Where I Want to Be (12 page)

He laughs softly. “What else?”

“I guess I’d get some of my complaints out of the way, too. I’d tell her that I’m still annoyed at those sabotage campaigns of hers.”

“Sabotage?” I can feel Caleb looking at me in the dark.

“Yeah, that was how it felt. Like whenever I had friends visit, Jane’d tell them our food was poison or that our tree house was haunted. Or she’d lock herself in my room. Or she’d stuff dry cereal into the sound system. She hated guests. She hated strangers in the house. Eventually I just stopped inviting kids over. It wasn’t worth the trouble.”

“Huh.”

“I know, I sound totally petty and selfish, right? But you asked. And that’s the stuff I never was allowed to say to her. Even when we got older. You know how it was, living with Jane. All of us orbiting around her illness and never acknowledging it. We weren’t supposed to make her feel like
even more of a misfit. Mom and Dad and I used to go to these group support meetings, and the counselor was always going on and on about how we had to affirm Jane. Give Jane her space—or else include her, depending on her mood. To be honest, sometimes my entire relationship with Jane felt so coached, like playacting.”

My heart is beating fast. I can’t believe I’ve talked so much. But Caleb stays quiet. Listening.

“Like the Senior Dance,” I blurt out. “That week just replays in my head, over and over. I can’t get past it. Because it really did feel like she was off-balance. But I kept right on acting.” I close my eyes. “Maybe I’d guessed, subconsciously, that she’d stopped taking her medicine. And sometimes I think—if Jane and I had ever shared an honest conversation about it before, would that have given me the courage to speak up? Could I have asked her what was going on? And maybe, if I’d confronted her, would everything be different today?”

“You can’t think about it like that,” Caleb says, but I know he’s thinking about it like that, too.

Caleb lets go of my hand and rolls back onto the grass. I lie down next to him and wind my leg over his, hooking again at the ankle. His skin radiates warmth. My yawn feels like it stretches out of the core of my exhaustion. Caleb yawns, too, and in the next couple of minutes, his breath is even. Asleep. I don’t blame him. It’s late, and the grass is as soft as a mattress.

I am half asleep myself when I feel it. Same as Caleb’s spiderweb. That prickle on the skin, that absolute knowledge that I am not alone.

My eyes open into darkness. “Jane,” I whisper.

She’s here. I could swear it. Jane is here, she sees me, she forgives me, yes, and I’ll be able to find her again if I need her, yes, because somehow, inexplicably, she’s right inside my reach. And yet just as I want to slip all my faith inside this moment, a moment that seems so real and strong and happy that I could grasp and hold on to it forever, the feeling is gone. Taking with it my faith that it happened at all.

Jane sat at the steps that led into the pool. The moon had turned the water silver.

She watched them as they slept.

In certain light, from certain angles, people had said that she and Lily looked alike.

“Because we’re twins,” Lily would say proudly, giggling at the fun of being identical to her older sister. Jane had pretended to be annoyed, but she’d secretly liked the game of it, too.

By the time Lily had joined up with her at North Peace Dale High, it was no longer fun. Jane would be walking and hear Lily’s name called, and she’d dread the moment when she, Jane, had to turn around.

The kid who’d been hoping for her sister would drop back. Freeze. Mutter an apology, but Jane could always hear what their words didn’t confront.

Oh. That’s not the sister I wanted.

Because Lily was lovely. Lily was the sister everyone preferred. Her face was shaped like a heart, and her mouth curved up at the ends so she looked as if she were always smiling. On top of everything else, Lily had gotten all that beauty. Even Lily had seemed to know how unfair it was. From time to time, especially after the whole stupid Billy Leonard mess, she would offer to go shopping with Jane, or to play games that involved makeovers and spa treatments. Trying to tack some beauty onto Jane as if it were some misplaced ingredient.

“Let’s dress up and go out tonight,” she’d say. “Liz Joyce is having people over. And you can wear my new jacket that you like, the one with the inside stripe.”

“But I don’t want to go out,” Jane would argue. “Liz Joyce is painful. She’s always trying too hard to make people laugh with those horrendous comedy routines. I’d rather stay home.”

“Well, you’re coming out anyway.” Lily would shake her head and smile determinedly. Then beg. “Aw, Jane. Please? You can’t sit in your room with your sketchbook all night. I promise it’ll be fun.”

