I didn’t bother to tell her about Jenna or her dig at me. Maddy would take her side. She always did, blamed Jenna’s miserable attitude on the fact that she had a hard time at home. As if her parents’ financial problems and their crazy need to hide them were somehow a free pass for Jenna to be mean. But no amount of lipstick could cover up her ugly personality.
She shrugged. “You don’t get it, Ella. You never will. They don’t care about you showing up. They don’t care about you at all. They’re more interested in lying—making up stories that will ruin their friends’ lives while making themselves more popular.”
She was absolutely right. Since we started high school, I’d watched her dance around these people, play their games, and worry about what everybody thought while I cleaned up her messes. I didn’t get any of it. Not from the first time she sat down at Alex’s lunch table to last month when she came home so trashed from a party at the beach that I had to spend three hours with her in the bathroom holding her hair back while she puked. Once she passed out, I had the honor of lying to my parents, telling them the leftover Chinese food Maddy had inhaled when she got home was probably bad. That wasn’t the first time I’d covered for Maddy, and it sure wouldn’t be the last.
The first hailstones hit the hood of the car like a steel drum hammering through my head. I turned the wipers on, but one was broken, a quarter of the rubber hanging off the blade. It did little to get rid of the water, rather smoothed it into a giant smear across the glass. Craning my head to see through the one clear spot, I pulled out onto the road.
The familiar chime of an incoming text had me glancing Maddy’s way. She whipped her phone out and started typing, pausing only long enough to angle the heat vents toward herself.
“Damage control going well over there?”
“What?” she asked, not bothering to look up from her phone.
“I asked if you had everything figured out over there. If you and Jenna got your stories straight.”
“What does Jenna have to do with anything?”
Jenna had everything to do with it. As far as I was concerned, she was the one who’d taken my sister away from me, introduced her to that crowd of popular people, and kept her there. If it wasn’t for Jenna, I’d still have my sister … my best friend. The one who used to camp out with me every Fourth of July in the backyard. The one who always gave me the bottom part of her ice cream cone for my baby doll Sarah. The one who took away the book Your Body and You that Mom had given me in the sixth grade and gave me her own, unadulterated version of the truth. Jenna had taken that Maddy away from me without asking, and I wanted her back.
“Jenna has everything to do with it,” I yelled. “Everything!”
Apparently I’d hit a nerve because for the first time since we got in the car she put her phone down and looked at me. “You have no idea what Jenna’s life is like. None whatsoever.”
Maybe not, but I didn’t care either way. “Doesn’t matter,” I said as I turned my eyes back to the road. “No matter how you slice it, she is still a mean, selfish cow.”
I didn’t need to look at my sister to tell she was getting annoyed. I could feel it, the air around us so thick with tension it was suffocating. “What’s your problem, Ella?”
I don’t know if it was my irritation with the wipers, that I was now freezing without my coat or shoes while she sucked up the heat, or because I was simply exhausted, nervous about getting into RISD, and stressed about the Physics test I still had to study for, but I snapped.
“My problem? My problem? I don’t know, how about the fact that I dropped everything to come and pick you up, yet you won’t tell me why? But the people who wouldn’t leave their beers long enough to drive you home … they get the whole story.”