Truest (18 page)

“How about boy bands?”

“Or Thursday.”

“Or Brian.”

A plump laugh bubbled out of me like lava. “That doesn't make
any
sense!”

Silas's laugh was just as funny. “But a major in
Thursday
does?!”

“I'm Westlin Beck, and I'm a Brian major,” I said. “Maybe
I'll major in punctuation,” I said. “Not English. Just punctuation. Or maybe I wouldn't even have to go to school for it. Maybe I could just become an activist to help support underappreciated punctuation.”

“Like?” he asked.

“Like the semicolon. And the ampersand.”

“I don't think that's technically a punctuation mark.”

“Oh, what do you know about it anyway? You're only a Brian major.”

When I went home later that night, after we'd listened to
August Arms
in the bell tower by camp light, I expected to face a firing squad; in fact, I felt almost ready for it. I was actually disappointed to find that Mom and Dad were already asleep.

Fine, I thought. I'm on hiatus from church indefinitely till I get a reaction.

The house was quiet. I sat down on the couch and turned on some late-night TV.

“Mom said you're grounded,” Shea said, leaning over the stairway banister. “What does that mean?”

“Hey, kiddo,” I said softly. “What are you still doing up?”

“Libby's music is too loud.”

I patted the seat beside me on the couch, and he came down the stairs to join me. I threw my arm around him. “Nothing,” I said, answering his earlier question. “It doesn't mean anything. How was your day?”

“Okay,” he said. “We had to be really quiet because Dad's head hurt again. Where were you all day?” I wondered if my parents had called around or just assumed I was at the Harts'. I didn't know which option I preferred.

“Around,” I said. “Shea, wanna play a game?”

With one eye on the TV screen, he asked, “Like what?” I knew he was thinking of last night's Sorry! drama. The boxed-up game was still sitting on the floor near the couch.

“I don't know. Anything. Battleship.”

He lit up. “Yeah, okay! I'll go get it.”

“Libby's still up too?” I called softly after him.

“Dunno. Her music's on.”

Libby was indeed still awake, and as Shea and I played several rounds of Battleship, she eventually joined us. “Got you this,” I said, tossing the Chuck Justice magazine at her. She paged through it on the couch while Shea and I played on the floor.

“Do you ever think the bad guys really think they're the good guys?” he asked, a young Socrates casting a sideways glance at the TV while he annihilated my aircraft carrier.

“Maybe,” I said. “Probably. What bad guys? Just bad guys in general?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

Libby and I looked at each other over Shea's head. He was clearly talking about Dad.

“Does that make them less bad, do you think?” I asked.

“I don't know,” said Shea softly.

But Libby said, “It makes them worse.” She left the room and returned with the paper dolls Dad had gotten her earlier that summer, along with one of Mom's scrapbooking glue sticks. Shea and I watched as Libby calmly, patiently glued pairs of the dolls together, face-to-face. She looked at us as she capped the glue stick, and her eyes were hurt and ruthless. This was her own tiny insurrection, and in a way, it made me proud.

Tuesday was strange, what with Silas out of town for his campus visit. I'd gotten used to spending every day together, and I found myself lonely without him. Shea and Libby were picking at each other, and technically I was grounded, so I barricaded myself in my bedroom, alternating between reading a book and an email from Trudy she'd sent in response to my teaser of “big news.” Her reply hadn't said much, but it had said enough.

Maybe Silas was right: Trudy and I would be fine because we had history.

I tried to ignore that this was one of just a small handful of emails she'd sent all summer, that it was ridiculously short and unhelpful, and that even in so few lines, she hadn't been able to resist including Ami Nissweller. I wondered if it would be worth my time to try to keep this conversation going. My phone buzzed. It was Silas.

I asked my parents, even though I planned to leave the house regardless of their ruling. My parents and I were both unfamiliar with this “grounded” territory, and in the end, they agreed it was more appropriate for me to go than for them, so I took the car over to Heaton Ridge. The door was locked for once, so I used the garage security code that Silas had taught me and let myself in.

