutes? We got pizzaaaaa.” He draws out the word like he’s a used-car salesman selling me a lemon, which is actually the perfect metaphor for Larkin family time lately.

Maybe it’s because this family feels hauntingly incomplete without Alice. Or maybe it’s because Dad and I have spent most of our “together time” these last two months desperately tiptoeing around The Things We Don’t Say. We talk about school. About the weather. About oddly specific German words. But never about the night she left. Our family is already stretched thin at the edges, trying to pretend everything’s okay. If we pick at that particular thread, we might unravel.

Sometimes I think the silence is the only thing holding this family together.

But Dad’s shaking the Scrabble box so eagerly, I can’t let him down. I look at my backpack again, mentally cramming thirty minutes into tonight’s homework schedule.

“Carbs and wordplay? How could I say no?” I say, zipping up the lunch bags and ignoring the knot in my stomach.

“Pizza’s here!” Staci shouts up the stairs to Margot.

I’m more than a little shocked that she’s letting us eat what she calls “gluten-stuffed cholesterol pies.” Ever since the Night of the Bathroom Floor, Staci-with-only-an-i and Dad have been on an all-natural kick. Something about chemicals and well-being and how we could all do with a little less toxicity. All I know is, our pantry went from Lucky Charms to various iterations of granola mixed with hemp hearts and flaxseed.

Staci carries in the pizza and starts dishing it up on the island for me. “Pepperoni or Hawaiian?”

“Hawaiian.”

Dad groans from the pantry. He’s a staunch supporter of the Coalition Against Fruit on Pizza.

“I really do have a lot of homework,” I reply.

“No, no, by all means,” he says. “Have your fruit in marinara sauce. Who am I to stand in the way of bad taste?”

Staci slides a triangular piece of paper-thin dark brown crust and a drizzle of what maybe, sorta resembles cheese onto my plate.

“What is that?” I say.

“Pizza.”

“I respectfully disagree.”

She holds up the label from the box. “It’s all-natural! Non-GMO, gluten free, dairy free—”

“Joy free.”

Dad laughs, but puts his arm around Staci’s shoulders, tugging her head against him—into my spot.

I look away, trying to ignore the ache in my chest. It’s not the usual palpitation-induced tightening, more like a dull ache right behind my ribs. An ephemeral thud of sadness.

Margot trounces down the stairs in a full-on, honest-to-goodness black robe, complete with a maroon-and-gold emblem on the chest, the latest in her Harry Potter obsession. She found Mom’s old books in the basement after Alice left for Fairview, and almost immediately began sorting everyone into their Hogwarts house against their will.

“Any letters from Hogwarts today?” I say. I know I shouldn’t tease her, but come on—she’s a ten-year-old WEARING A CAPE.

She sticks her tongue out at me. “For the one-hundredth time, I do not think I am an actual wizard.”

“Your attire begs to differ.” I take a bite of undigestible pizza. “Just saying you’re really blurring the lines between reality and fantasy here.”

Dad bops Margot on the head with the Scrabble box. “Enough Potterverse. Let’s play.”

Staci arranges Dad’s tiles on the coffee table. (They’re always on the same team.) Margot and I share Dad’s über-competitive DNA, so after a few rounds, I’m lost in the game and in my family, and today’s drama fades away. My stomach feels almost normal as I sit here, focusing on seven little tiles as if they’re the most pressing thing in my life. Like Alice is actually just off at college, and I didn’t have an epic bathroom meltdown today, and that Micah kid didn’t almost out my secrets, earning me a tell-all post on the Underground with the other hot gossip.

I even silence my phone when the alarm for my thirty minutes of free time goes off.

I’m ahead by ten points, waiting on Dad to play the winner-take-all word I know he’s building, when he clears his throat and inches forward on his couch cushion so that his knees touch the Scrabble board perched on the coffee table.

“Girls. I want to talk to you about something.” His voice is serious. Very un-Dad-like. My stomach instantly retightens. “Alice is coming home.”

I pause with my newly picked tile in midair. “What? Like, here?”

“Well, this is her home,” he says calmly, like his words don’t explode around me, sucking the oxygen from the room.

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“I thought she had more time,” I say. The grip on my stomach has already started its march north toward my throat. She left in January. It’s only March. “Wasn’t it supposed to be three months?”

“Well,” Dad breathes out slowly. “The counselors think she’s ready.”

Did anyone bother to ask if we’re ready?

Dad continues. “And she seemed really good on our last visit, didn’t she, Margs?”

Margot nods.

Staci pipes up, her face beaming with an overzealous smile. “What wonderful news. This place hasn’t been the same without her.”

“Is she going back to school?” I ask.

“Not yet.” Dad flips a Y tile between his thumb and pointer finger. “She’ll stay here for a while.”

Well, that pokes a ginormous hole in our Alice-is-away-at-college ruse. And how can we not talk about it when she’s right here?

“So, what do we tell people?” I ask. I think of how Damon talked about Micah today. If people know about Fairview, Alice won’t be able to just waltz back into her old life.

Dad studies the Scrabble board like the answer is hiding in the triple-word score.

He sighs. “Let’s just tell people that she’s taking some time off for a work-study project. That’s something college kids do, right?”

“So we should lie about it?” Margot asks.

“It’s not a lie, honey. It’s more like—”

“An omission,” I offer.

Dad nods. He tousles Margot’s crimped hair.

“Exactly,” he says. “We do that sometimes to protect the people we love. But trust me, this is going to be a good thing, girls. Alice will be home, and things can go back to normal.”

