Encore Edie (16 page)

The
XLERATOR
stops suddenly. I stand in the silence, realizing what I’m scared of is the way I’m going to feel when I go upstairs and see my sister and the boy I turned down holding hands, again, still.

Edie in the Sky with Diamonds

“This is cute,” Dex says. “You should try this on.”

“Blah,” I say.

She holds the baby blue T-shirt up to my chest and looks at me appraisingly. “Maybe the colour’s a bit too light for you.”

“Do they have it in black?”

“Pink,” she says, flicking through the rack. “Orange, green, yellow. Maybe the green?”

“Blah,” I say. “Lemme see. No, blah.”

We’re shopping. Dex and I are at the mall, actually shopping together. Mom dropped us off by the doors with fifty dollars each and said she’d pick us up again in the same spot in two hours. It’s the first week of July and we’re leaving for our summer holidays in a few days. We’re supposed to be getting holiday clothes. I’ve been along while Dex
shopped lots of times, complaining to Mom the whole way, but I’ve never actually shopped alone with her before. She’s making a supreme effort to be nice: staying with me instead of abandoning me at store entrances to go off on her own, finding clothes for both of us, telling me how I could look good. Mom put her up to it, I guess.

“This,” she says. It’s a hoodie, black, with a row of white surfboards down one sleeve. “It’s black.”

“Because I surf,” I say, and she puts it back.

I wander over to a rack of candy-striped flip-flops and pick out the loudest, neon-pinkest pair. “For you,” I call across the store, holding them up.

“Oh my god,” she says, and we both start to laugh. The girl at the counter gives us a dirty look.

I grab a brown pair in my size and a pale rose for Dex and go back to her. “Actually,” she says. We buy both pairs. “Bathing suits, now.”

The bathing suit store has bikinis all over the place, a wall of board shorts for boys, and a single small rack of racing suits hidden in a back corner. I go straight there and Dexter groans. “Wait, let me guess,” she says. “Black. You need to splash out.”

I pick out a navy blue.

“You’re hopeless, you know that, Edith?” she says. “A lost cause. Seriously.”

“Don’t call me Edith.”

“Robert says—” She stops, flustered. We pick through
the racks in silence for a few minutes and then she says, “I’m going to go try this on, okay?”

“Whatever,” I say.

“Yeah, but don’t take off on me. I want your opinion.”

I raise my eyebrows, because when has she ever wanted my opinion? She goes into the change room and fiddles with the curtain from the inside, making sure there are no cracks to peek through.

“Finding everything okay?” a salesman asks, startling me.

“I’m just waiting for my sister.”

He picks a two-piece off a rack, long baggy shorts and a tight racer top in olive green. He holds it up as though picturing it on me. It’s not a bikini, not exactly.

“Matches your eyes. I’m just saying.” He hands it to me, smiles, and goes back to his counter. He reminds me of Daniel. I twitch the change room curtain aside and go in.

“Edie!” Dex shrieks. She’s got a bikini on, purple. It fits her perfectly, of course.

“Shove over,” I say.

“Is that a two-piece?”

“Just shut up,” I say.

The suit fits. Dex starts digging in her purse for her cellphone. “I am so calling Mom. Edie’s buying a two-piece.”

“Grow up,” I say. I put my clothes back on and walk out of the store, leaving the suit with Dex in the change room. She catches up to me a few minutes later. I’m leaning against the railing, looking down at the food court below.

“I bought both suits,” she says. “It looked really good on you, Edie.”

“What does Robert say?”

“What?”

“You started saying something before about Robert.”

“Oh.” She flushes a little. “Nothing. I was just remembering he told me he couldn’t believe how two people could be so different and still be sisters. Hey, you want to play a game?”

“I want coffee,” I say.

We take the escalator down to the food court and order frozen caramel lattes from the fancy coffee place. “Inside or out?” she says, meaning where should we sit.

“In.” We get the best table, at the far back of the store, behind the palm plant, under the picture of the Eiffel Tower. I want to hate the creamy sweet drink, pure Dexter, but it’s delicious. “Okay,” I say. “What’s your game?”

“You make a list of everything that’s, like, totally you. Like, colours and clothes and music and—I don’t know. Just everything that makes you
you
. Then you make a list for me. I make a list for me and a list for you. We compare lists and see if anything’s the same.”

“That’s it?”

She goes up to the counter and smiles at the man working there. A minute later she comes back with two pens and paper napkins for us to write on. “No peeking,” she says.

“You know this is lame, right?”

She’s already writing.

I sit for a while, sipping my drink, staring at the picture of the Eiffel Tower. One day I’ll go there. There’s a famous bookstore in Paris called Shakespeare and Company; that’s a place I’d like to see. I write down
EDIE
and under that I write
Shakespeare
.

For the last three years we’ve been going to the same place for our holidays, a cabin in a pine forest on a lake on an island. That’s where we met Robert and his mom; they had the cabin just down from ours. Robert’s mom called our mom a few weeks ago to make sure we booked our holidays at the same time, so we’ll all be together for the fourth year in a row. Except, I guess, some of us will be more together than others.

I write
DEX
and stop. Right this second, I can’t think of anything to put under her name that isn’t mean. I go back to my own list and write
cheese, jazz, black nail polish, black coffee, Sam, ice cream, books
.

“Almost done?” Dex says.

Quickly, under her name, I write
pink lipstick, ballet, Mean Megan, cinnamon bagels, sushi, top forty, learner’s licence, princess clothes, Robert
.