“Laurel?” I called, once inside. There was no response, so I started up the stairs. “Laurel?” Still nothing.

I said her name once again, this time outside her bedroom
door, and a sick feeling started to grow in my stomach. I pushed open her door, not sure what I'd find inside. She'd been so depressed lately—

She lay curled up in her bed atop a pearl-colored comforter, not moving. My heart was pounding like a tribal drum. “Laurel?” I whispered. “Laurel, get up!” I put my hand on her back to shake her.

She rolled over suddenly, saw me, and gasped. “West! My
gosh
! What are you doing?” she exclaimed. “You
scared
me!”

You scared me too, I thought, my pulse still hammering.

“I—I'm sorry,” I said. “Silas said you weren't texting him back; we just wanted—to—to make sure you were okay.”

“I was taking a nap,” she said crabbily. “I don't usually text while I sleep. Do you?”

“Sorry,” I said again, relieved she was fine—and that I'd escaped my house. Laurel sat up with her back against the headboard. I sat down at the foot of her bed, leaning my back against the wall. We were an intersection of legs. “Why are you taking a nap now anyway? It's almost lunchtime.”

“I'm not hungry.”

“You have to eat,” I insisted.

For a second, she looked uncooperative, but then she shrugged. “Okay.”

“Let's go down to the kitchen. I'll make us some lunch.”

Laurel moved like a phantom. She sat at the kitchen island, watching but not seeming to really see me. Her hair was greasy
and she wore yoga pants and a T-shirt. Below her eyes were circles a shade darker than the rest of her face.

The Hart kitchen was all white and stainless steel, except for the dark walnut butcher-block countertops and island. I was so used to the surfaces of our house being covered in Pinterest projects and coupons that the Hart kitchen felt sterile and unused. Except for a littering of Magnetic Poetry on the fridge.

douche y poem

for mah girl

u beeyotches obvi

ain't badass like

my bomb hottie

who got hella

junk in da trunk

fo sho

“Mom told him, ‘I don't care how over the moon you are for Ms. “Bomb Hottie” Beck, if it's not down before your Oma Lil comes over next, there'll be hell to pay,'” Laurel said, smirking a little. I was certain I was blushing, but I took a photo with my cell phone.

After poking around in their pantry, I found a box of mac and cheese and held it up for Laurel to assess. “Sure,” she said.

I put some water on to boil, then said, “Haven't seen you much lately—I mean, besides the boy-band dancing.”

“Nope,” she said.

I leaned on the island toward her. “We're worried about you.”

This time she smiled a little bit. “Me too. I'm not okay at all, West.” She had a pinched look to her face, the look that people get when they're fighting back tears.

“Isn't your therapist helping?” I asked.

She let her head roll back, staring up at the ceiling in the frustrated way Shea does when Mom tells him to clean his room. “No,” she said. “It's not working. I want to try something new.”

“Okay,” I said. “Like what?”

“I don't know, a blue pill.”

“Blue pill?” I asked. “Oh,
The Matrix
.”

She nodded. I put the pasta into the boiling water and stirred it around, hot steam rising from the pot.

“There's something I've never understood,” I said quietly. “How can you not know when you're sleeping and when you're awake? When I woke you up just now, I scared you and you woke up
so fast.
I mean, aren't you aware that you're awake every morning when you
wake up
?”

“Seriously?” she asked, narrowing her eyes at me. “You've never dreamed that you woke up?”

“Okay, fine,” I admitted. “But every night? Over and over, the same dream? Dreams are crazy! They aren't real and . . . and . . . logical like this is, like real life is!”

Laurel only looked sad. “West,” she said patiently, “when
you're dreaming, everything seems normal. Skating on grass or walking on the ceiling or playing Quidditch all
seems
normal while you're dreaming. It's when you wake up that you realize that it wasn't.”

“So?”

“So, what if I wake up, and all these things I thought were normal—having a family, sleeping in a bed, drinking water—are actually bizarre?”

“Drinking water—bizarre?”

“Dreams feel normal when you're in them.”

