In high school, Jack had made his money selling drugs. He’d started with pot and graduated to cocaine and prescription pills by his senior year. Brit and Jack were the same age, but she’d been a year ahead in school. (Flunked kindergarten, he always joked, but rumor had it he’d done time in juvie.) They started fading when she left for college, and after Clare died, she broke it off. He understood, and they’d stayed good friends. Two years after he dropped out of high school, he was arrested for drug trafficking. He’d done three years in state prison but, once freed, turned his life around. A success story by any measure.

Brit clapped her hands. “Come on, kids, time to sit down.”

“What’s with the barbecue? That was Clare’s fave,” Jo-Jo said.

Hearing my sister’s name was a bit of a jolt. No one ever said her name anymore. Death had taken my sister, but time was slowly erasing every trace of evidence that she’d walked this earth. Clare’s first death had been quick, but this second one was agonizingly slow. Maybe that was why Brit had invited old friends who’d known Clare. She wanted to keep our sister alive as well. It was the only reason that made sense to me.

“I love barbecue, too,” I said. The goal was not to stir the pot with Brit. She reveled in her maternal role, and I wasn’t keen on taking that away from her. She’d been a lifesaver these last couple of months.

Brit looked at me, and I saw the wheels turning. She’d realized her mistake but recovered. “Can’t forget Clare.”

Both Brit and I had found ways to cope after our mother’s death and then Clare’s. She shifted her grief into her career, becoming addicted to hard work that numbed her mind. Me? The classic substance abuser.

“I can still picture Clare and Marisa by the river in their cutoff jeans, halter tops, and cowboy boots,” Brit said. “Clare’s boots were powder blue, and Marisa’s were black.”

“I always struggled with who was who,” Jo-Jo said.

I remembered the day we’d bought those boots. It was the summer before she died. We’d both had the flu and for the first time in weeks felt really good. We’d dressed up and headed to our favorite spot on the river. I’d gotten wasted, and Clare had hooked up with Kurt for the first time.

“The school got their names backward in the senior yearbook,” Kurt said.

It might have been funny if the yearbook hadn’t been issued after Clare died. When I opened the book and saw my face with her name, I laughed so hard I cried. So fucking ironic. Even to the end, no one got us straight.

“I had another trick to tell you apart besides the boots,” Jo-Jo confessed.