Before I could, Aidy stepped up to me. “Ollie, Ollie, Ollie,” she said, using the rule of threes to its maximum effect, “Don’t bother. I went ahead and explained to everyone exactly what you did. They were pretty mad at first, but I said, What do you expect from Ollie anyway? And they were all like, Oh. Yeah.” She pushed me, ever gently, like a tease. “Every knockoff has a tell. Something that makes it a little less valuable than the original.” She hurried off to the corner and rummaged through her bag. “Did you already take it? Oh no, never mind, here it is.” She pulled out her Marley letter. “I’ve read this over and over. Probably a thousand times. At first because I was like, whoa, more of Marley. Then because I was confused. Why would she have written us letters? Then, because I was scared. Had she wanted to die? And then, because I knew. She hadn’t done this. You had.”

Her index finger traced lines into the paper until she reached the part she wanted. “‘Everyone respects you, and you keep it all to yourself, piecing it out into tiny servings. You don’t want to give too much for fear of the pushback. But Aidy, you should try. Be the one to throw us a party. Do it somewhere cool and different. Get scandalous! Make it a sleepover! Bring some of that ancient liquor from your house. No one’s touched it in years. I guarantee your parents won’t notice. Think of how much we steal from our houses, and we’ve never once been caught. I want you to sub in for me. Feel what it’s like to hold the strings. I’ll give you the other stuff you need to do it. I promise, it’s not that much. All you really need to do is rearrange the furniture. Parties are just smoke and mirrors. That’s all life is, I think.’”

The entire room was listening, far past the point of pretending to talk to one another.

“You get the point,” Aidy said. She crumpled the letter into a ball and shoved it into her pocket, smart enough to know that in spite of it all, I’d still try to steal it. “Can you spot it?”

Again, I said nothing.

“I’ve read it enough that it’s more than one thing now. The whole thing is so you, it’s actually incredible no one else noticed, but there’s one thing in particular. Do you know what it is?” Her words struck brass-knuckle blows. “Nick? How about you, since you and my sister are so in tune again? Do you know her well enough to know when she’s pretending?”