The Year My Sister Got Lucky
Read The Year My Sister Got Lucky Online
Authors: Aimee Friedman
For Natalie Joy,
who is a good dancer,
but an even better sister.
Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer
.— Louise Glück, “Tango”
I’m an insomniac. Any sweet, deep slumbers I’ve had over the course of my fourteen years could probably be counted on one hand. Still, I manage okay during the day — school, dance class, dinner, homework. Most people wouldn’t guess my little secret.
My sister, Michaela, is the only one who really knows.
“Michaela?” I whisper from my bed. My covers are kicked down around my ankles, my curls are piled up on top of my head, and I’m fanning myself with one hand to cool off.
Michaela lets out a long, weary sigh. Her big-sister sigh. It’s the sound she makes when I try to talk to her at night, when I can’t find the keys to let us into our building, or when I’m spacing out on the street and my foot misses the curb. Michaela never trips on the sidewalk. She’s three years older than I am, and
sometimes that gap feels as vast as the green swath of Central Park. Other times, it’s as small as the space between our beds.
“Are you awake?” I persist, propping myself up on one elbow. I know the answer. For the past hour, I’ve been listening to her flip from side to side. This behavior, coming from Michaela, is completely weird. My sister is my exact opposite: a champion sleeper. She can crash as soon as her head touches a soft surface — or, sometimes, not even. Once, after a late dance class, I watched her doze off while we were riding home on the subway, standing squished between hordes of strangers. Her talent is awe-inspiring.
“Katie, come on.” Michaela’s voice — soft and light, even when she’s annoyed — is muffled by the pillow over her head. “It’s after midnight.”
It’s also thick, soupy August, and the apartment’s air-conditioning broke today, so we’ve got the windows pushed open as high as they can go. Sirens and taxi horns and some hoarse girl yelling at her friend to meet her on the corner of East 5
TH
Street and 2
ND
float inside, but it isn’t the noise that’s keeping me up. I’m as used to the babble outside as I am to the stripes of light that passing cars paint on my ceiling. I remember when I was little, sitting in my parents’ bedroom and watching my dad write, with his Frank Sinatra CD blasting in the background, and hearing the line about New York being “a city that doesn’t sleep.” I’d hugged
my knees to my chest and felt a sudden, tugging connection to my hometown. That feeling’s stayed with me ever since.
“You must be hot,” I tell Michaela, and sit up entirely. Drops of sweat slip down my neck and beneath my white ribbed tank, the one I only wear at home because I worry it makes my boobs look too big. “Unbearably hot,” I add. “Like, dying.”
I’m not planning to leave my sister alone just yet. Having her awake is a rare, delicious treat; lying restless in the dark every night can start to get old after a while. Especially since Michaela is a sound sleeper who breathes in and out steadily and only occasionally murmurs nonsense. Sometimes I listen closely and hope that she’ll spill something scandalous and awful in her sleep. No such luck so far.
“Mind over matter,” Michaela mutters, all stoic-like. But then she flings the pillow off her face, which signals to me that she might be surrendering. Her straight, walnut-brown hair billows out behind her, and her hazel eyes flutter open. I can see them, bright and glistening, as they dart back and forth, quick as thoughts.
“What?” I ask, leaning forward to get a better look at her.
I see Michaela’s brow furrow, ever so slightly. “What what?”
I roll my eyes. “You.”
Michaela pauses, just long enough for curiosity to
stir in the pit of my stomach. “Nothing,” she finally replies. Her left foot is dangling over the edge of the bed, and I watch as she points and flexes her toes, out of habit. Even in the shadowy half light, her arch is ridiculously beautiful.
“It’s
so
not nothing,” I retort, and swing my legs off the bed. For some reason, my heart is beating a little faster than it was a second before. “You’ve been acting different all night.”
Because now I’m remembering Michaela’s strange silence over dinner, the way she dragged her fork around and around her bowl of pasta without looking up at me. Our parents were arguing about rent checks or something equally dull, and I kept trying to catch my sister’s eye. Normally, during meals, Michaela and I will ramble on and on about finding the right long-sleeved Danskin leotard, or creating the perfect iTunes mix, or did you see those dark indigo jeans in the window of Bloomingdale’s? Not this time. And after dinner, she flounced off to our room to call our friend Sofia Pappas (who, okay, was technically Michaela’s friend first, but we all hang out together in dance school), leaving me to wash the dishes.
