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I give her a look.
“What?”
“That’s a commitment. When you’re good for your word, like we are, committing is the same as doing. Telling Bess to delay because you’ll do it with her?” We’ve been over this before. “We keep our word, us two.”
She snorts and huffs. But it’s our thing, and she knows it.
We two sisters keep our word. It’s a thing.
Also, our pact has kept her from quite a few misguided tattoos.
“What was the courier? Was it the Smuckers allowance?”
“Who knows?” I say. “Maybe she put the dog food allowance in her will. I have to take an afternoon off work and trek halfway across town to find out. Rich people have no concept of life.”
Carly zeroes in on another fashionable woman with wild-colored hair and then gives me the side-eye.
“Bird,” I say, which is our sisters version of fuck you, from flipping the finger, the bird.
But really, that’s what I want for her—to only have to worry about things like hair and pop music and TikTok lighting techniques. I’ll fight to see she gets that. She’s decided to be an actress but she has to wait until she’s a senior in high school before she can be in nonschool productions.
I know I keep her too close. She doesn’t get to kick around town at night like other girls her age. The helicopter sister. But better that than our shipwrecked mom back home in Deerville.
“Tell you what,” I say. “If I get Saks, we’ll go get ourselves two-hundred-dollar blowouts.”
“Hold you to it.”
The preliminary buyers liked my collection of jewelry for humans. Sedate elegance, they called it, which is about right. It’s not the big, wild, exuberantly colorful stuff that I used to be attracted to, but I’m good with that. My life these days is geared for staying under the radar. Coloring inside the lines.
I’d do anything to distance myself from when I was Vonda O’Neil, the most hated teen in America for one very long summer some seven years ago. The girl who cried wolf. Except there really was a wolf.
Nobody believed me.
Carly hates the clothes I wear even more than Bernadette ever did. You’re not on trial anymore, she always says. You can stop living like a monk now. You don’t have to wear those boring-ass outfits.
But the pencil skirts and dark sweater sets my lawyer recommended grew on me. For the record, they’re not boring-ass. They project an image of trustworthiness, and that’s important to me.
Anyway, there’s just one more hurdle for my jewelry line—the VP of merchandising. A huge order from Saks would make such a difference. Carly doesn’t know how hand-to-mouth we actually live; we’re still in the hole from two years of braces, but I’ll never let her know. I don’t just want to protect her from Mom; I want to protect her from everything.
“Can a person even do that? Leave an allowance to a dog in a will?”
“Rich people can do anything they want to,” I say, and then I swallow my bitterness, because Carly doesn’t need it. She doesn’t need to hate rich, entitled people, and specifically rich, entitled men, the way I do.
It still shocks me that Bernadette was fabulously wealthy. She was pretty successful in hiding it; she seemed post-rich, if anything. I sometimes wonder if she concealed it because she picked up my disdain for the wealthy.
After the shelter fundraiser fair, Bernadette suddenly started showing up on this bench that Carly and I couldn’t avoid passing in getting to Carly’s school, and she’d call us over and ask for a reading—just a few impressions, she’d sometimes say. And I’d politely decline.
Carly thought she was stalking us, because she kept on showing up. I don’t know about that, but she definitely got madder and madder that I wouldn’t read Smuckers for her. She clearly thought it was a personal thing I had against her. The woman had a paranoid and highly suspicious nature.
Then there was the day she was in distress, out in the heat. We were on the way to school, as usual, and she was half slumped on that bench, so pale and frail, with Smuckers panting at the end of his leash. We stopped to make sure she was okay. She told us she felt faint; she asked us to help her home.
Her home turned out to be a gorgeous prewar building several blocks down. We got her up and settled in and hydrated. As soon as she bounced back to her regular self, she offered me money for a special Smuckers reading from the whisperer.
It was then I saw Smuckers’s bone-dry water bowl.
“Okay, one quick free read,” I said.
Carly widened her eyes as I unhooked Smuckers’s leash and picked him up. I put my hand on his head, kind of a Vulcan mind-meld thing, and closed my eyes. So thirsty. I need a lot of water. So very thirsty, Bernadette.