“Okay, trade,” she says.

I give her my napkin and she gives me hers. Under my name she’s written
coffee, Bollywood, green, singing, flip-flops, murder mysteries, writing
. Under her name she’s written
sushi, beach, purple, mangoes, historical fiction, university, photography
.

“Singing?”
I say.

“Joke,” she says without looking up from my list. “What are princess clothes?”

“Like, you know, pink and sparkly. Like you.” She looks up at me now. I suddenly feel as if I’m seeing her for the first time. Jean shorts, short-sleeved white lace blouse over a coffee-coloured tank top, black ballet flats. “Like you used to wear. Purple? Not pink?”

“Not so much anymore.”

We both read some more.

“Cinnamon bagels!” she says, slapping herself on the forehead. “How did I forget that?”

“Bollywood,” I say, copying her gesture, meaning
Same here
. “I guess I do wear a lot of green. I never really thought about it.”

“You have never in your life worn black nail polish,” Dex says.

“I always wanted to try. Photography?”

“I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to do for a career,” my sister says. “It kind of interests me. Fashion, or maybe movies. Music videos? I don’t know. I’d like to learn to use a movie camera.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No,” she says.

“What about ballet?”

She shrugs. “There’s no future for me in dance. I’m not good enough.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Seriously. I was good when I was ten, but you should see some of these girls now. It’s all they do. They home-school so they can spend all day practising. I can’t keep up with them. Plus, my body is wrong. I’m too big and heavy.”

I point to her drink and ask if she’s going to go puke it into the toilet when we’re done.

She laughs. “No. That’s the point. I don’t want to be that person. I think I’m almost through with ballet. I’d like to try something else.”

“University.”

“It’s not so far away. I think about it a lot.”

“Is that why you’re always looking at the IKEA catalogue? Picking out stuff for your dorm room?”

I mean to be funny, but she just nods. I wonder if Mei does that too.

“We didn’t overlap much,” she says. “But we both got lots right, too.”

“You got more than me,” I say. “I guess I’ve been distracted this year.”

“You got lots right about me. You got cinnamon bagels and sushi. You got Robert.”

“
You
got Robert, actually,” I say.

Then we’re both blushing and not looking at each other.

“Hey, pass me that bag,” I say, too brightly, right at the
same time as she says, “Stay here, finish your drink, I just want to run to the drugstore for a sec. I’ll be right back.”

“I’m done anyway,” I say.

We meet five minutes later at the top of the escalator. I open the bag and pull out the flip-flops I just exchanged for her: purple instead of pink, to match her new bikini.

Dex hands me a bottle of black nail polish.

“How’d it go?” Mom asks when we get in the car.

“Edie!” Mom shouts.

“Edie!” Dad shouts.

“Edie!” Dex shouts.

I sigh. I’m lying on my bed, painting my nails again. The only thing more fun than black nail polish, I’ve discovered, is peeling off black nail polish. I’m a compulsive peeler. Dex says this is disgusting. At breakfast this morning she said, “Every time I look at you, you’re all picky and disgusting.”

I said thanks.

“You need help,” she said. “I’ll take you shopping again before school starts, okay? I’ll fix you up.”

I picked and peeled a black strip off my pinky.

“Gag reflex,” Dex said, and left the room.

Now I paint a last slick black stripe across the same pinky, making it perfect again. I must have picked and painted half a dozen times since Dex gave me this bottle. Downstairs, Mom and Dad and Dex are loading the car. We leave for the
cabin today, supposedly on the one o’clock ferry. My duffle bag is packed so full it stands upright all by itself in the corner of my room. Books, mostly. I should be downstairs right now, helping, or at least making funny faces with Dad and Dex behind Mom’s back because she’s panicking about where she put the tea towels and the sunblock and that we’re all going to miss the ferry, as though there will never be another one ever, ever again.

“Edie!” everyone calls again.

I flutter my fingers in the sunlight that lies in a hot stripe across my bed, admiring my newly glossy black claws.

Feet stomp up the stairs—Dex. “Mom is going to freak,” she says when she sees me. “You’re not even ready.”

“I was ready last night,” I say, waving at my bag in the corner. “I’ll bring it down when my nails are dry.”

Dex rolls her eyes. “I wish I never bought you that ugly junk. You’re supposed to try it one time and then you realize how stupid it looks and you move on. It’s called maturing. I was trying to help you accelerate the process.”

“Whatever,” I say.

“I’m taking this down,” she says, grabbing my bag. “We’re going to have to repack the trunk again to fit it in.”

I flop back on my bed, arms and legs splayed like a sea star, and listen to my books go
bump bump bump
down the stairs.

Two weeks. Fourteen days. Three hundred and thirty-six hours, one hundred and ninety-six of them waking.
One hundred and ninety-six hours to kill. That’s eleven thousand, seven hundred and sixty minutes; seven hundred and five thousand, six hundred seconds of not knowing where to put myself. Some of that time will be meals and showers and peeing, I guess, but after that—I can just see it.
Of course we don’t mind if you come with us, Edie. Actually, it’s a two-person boat—maybe you could watch our stuff on the dock? You can have the next turn. We’re going to watch a movie in Robert’s cabin tonight, do you want to come, Edie? You don’t have to. You look tired. Oh, you do want to come? That’s great! You can sit—how about on that chair over there, and we’ll take the couch? It’s pretty much a two-person couch, actually. Hey, Edie, could you go make some popcorn? Hey, Edie, could you run get some ice? Hey, Edie, could you go jump in the lake?