It was never fun.

But sometimes Lily did manage to coax Jane out to parties and concerts that she’d rather not be at. And sometimes she relented and let Lily sign her up for school committees that she didn’t particularly want to join.

Other times, though, Jane wondered if she were the only
person in Peace Dale who didn’t understand what it was all about. Who didn’t want to go to the homecoming game, or to talk about college. Who wasn’t interested in other people’s spring breaks or summer plans. Those days, it felt as if the whole student body were waving from a big ship that was floating them off to their happy futures while she, Jane, bobbed alone in the ocean, forgotten.

Then she’d ask for Lily’s help.

“Help you with what?” Lily was always ready to help.

Help me with everything, Jane wanted to say. Help me to be like you. “Help me find a good pair of jeans. Like the kind you wear.”

And so Lily would ride along with Jane down to the flea market in Kingston to find the best pair of jeans—frayed across the front, with the ends let out—and then over to Wilner & Webb, for tatted-lace camisoles or low-rider belts or whatever Lily was convinced was the hot item of the moment. It took nothing to get Lily overexcited, hopping in and out of their dressing rooms with armfuls of clothing. “Check this! Half off! Try it on! You look great in off-the-shoulder!” Although Jane never wanted to try it on, because from the minute she got to Wilner & Webb, she was tired of useless, boring shopping and wished she were back home.

With the Senior Dance looming nearer, Lily was ready to help again. Jane was relieved. Even though she wasn’t sure she wanted to go to the dance, she wasn’t sure she wanted to be left out of it, either. Dr. Fox had been coaxing her to
go. Her parents would worry if she didn’t. Senior Dance was a big deal at North Peace Dale High.

“Caleb has this friend Greg Benson,” Lily announced at the dinner table, “who wants to go to the dance with Jane, but he’s too shy to ask.”

“Benson of Benson’s Hardware and Appliances?” asked their mother.

Lily nodded. “Yeah, Greg’s Mr. Benson’s son.”

“So does that make him Greg Bensonson?” joked their father.

Everyone laughed too hard. Jane’s stomach cramped. It was a setup, of course. She could practically hear Lily asking—“Will you go the dance with my sister? You can hang out with Caleb the whole night.” Probably even Dr. Fox had been in on the plan. Jane was always the last to find out. Always.

Three pairs of eyes were turned on her.

“He can ask me if he wants. I don’t care.”

Lily clapped her hands. “Ooh, Jane. We’ll go shopping for dresses and we’ll do each other’s pedicures, and nobody will be able to take their eyes off us, we’ll be so gorgeous!” She said it like she believed it. Jane frowned.

Caleb’s friend Greg Benson had turned out to be that extra-tall-with-sideburns guy from Jane’s AP Spanish class.

“He’s all overgrown and weedy looking,” Jane pronounced.

“No, he’s really sweet,” Lily assured her. “He’s shy. You’ll like him. You’ll see.”

“Just because you like him doesn’t mean I will,” Jane reminded her. “You like everybody.”

Lily’s smile was tight on her face. “Okay, I have an idea. Let’s invite Greg and Caleb over to the house for a spaghetti dinner next week. To make sure you get along. And then you can decide if you want him to ask you or not.”

“Whatever. If it’s so important to you.”

“Jane, it’s not about me. It’s about you.”

“If it’s about me, then cancel it. I don’t want to go to the dance.”

“You say that now, but you’ll change your mind.” Lily was used to different Janes. She went ahead with plans. On the night of the spaghetti dinner, Jane watched as her sister made a pitcher of lemonade. Then set the table with Augusta’s bamboo place mats and put a vase of fresh flowers in the middle as a centerpiece.

“It looks like…” Jane couldn’t say it.

“Granpa and Augusta’s table, right?” Lily grinned. “I thought you’d like that. Now, you go ahead and get ready while I make the salad. Then I’ll fix your hair. I’ve got an idea that I saw in a magazine. I think I can make it work.”

And she did, in the form of a sleek ponytail that hung low on Jane’s neck.

“You look beautiful,” Lily pronounced, brushing some of her sparkle powder like fairy dust on Jane’s throat and neck.

Staring at herself in their bathroom mirror, a bit of hope twitched inside her.

