“Probably staring at my picture for hours without blinking.” She smiles and bats her eyelashes.
I want to say he couldn’t possibly, unless it was taped to his mirror. Except making fun of Jeremy is such a low-hanging fruit, it’s practically a potato. What matters is that he makes her happy (even when he makes her miserable, I guess).
As the sun flares in our eyes, Jessa swats away a small cloud of gnats—it’s a fact of life that Sugarbrook is beset by them every time the weather warms—then hooks her arm around mine. “I’m gonna miss you, Im.”
“Me too. A lot.”
“But I’ll be back for every single vacation.”
“And until then, every painting you make can be of my exquisite face.”
“Yeah, and, like, your first literary masterpiece can be all about me!”
“Oh, definitely.”
She pries her iPhone from her own tiny purse and aims it at me. “Want to take a picture to send to your mom?”
I shrug. I don’t know if we’re at a selfie-sharing phase in our relationship. I’ve seen her once since February: the week after Dad came home, when she drove up to Sugarbrook to see him. I don’t know what they talked about—they went into the office and shut the doors behind them—but it wasn’t a long visit, and he seemed okay when she left. He came out and patted my cheek, then took his pre-dinner pills. While he brewed his customary six o’clock coffee, I finally got around to asking why he’d lied about he and Mom being married.
He watched the coffee trickle down into the pot. “I guess I wanted you to think you’d had a perfectly normal family once, even if you couldn’t remember it. Pretty dumb, huh, bou bui?”
I swallowed and leaned into him. “Yeah, Dad.”
Then Lindy came in, and I helped her chop asparagus tips into precise segments, as instructed, and the three of us sat down to eat, like every night.
Lindy says it’s my choice to forgive Mom, and I guess I have. At least I’m trying to, though I don’t know if we’ll ever be perfectly comfortable with each other.
But even at the end of a mystery, everything’s not perfect, you know? The dead stay dead, no matter that the murderer’s been caught. The main character finds her answer, but maybe it’s not the right one; maybe the question she had in her head from the start was all wrong, and now she has to live with the weight of what she knows and what she’ll never know. I mean, look at Rebecca. Even though Manderley burns down, and long after the place of all her and Maximilian de Winter’s suffering has crumbled into a cold pile of ash and blackened stones on a lonely beach, it still haunts the unnamed heroine. She still dreams of it in the end of her story.
Obviously, I’m just graduating high school, so it’s not exactly the end of my story.
I freeze a smile in place, and Jessa takes the picture.
The music picks up inside, pounding out through the walls behind us. We twist around to watch our classmates drift toward the dance floor, summoned by the pied piper of a Kesha song on full volume. Levi Cantu waves at Jessa from the buffet table, sets his champale down, and pantomimes his intentions with sharp, sprinkler-armed moves.
She turns to me, her thin shoulders swaying slightly to the beat. “We can stay out here a little longer. However long you want.”
“No, let’s go in. The bugs are out anyway.”
“Yeah?”
We stand and smooth our dresses down and catch sight of our faint reflections in the glass, side by side.
“Are you ready?” she asks.
I open the door.