Mae’s eyes slide toward me, and you can almost see her brain working behind the bright turquoise of them, like her brain is a really fast, expensive computer: assessing, calculating, sorting.

“I don’t think it works that way, Nah. All the websites say—”

“Can you at least let me be the expert on my own shit? You can know best about everything else—space is all yours, okay? The whole universe.”

Nobody gets under my skin like my sister.

That thinking crinkle we both get—it’s like our bodies know we’re sisters, even if our blood doesn’t—forms between her two pale eyebrows. When Mae gets it, it means she’s confused. Which means you rarely see the crinkle on her face.

“I’m just trying to help,” she says.

“You can help by trusting me, for once.” In the blue light of the TV, she glows a little, milky-white skin and hair the color of wheat. Light to my dark. How cliché is that? “I’m clean. I didn’t take any pills. And I’m not going to. I just fucked up because Micah had the stuff and—”

“He shouldn’t have let you.”

“He’s my boyfriend, not my boss. Micah doesn’t let me do anything. Drinking isn’t my problem, anyway.”

She gives me a look.

“Legit addicts are way worse than I ever was,” I say. “I was the one who told Mom and Dad I was using. I wasn’t, like, stealing from them to buy smack on the boardwalk or something.”

Everyone keeps telling me I’m an addict. I’m not. I had a problem, and now I don’t. I’m only seventeen—you can’t be an addict when you’re seventeen. What happened to sowing wild oats and experimenting and all that? They’ve written me off before I’m even legally allowed to vote.

Mae squeezes my hand. “You can talk to me. Just because we’re not the same doesn’t mean I can’t understand.”

“You can’t. This one thing, Mae—you can’t.”