Read Online Like It Never Happened by Emily Adrian - Free Book Online Page B

pathetically, like a child in the toy aisle of Target. Dad slapped her cheek and she cried harder. On his second attempt, Mom seized his wrist. “I will divorce you if you do that again,” she said, so calm it was almost creepy.
    I was seven.
    Maybe my memory was not entirely accurate. For one thing, when I pictured the scene I saw hair cascading down Mary’s back, but my sister never had long hair. It was always cut into a bob and parted down the middle, curls sticking up in odd directions. More importantly, our father wasn’t the slapping kind. I had seen movies about abusive families. They had boats in their front yards, whereas our house bore a plaque from the National Register of Historic Places. We even hugged, sometimes.
    I had overheard enough relatives describe Mary as a “troubled girl.” But at seven years old, I couldn’t have drawn the same conclusions I drew now—about substance and sex and downward spirals. As a kid, the most I could gather was that Mary was extra-charged. Something besides blood coursed through her veins and kept her heart beating fast.
    After she ran away, she disappeared completely for a few years. I didn’t know anything about it; the details were whispered far from my ears. But when I was ten she showed up unannounced, looking a little less grungy and—according to Dad—looking for money.
    After that, Mary was around sometimes. Not often, and only about half the times she promised. But now we knew things about her life. At least enough so that when Mom ran into people at the supermarket, she could pretend to be on speaking terms with her firstborn. Mary lived in Northern California. She worked as a waitress and was some kind of artist. Naturally.
    As for her missing me, I didn’t exactly grant her the right. My sister didn’t know the first thing about me. We might have shared ninety-nine percent of our DNA, but who really cares, when that one percent clearly determines everything?
    We had survived Mary and she had survived us.

    â€œIt’s nothing,” I told Charlie. I didn’t want him to read Mary’s e-mail. Either he would make fun of me for having a crazy sister or he would be attracted to her craziness. Either way, I didn’t want him making the comparison.
    Charlie might have heard things about me—people might talk in locker rooms—but from firsthand experience, he knew me strictly as a drama nerd, a director’s pet.
    Well, I guess now he knew me in one other way.
    Lazily, as if by accident, his thumb slipped beneath the waistband of my shorts.

    Charlie and I said sterile good-byes in the parking lot. We still hadn’t discussed the issue of the broken pact.
    â€œYou’ll call me later?” I asked, filthy duffel bag slung over my shoulder. But Charlie was already jogging toward his parents’ car, eager to resume his role as the perfect son, I imagined.
    Sinking into my own father’s arms, I was briefly, overwhelmingly happy to be home.
    â€œDid they feed you?” Mom’s brow furrowed as she reached for me. “You look awfully thin.”
    I was exactly the same size as always, but her concern was endearing.
    Then I climbed into the backseat of the SUV, which still somehow smelled like a new car, even though it was approximately half my age. Dad started the engine, inched toward the road, remembered his turn signal, and batted my mother’s hand away from the air conditioner controls. My eyes glazed over. I had been gone for practically the entire summer, but everything was the same.
    We got stuck in traffic on Grand Street, right by the vacuum cleaner museum. I wasn’t exactly well traveled—I had basically never left the West Coast—but I thought I might someday like to live in a city where there was no vacuum cleaner museum. It seemed like a reasonable goal.
    My mother asked me a series of mundane questions about the girls in my cabin, and the types of