5

LAST APRIL

Twelve years old

Sixteen weeks before Simone showed up on our doorstep and invited me to dinner, Dr. Leo Lacamoire was in a deep hole. He was lying on his couch, unable to do anything worthwhile. He hadn’t yet moved on to the action part of his plan; he was still in the never-ending sorrow part. He was eating a lot of fake orange snack foods—the foods of depression: Cheetos, Cheez-Its, cheddar-flavored potato chips. Foods you eat when you just don’t care anymore.

It was the beginning of spring, and Waukegan County High was getting ready for senior prom. Blair was homeschooled and didn’t do many of the typical high school things. Jade did enough for both of them. Blair was too busy for football games and homecoming parades and prom. She had a career she was preparing for. Her only friends were her dance mates, and she talked about them more like colleagues than soul sisters. They weren’t exactly having sleepovers or doing BuzzFeed quizzes together. The only thing they probably shared was mutual judgment of each other for things like bending your knees during arabesques.

But Caleb Evers had asked her to the dance with a dozen red roses, and even my sister couldn’t say no to that.

It was called homeschooling, but it wasn’t like Mom sat Blair down and taught her precalculus or anything. Blair would just Skype with some woman named Sasha in Madison and go through tons of workbooks on her own. Mostly, she danced, even though after the Joffrey Incident, we weren’t sure what her next steps were. She wouldn’t be going to New York in the fall, like we’d all been planning. However, her coach, Aleksander, had enrolled her in a competition in July that could put her in front of some company eyes.

Mom hated Aleksander. I was surprised she didn’t have a dartboard somewhere in the house with his picture pinned to it. She purposely wrote Blair’s checks out to Alexander instead, her one small act of rebellion. I cheered silently every time she did it. I wasn’t a fan of Aleksander, either; he was loud and kind of mean. He thought Blair didn’t live up to her potential.

Things were bad. The Joffrey Incident had made them worse. We didn’t know how bad, but if you stepped into our house, you could feel that everyone was tiptoeing around silently hoping everything would get better soon. Blair had started going to a small group for girls with “anxiety issues” on Tuesday nights. You’re too stressed, I’d heard Mom say as they argued down in the kitchen one night. It will help. But I wasn’t so sure it did. Blair hated it, coming home in a terrible mood and slamming her bedroom door so loud it made Obi jump. Every single mealtime was some kind of argument about ingredients and portion sizes and whether or not Mom had bought the low-calorie orange juice. One morning, Blair had woken up to find her scale gone, and she shrieked so loudly I thought the pine needles would fall from the trees. Mom and Dad hadn’t fessed up to it, but I found it later that day, shoved at the bottom of the garbage can, broken into a million pieces. Every day was a new war.