But once Caleb and Greg arrived, Jane knew that nothing had changed. She felt just like herself. Ponytail, fairy dust, and all. Lily had lied. Throughout the evening, Jane could feel herself shrinking. Turning small and mute and distant. Memories of her date with Billy Leonard rattled in her head, mocking her.

Finally, she stood up from the table and excused herself to the bathroom.

“You’re pathetic,” she whispered, scowling into the bathroom mirror. She pulled out the ponytail holder. Down the hall, she heard the sounds of Lily and Caleb and Greg laughing. Were they laughing at her? Or were they just glad that she had left the table? Why couldn’t she just “be herself” the way Dr. Fox always encouraged? Why was “herself” so hard?

As it turned out, the answer was behind the mirror. Because when she opened the medicine cabinet to roll on a new coat of antiperspirant, her eyes lighted on her bottle of pills.

Of course. Her answer. She would stop taking her meds. Just for a little while, a few weeks, just to get through the end of school, the dance, and graduation.

Yes, yes, yes. How else would she find out the truth of who she really was?

The next morning was her new beginning. She reached for her bottle, uncapped it, dropped one blue pill into the
toilet, and flushed. She needed to remove the evidence since her mother had been known to count pills.

“Sorry, honey,” her mother would always say, only halfway apologetic if Jane caught her. “I can’t stop being a mom, and your medication is very important.”

For years, Jane had heard about the absolute necessity of the pills. The good they could do. It had never crossed her mind to stop taking them. Watching the pill swirl, then get gulped down by bathroom pipes, new doubts came alive in her. Would she be able to recognize herself off the meds? Would she be better or worse? Would she know the difference?

Days passed. Nothing happened. And then one afternoon, walking into the school library, Jane saw the blue sky and the budding branches of the dogwood trees through the library window. The sunlight shone onto the student trophy case. Each trophy was shiny gold like pirate’s treasure. So overbright and forcefully, gorgeously sparkling that she could have burst into tears.

Instead, she glided past the library desk in mini-pirouettes, like Klara from
The Nutcracker.

“Well. I suppose spring is in the air,” Ms. Myers, the head librarian, commented when she looked up from the checkout desk. “Are you excited for graduation, Jane?”

Oh, yes. She was. Over the next few days it seemed that she became more and more excited for everything. For
breakfast and for her calculus exam and especially for the Senior Dance. Even for her biweekly phone calls from sweet, solemn Greg Benson, who, as she joked to Lily, had given her a new name: “Um-um-Jane” because he was so nervous whenever he spoke to her.

Later that week, trying on dresses at the Wakefield Mall, she and Lily had twisted and twirled, unzipped and rebuttoned and decided. Silver, backless for Jane. Lilac, strapless for Lily. Kitten-heel sandals for both. They smiled at their mirror selves. Impulsively, Jane picked up Lily’s hands and swung them like in the old days when they played London Bridge.

“It’s going to be the best dance ever!”

“It is, isn’t it?” Lily enthused.

Jane’s mind hummed, imagining it all. Dancing like Klara, all the music around her and the silver swish of her dress on the floor.

But on the very next morning, driving to school, Ganesha spoke. It had been so long since Jane had heard a secret language that at first she had not understood what Ganesha was saying.

Let’s get away to somewhere quiet,
he suggested.
There’s too much noise in my head.

She looked down. Ganesha looked up sternly at her.

I can’t now,
Jane had answered in her head so that Lily, doing some last-minute homework in the passenger seat, wouldn’t hear.
What about the Senior Dance?

No, Jane. You shouldn’t go to that dance,
said Ganesha.
You should stay home. With your mother and your father. You already won the race against your sister, remember? You don’t have anything to prove.

You won the race,
Jane reminded him.
You won the race against your brother. I haven’t won anything.
In the back of her mind, she worried. A talking key chain. No. It wasn’t for real. It wasn’t right.

That night, she was unable to sleep. She felt dizzy. She busied herself taking old practice tests for Spanish, although she was already accepted into college and her Spanish exams were over. She took one test, then another, and another, until she had finished all eighteen tests in the book. Then, spying it hanging in her closet, she tried on her Senior Dance dress.

A nightmare stared back at her in the closet mirror. The dress didn’t fit. The fabric pulled. She knew she’d gained a little weight, but the dress squeaked so tight across her hips that she doubted she’d be able to sit down in it. Worse, the silvery color made her face look gray. Sickly. What had happened? Was it a sign?