“Katie, you’re being overdramatic.” Michaela closes her eyes and her long lashes rest against her cheeks. I want to ask her what’s wrong with being overdramatic, but it’s clear she’s trying to distract me,
and I can’t allow that to happen. Silently, I get to my feet and begin to cross our tiny room, sidestepping Michaela’s boxy pink toe shoes, which lie in a tangle on the carpet. I duck to avoid the low shelf that holds our hand-painted Russian nesting dolls, and then plunk down onto Michaela’s bed. Her sheets feel crisp and neat, unlike mine.
“Katie!” Michaela bolts upright. “Get off!” She nudges me — hard — with her foot. It’s a foot made strong from years of ballet training, so I know better than to mess with it. “What are you doing?”
I shrug, but scoot back. We sit on opposite ends of the bed, facing each other. “This way, you can’t ignore me,” I explain.
Michaela groans. “We have to get up early for dance tomorrow and —”
“I’m not going to fall asleep anyway so —”
“— Svetlana has been
on
me about nailing my pirouettes and —”
“— you’d better tell me whatever it is that’s bugging you because —”
“— if I’m zonked in the morning it will be all your fault —”
“— since when do we keep things from each other?”
It’s that last question that quiets Michaela. She holds my gaze, and I think we are both holding our breaths. Sometimes when I’m staring right at Michaela, I get the creeped-out sensation that I’m
looking at
myself
. We don’t have the same eyes, but I guess it’s the expression in them that’s the same: a look that our mom calls “penetrating.” I’m not sure what that means exactly, but right now, I do feel as if Michaela is boring into me with her gaze, trying to read me, or maybe to read herself. Outside, a garbage truck is huffing and puffing, and I can hear our dad’s rumbly snores from the next room.
“Okay,” Michaela says, and her voice is less than a whisper, a feather of a whisper. I can smell her breath — minty and toothpaste-y — and see the faint shimmer of sweat on her upper lip. “Promise you won’t tell Mom and Dad?”
I knew it!
“I promise, I promise. Can I guess?” Michaela half smiles, half shrugs, so I pounce. “It’s about dance, isn’t it?” Leave it to Michaela to have nightmares about pirouettes.
Michaela slowly shakes her head from side to side. “Not really. Sort of. No.”
I lean back on my hands, wracking my brain. School is a distant memory in August, and we’re not close enough to September for Michaela’s coming senior year to be an issue.
And then a wild thought occurs to me.
My pulse flutters at the base of my throat. No. Impossible. But it
could
be. What else would keep my levelheaded sister up at night other than …
“A
boy
?” I whisper in shock. “You’re thinking about a boy.” I feel my stomach drop.
Boys. Such strange, alien creatures. Take the boys in my junior high, for example. They all chew with their mouths open, get into scuffling fights in gym class, and look at the floor whenever girls speak to them. Horrible. Sofia Pappas, who is sixteen, swears up and down that boys get cuter once they hit high school —
and
that kissing them feels nice — but I’m doubtful. After all, Michaela, who is seventeen and knows better, has never promised anything of the sort.
True, Michaela has only kissed one boy: Jason Rosenthal, the only boy in her dance class last year. Jason had wavy dark hair and a goofy smile, and was good at the big jumps. One afternoon, when I was home sick with a cold, Jason walked Michaela to the subway and kissed her just as the train was roaring in. The next day, he dropped out of dance school after some guys in his neighborhood found his tights in his bookbag and gave him a purple-black eye. Michaela never heard from Jason again, but she didn’t seem to mind much. She’s not the type to get all mopey and obsessive over boys — unless you count Ethan Stiefel, the so-gorgeous-it-hurts principal dancer of the American Ballet Theater. Michaela has a poster of him, leaping through the air, over her bed. Sometimes the two of us will lie
back on Michaela’s pillows and stare up at Ethan, wondering why we don’t know any guys as perfect as him.
“Is Jason Rosenthal back?” I ask, studying Michaela’s surprised face.
When she doesn’t respond right away, dread seeps through me. So
that
explains why my sister’s been avoiding me in favor of Sofia. Last year, whenever Michaela tried to talk to me about Jason, I’d swat the subject away like it was a mosquito.
“You can tell me, Michaela,” I press on, trying to be brave. “It’s okay — I promise I won’t get weird or —”
“It’s not about Jason,” Michaela says flatly. “Or any boy.”
Oh.
Before I can feel the full force of my relief, Michaela speaks again.
“We’re moving,” she says.
I look down at the bed on which we’re sitting, as if I’m expecting it to up and glide away — a magic carpet. “No, we’re not,” I blurt, but my tongue feels stupid in my mouth.
