I will hand it to Bryce; brushing your teeth while watching lights twinkle across the East River is pretty ideal. Renata starts spraying down her hair, needing it damp for the dye, and I look out at the skyline as twilight settles in. This time of year, the waterfront is slushy, painted multicolored by pockets of pale gray ice and deep-blue water and fresh white snow. It’s my favorite part of the city—like Lake Michigan around the holidays, vastly severe but moving right below the surface. Even if you didn’t grow up walking around Chicago each Christmas like I did, half-frozen and all-happy, how can you not love the cold? It’s so alive. Winter is always breaking apart and putting itself back together.
“Aren’t you freezing?” Renata chatters. “Get my hoodie.”
“I’d get bleach on it. And I’m fine.”
“It’s forty degrees and you’re next to an open window.”
“Forty is practically fifty.”
“And fifty is…”
“Practically spring, yeah.” I smile. “I like winter. The air’s spicy.”
We don’t talk about my work or her family for the rest of her hair. Back when Renata and I used to live together, two aspiring models in a punishingly tiny Bed-Stuy studio, she’d pleaded with our original agency to let her have pink curls. But they wouldn’t budge, insisting that any future commercial success would be tiedto her Ashkenazi ringlets. Same with me and my natural, stranger-stopping orange hair. Really, our first agency had been so strict and so anti-Tyra-Banks-makeover, we’d both gone wild at Sally Beauty after we’d quit working with them. The smell of developer and synthetic fragrance always takes me right back.
“Are you gonna visit Maisie while you’re in town?” Renata asks.
I’m glooping pink goop onto the highlight we’d spontaneously decided she’d needed, and wipe her forehead with a latex thumb. “Not this time. She has finals next month, and she was already trying to tell me that she doesn’t have to do that internship next fall. Which”—I flick a pink glob back into the plastic bowl—“is stupid.”
Renata falls silent for a beat. “Why not let her skip it?”
“Skip interning for a real designer? In Paris?”
“Maybe she could find someone who wants to pay her.”
“It isn’t like that,” I say quietly.
She rolls her lips together. “Bryce’s aunt offered to list this place if we wanted to downsize. I could talk to him about if we could help—”
“No, Ren. I’m fine, I promise. Maisie just worries too much.”
Always has. I have three younger sisters. There are the twins, Samantha and Bailey, from a very short-lived relationship Dad had after Mom passed. And I know I’m not their de facto mom because their actual mom split to become an army wife and I’m almost thirty—but it’s hard to accept that they’re both eighteen and legal adults. Samantha is the Sporty Spice of our quadrangle; her life is volleyball, her phone, and her friends, who she’s either playing volleyball with or texting at any given moment. I try to tell Dad not to get too annoyed at her for it. I’d be goofing off in Calculus, too, if I was about to be a Division I athlete at freakingHarvard. Well, I wouldn’t, but I get it.
Bailey is our painter. Beautifully tender-hearted, quietlyhilarious, she only just plucked up the courage to apply for art school this year. I think it sank in that she’s a senior and the people in her Dungeons & Dragons circle-slash-fanfiction writing group are way too interesting to stick around Waterfield. Not that I’d sort of hoped she might stay in town and work at the garage with Dad, or open up a restaurant like Grandma—okay. I’d hoped. Just a little.
Finally, there’s Maisie. And I don’t have a favorite sister, I promise, but being able to bankroll her fashion design degree at Parsons has been a highlight of my life. Same parents aside, Maisie is me in another font: addicted to caffeine, chronically obsessed with clothes, too headstrong for her own good.
“If Maisie worries too much, then you don’t worry enough,” Renata says, and we’re back to work talk. Fuck.
“Ah yes, a common problem. I’m too chill. People say I need to get my blood pressure up.”
Then there’s Renata, the sister I chose. I’ve chosen her ever since we met outside that shitty modeling agency, Renata chain-smoking hand-rolled cigarettes that I’d learned, months into knowing her, had been blunts. “You have a face that’ll let you get away with murder,” she’d said, winter-cold hands cupped around my cheeks. She was high and stoic, I was drunk and terrified; I’d just moved to New York City with a thousand dollars in cash, a backpack stuffed with Walmart’s finest fashions, and my grandma’s words twisting around my head:Go be a model. Get out of Waterfield. Drive past Chicago, past New Jersey, and go live the life I know you can live.
Don’t die in this town like I am.
“Have you ever shoplifted?” Renata had asked me at the dive bar we went to later that night, her pupils wide and face serious.
“Um. No?”
“You could.”
“Oh.”
“You want to try?”
“What?”
“Right now. Want to try stealing something?”