Ah, the lies that bind.

Margot smiles. Dad’s words don’t explode for her. She wasn’t there when I found Alice. Crumpled on the bathroom floor. She didn’t see Dad lift her or hear the tightness in his voice when he called 911. She’s too young and too lost in her fantasy world to see what’s happening here.

Our big sister left because something was wrong with her.

Something Dad couldn’t fix.

And now she’s coming home.

Dad lays out a word that immediately bumps him ahead of me on the scorecard, but I’m not really here anymore. I’m watching family time from outside my body. Through the glass, I see them, laughing and placing tiles. I see me, playing my part, smiling when I’m supposed to smile.

But inside my head, the worries have slithered in, uninvited.

This is how it always starts.

With a thought.

A whispered what-if.

What if Alice is different now?

What if everything’s different?

As my mind spins, my heart races. I’m suddenly hyperaware of the air moving in and out of my lungs.

What if you forget to keep breathing?

Dread branches out through my body. My right hand starts to tingle. I shake it out, but the pins and needles won’t go. Margot shoves me with her elbow.

“Earth to Lily,” she says. “Your turn.”

I blink back to life. The glass shatters. Dad is staring at me, and so is Staci. Well, she’s staring at my left hand, which is scratching off the scab on my neck.

“Actually, I—I really do have a ton to do tonight.” I empty my tiles back into the box lid.

Dad studies me now, his face still serious.

“You okay, kiddo?”

I hoist my heavy backpack up, the weight of it almost crushing me, and I slap on my everything’s-just-great face. The last thing this family needs is one more member losing their grip on reality.

“I’m fine.”

Not a lie.

Exactly.

Just an omission.

Because that’s what you do for the people you love.

—

Alone on my bed, I try to calm my body.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Just breathe.

I do not need a doubleheader meltdown today.

Across the room, Alice’s empty bed stares back at me. On the night she left, I meticulously tucked in the corners of her navy-blue comforter. Sixteen times. If I can just fix this bed, I thought, maybe Dad will stop looking so scared.

Alice’s desk is just how she left it, though—a mess of papers and projects. Crochet needles from when she made what turned out to be a hideously deformed scarf. Recipes from her Top Chef phase. Hot-pink Post-it notes, where Alice would scribble her ideas. She was always trying something new, always living life 110 percent.

Pictures on her desk show off Alice’s big smile (best in the senior class) and even bigger hair. She’s standing between Margot and me at her high school graduation, her cap barely holding down her long, brown, curly hair that always occupied as much space in any room as she did—big and boisterous and everywhere.

Everything from her hair to her smile to the bright red shoes below her grad gown screams Alice, at least the Alice I knew before she left for college. When she showed up on the front porch a few weeks into the semester, stripped of her Alice-ness, Staci gave her pills from the organic health-food store, insisting that her iron and B vitamins were low. Dad said she was going through a phase. That she needed rest.

I saw the thin cuts on her arms that she tried to hide, but I kept it to myself. Figured it was another one of Alice’s fleeting ideas, like when she went Goth for a month. I expected it to pass.

I didn’t expect the Night of the Bathroom Floor.

Or the word Dad uses in hushed tones on the phone with the Fairview counselors: bipolar.

What if Fairview changed her?

Stole the pieces that made her, her?

I try to put Alice and her expedited homecoming out of my head while I bust through my homework in a few hours. (Thank you, energy drink nightcap.) The black, chalky fingerprint in the corner of my planner, courtesy of my new problematic project partner, keeps pulling my attention. Will everyone treat Alice like they do Micah—rumors and I heards swirling?

Before I turn out the light, I stand up and walk the distance between Alice’s bed and mine, one foot carefully placed in front of the other.

Seven steps.

When I was little, after Mom died, that was all it took. Seven steps and one flying leap, and I was safe, tucked in next to Alice’s side, where the monsters under the bed couldn’t get me.

The best thing to do, she’d say, is make friends with the monsters.

And somehow they stopped being scary. Alice was like that. Brave and smart, with all the answers.

I run my fingertips across her perfectly made bed and wonder which version will be coming home tomorrow: the girl who tackled life head-on, or the broken girl from the bathroom floor.

Back in my own bed, sleep flits just out of my grasp like always. Memories—freeze-framed moments—fill my head, circling like snakes, biding their time, lunging every so often to take a nip: Me, frozen, staring at the blood. Dad carrying her down the stairs. Me, running from the classroom today. Sitting on the bathroom floor with my list. Micah ignoring the cuckoo calls.

I cover my head with my blanket. Just stop.

But my brain doesn’t listen.

Never does.

Across the room, a beam of moonlight illuminates Alice’s perfectly made bed through the dark.

Seven steps.

But where do you go if your sister is gone? And the monsters have moved from under the bed to inside your head?

1:27 a.m.

You never visited her.

1:40 a.m.

She probably hates you.

2:00 a.m.

To: [email protected]

Subject: SORRY…

Alice,

Dad says Fairview has a no-cell-phones rule. That blows. So I hope you’re checking email. Just wanted to say I’m sorry I never made it over there. I’ve been super busy. I hope you’re feeling better.

Lily

2:03 a.m.

2:15 a.m.

To: [email protected]

Subject: WELCOME HOME!

Dear Alice,

Can’t wait to see you tomorrow! So excited!!

Love,

Lil

2:20 a.m.

3:00 a.m.

She’s definitely gonna hate you.