Michaela is nothing if not patient. She reaches out and touches her warm hand to my hot arm. “Like,
moving
-moving,” she murmurs. “Out of the apartment. Out of the city.”
This idea is so insane that I start giggling, only the giggles come out more like nervous hiccups. Michaela watches me, concerned. “Um, when?” I snort, and my
arm sort of flops as I gesture around our dark room. “Shouldn’t we be packing? Or calling movers? Time’s a-ticking!”
“At the end of the month,” Michaela replies without a hint of wanting to laugh. I notice that she’s twisting her thin blanket between her hands. It’s this small detail that sends a cold knife through my belly. Maybe she’s not joking. Or lying. Come to think of it, Michaela’s never done much of either.
“Where?” I ask, and my voice is quieter now.
Michaela flicks on her bedside lamp, and I blink as she slides out of her bed and pads, catlike, over to her desk. Everything about Michaela is catlike, from her sloping eyes and her long, slender neck to her careful, graceful way of walking.
I think I’m more the hamster variety.
Michaela returns, holding her humming laptop, and sits down beside me. A Google map stares at us from the screen. The jumble of yellow and gold lines makes no sense to me. Give me a subway map, like the one that hangs on my wall, and I’ll be able to figure out every orange squiggle and confusing transfer. Now, foreign names like
KEENE
and
CROWN POINT
pop out at me.
“Here.” Michaela presses her finger to a small spot on the map. The screen dents when she touches it. “We’re moving here.”
Okay. This is feeling suspiciously less and less like a joke.
The map, I see, is titled
ESSEX COUNTY, NEW YORK
. Which, I’m guessing, is somewhere upstate. I’ve only been upstate once, to see a ballet performance in the cute town of Saratoga Springs. But the spot Michaela is pointing to isn’t called Saratoga Springs.
“Fir Lake,” I read aloud, my lips thick and slow. “What’s a fir?”
“A kind of tree,” Michaela replies instantly, ever the straight-A student. “It’s like a pine tree. Green and bristly. Christmas. You know.”
My mind sputters. My sister and I are sitting here, talking about trees, with a map of what may as well be the moon in our laps. How did this happen?
“Why?” I ask, my throat tight all of a sudden. I feel jumpy and wired, as if someone has plugged me into an outlet.
“There’s a college right outside the town,” Michaela says. “Fenimore Cooper College. And they needed a new professor to head up their Russian Lit department.”
“Mom,” I mumble, understanding.
“Mom,” Michaela agrees. There’s nothing more to say.
I think of our mother, who is no doubt awake next door, rubbing lemon-scented lotion into her hands, with some mammoth book on Tolstoy open in her lap while our father sleeps beside her. Anger flares up in me. My parents are so peaceful, so calm, keeping
this huge, this momentous …
thing
from me. When were they going to let me know? When was anyone? Were they planning to leave me behind?
“How long have you known?” I whisper, snapping my head toward Michaela.
Her cheeks are as pink as the stripes on her nightgown. “Mom and Dad only told me last week. They said they wanted to wait to tell you until they cleared things up with the lawyers, about the house or whatever. They said there was no point in getting you upset until …”
“A baby.” I am barely able to talk through my clenched teeth.
“What?” Michaela asks, and leans into me, as if she wants to give me a hug. I brush her off me, and stand, glaring down at her.
“A baby,” I repeat, putting my hands on my hips. “That’s all I am to you guys. It’s disgusting.”
“Katie.” Michaela’s voice takes on a worried, step-away-from-the-mental-patient quality.
I hold my hands up for added effect, and make my voice go high-pitched. “Oh, don’t say anything to the
baby
! God forbid the
baby
gets upset! Maybe we’ll have to change her diaper!” I’m not exactly sure who I’m imitating, but it doesn’t matter.
“Speak louder, why don’t you?” Michaela whispers, reaching up to tug on my arm. “I can’t hear you over the
crazy
.”
“I’m sick of it,” I spit out, ignoring her. “Sick of being the last one to find out stuff. Nobody ever tells me
anything
.”
I’m not exaggerating. In fact, I’m remembering all the times this happened before — when our pet gerbil kicked the bucket; when my dance teacher decided I wasn’t quite ready for toe shoes; when our dad couldn’t sell his last manuscript and kept going into the bathroom to cry. My parents always act as if I’m too fragile, too head-in-the-clouds “sensitive” to bear any of this knowledge. But of course I’m not. I rely on Michaela — my spy, my confidante — to fill me in on the truth. This move, though, is bigger than any pet’s passing. This is my
life.