Silas had told me that it was useless to argue with solipsism, that it would always win. I hunted around for a colander to strain the macaroni; Laurel got up, opened a cupboard, and pulled one out for me, then took butter and milk from the refrigerator.

I prepared the pasta, mixing it all together as I said, “Okay, so I'll admit to you that what you fear is possible. I'll give you that. But it's
improbable.
Do I get points for that one?”

She smiled slightly as I handed her a bowl of steaming mac and cheese. “I don't care about probabilities. If something were one-in-a-million, I would wonder if the one had found me. It's the uncertainty that's torture.”

Why couldn't I enter into her suffering? I spooned out a bowl for myself, looking hard at the spoon, the dish, not wanting to meet her eye. I thought back to that first day in the sunroom, when I'd seen the light go out of her eyes.
Look at her
,
I berated myself.
Would you at least look at her?

I leaned back on the countertop, trying to seem casual, and looked across the island into those lost, sorrowful eyes. “Silas misses you,” I said.

“I miss Silas every day,” she said softly. “It breaks my heart to look at him and think,
You're not real. I have imagined you. When I wake up from this, I will not have a twin.
”

I swallowed hard.

“I know what you're thinking, West,” Laurel continued. “And it's true. There are so many things I would love about this life . . . so many things. This incredible house. My parents and how passionate they are about their work. I love that we met you this summer, love how happy you make Silas. I love the way I feel around Whit, and I want to know him
so bad
—I mean, I want to know every little thing about him. And Silas.” She pushed her spoon around in her bowl. “He's the greatest person I have ever met. If I woke up and found I had a different brother, I would hate that other brother, just for not being Silas. I would honestly rather trade in real life for this dream, if it is a dream. I am that terrible of a person, West. I would trade in my real parents and real siblings for this dream family.”

She was breaking
my
heart as I realized the truth of why her condition was so debilitating. “Laurel,” I said quietly but with force, “Silas is your real sibling. The only one you've got. And you're pushing him away.”

“Yeah, sometimes I seem to know that,” she said, “but I can't . . . can't hold on to it.”

I said, “If you were dreaming, you couldn't be having a conversation like this, right?”

“Like what?”

“Like, what's it called, meta-dreaming? That doesn't happen, I don't think.”

Laurel frowned at me as if I were infantile. “Of course it does,” she said. “I've definitely had a dream within a dream—that's what makes it so hard to determine how many layers down I am.”

“Oh.”

“The family stuff isn't the worst part though,” she admitted. “Sometimes I wonder if I invented God, made the whole concept up. Then everything goes haywire—I wonder if maybe we're puppets, or dolls in a dollhouse, and there's this omnipotent being who is moving us around and making us interact. What if it turns out that the ultimate reality is that a child was in charge? Or what if we're characters in a book? That would make the author a god. Or what if something evil is actually in control of the entire universe, only it has disguised itself as something good, and after we die we learn the truth that all good was actually defeated before the earth was ever made, and everything we ever took as virtuous was just evil in a mask?”

“Laurel.”

“Or what if there was actually—”

“Laurel,
stop.
You can convince yourself of anything if you let yourself. You can't let yourself.”

She looked at me, wide-eyed, a little stunned. “
Let?
Oh, West. I wish it were that easy. Worrying about life-as-a-dream is difficult but not impossible. Worrying about a foundation that can't hold the weight of your soul? That's agony.” She swallowed hard and bit back tears. “It makes me wish I didn't exist,” she whispered, and there was so much truth and devastation in the sound of it that I didn't doubt her for one second. “Sometimes I just want oblivion.”

The hair on my arms stood on end.

“I'm tired,” she said suddenly and got up to return to her room.

“Laurel, listen,” I said, following her out of the kitchen. She looked annoyed, and I almost backed down, but she had once said that socializing was good for her, even if she didn't want to do it. “You shouldn't be alone so much.”

She paused on the stairs, considering me. “Okay, then,” she said. “Come with me to Papa and Oma's house.”

“For what?”

“You know.”