The Other Half of Me (12 page)

Russ glances at Alexa in a way he hadn’t during dinner. There’s more intensity in his eyes, and Alexa is kind of reciprocating it. “Thanks for the invite, Alexa.” Then he turns to me. “Maybe we’ll hang out some other time.”

It sounds silly, but I’ve never really thought much about hanging out with Russ. About being his friend. I’ve always thought that he’s on one side of a line that doesn’t really exist, and I’m on the other. Male-female. Brother-sister. Team-alone. Sports-arts. It could be I’ve been selling us both short. “Maybe,” I say to him.

When my mother returns from the kitchen, she hands me a note, and I tug Alexa out the door, leaving the rest of the family behind.

“So,” I say when we’re outside in the dark. The air is shifting, too, bringing small changes that signal one season giving way to the next. “You ready to go out?” I expect she’s going to laugh and say sure, or just hop in the car and fiddle with the radio again.

But instead, she looks up at the house, at the light that’s just been switched on in the attic. “I wouldn’t have minded helping your brother up there. He’s really…something.”

Suddenly those small changes feel huge. A gust of cool wind marks yet another day lost, and Alexa’s comment makes it clear that while we might be linked, we are not necessarily playing on the same team.

TWENTY-ONE

“Jenny’s more like a thoughtful chewer—you know, a hangnail puller or something. I’m more of a thorough gnawer myself.”

Alexa expounds on our different nervous habits while Tate and I watch her get ready to putt. It’s around 9 p.m., so the families with kids who usually crowd Golf on the Green aren’t around. There’s only the three of us and some scattered couples wandering through the course, putting into windmills and over goldfish ponds, wearing down the already trod-upon fake grass. Earlier we posed for a picture, the three of us dwarfing a tacky papier-mâché gorilla that’s seen better days.

Alexa slides her sandaled feet across a bridge that’s meant to look like bamboo, her legs long enough to cause momentary envy from me, even though the envy is accompanied by a smattering of self-loathing. I never want to be one of those girls who wishes she were like someone else, or who looks in the mirror with contempt and longing. But when I glance at my pale thighs in the glow from the tiki torches and back at Alexa, it occurs to me that maybe if things were different, like if she lived here for instance, we might not even run in the same crowd. And how weird would that be?

Tate is third to putt. He hangs back and keeps score with a miniature red pencil. “Under par! Nice one, Alexa,” he enthuses, jotting down her number of strokes and smiling.

I want so much to take Tate’s hand, but I restrain my impulse and shove my hands into my pockets instead, afraid I’ll look too cloying or needy. A crinkling sound makes me fidget for the paper in my pocket. It’s some money and a note from my mother.
Jenny, Treat everyone to ice cream from us. We love you. Mom. P.S. Be careful!

She wrote
us
and
we
, but I know my dad had no part in this. She doesn’t explain why I should be careful or with whom. Alexa? Or Tate? Or just with my own feelings? I smooth the note out and fold it, then put it back into the darkness of my pocket.

“Earth to Jenny? Tune in, Fitz.” Tate twists my nose as if it’s a radio dial, which causes me to wince and push his hand away. “Oh, good, you’re still with us. It’s your turn.”

I line my feet up and check out the hole. It’s a double one where you have to get the ball in on one level and then again after it sinks through a tunnel and onto a smaller patch of green below. “I’m here,” I say. “Just thinking.” I take a practice swing. Alexa laughs.

“You’re prepping for mini golf?” she asks. She means it as a joke, but it stings a little, especially when Tate cracks up.

“Maybe she’s painting in her head?” Tate asks. I despise being spoken about in the third person when I’m right there, but I suck it up, swing, and tap the ball. I will it to be impressive, like in a movie when the girl who isn’t athletic suddenly creams everyone else. But the ball moves only a few inches.

“That didn’t work,” Alexa says with a frown. “You should be allowed a do-over. Don’t you think, T?”

My shoulders slump. T? She’s got a nickname for him. “I don’t need an extra putt. Just go,” I mumble.

Alexa steps forward, drops her bright pink ball onto the starting pad, and with hardly a glance, takes her shot. She peers down to see where the ball came out. “Not quite a hole in one, but close. You get that, T? That’s two for me.”

Tate writes her score down, then takes his turn. We don’t seem to be following any kind of order. Maybe this is symbolic. I want him to be affectionate with me. Even though I usually don’t like PDA, I could use it now.

“Want to help me line up my shot?” I ask Tate, faux flirting and hoping he’ll come up behind me and press against me as he demonstrates the right way to swing.

“You can do it, Fitz,” he says, forever encouraging, as he waits for me to take my turn so he can complete the round.

It takes me not three, not six, but ten strokes to get through the fake volcano hole. When I emerge on the other side of it, the prerecorded sounds of lava roaring in the background, Tate and Alexa are in hysterics. Her lithe body is folded over, her hand on his arm to steady herself. My face feels hot with anxiety. First Russ, now Tate?

“Alexa wants ice cream after this. You game?” Tate asks me. He’s not fawning over her, but it’s so easy to picture him liking Alexa. She is so his type.

I feel sick.

I shrug and commit only to
maybe.
Tate wanders over to the mermaid fountain at the seventeeth hole, takes off his shoes, and puts his bare feet in. Underneath the water his skin appears luminescent and otherworldly. When I watch him chat with Alexa, her theatrics aided by her long limbs and toned figure, I feel that unfastened feeling inside, that Tate will never fully be mine. That there’s a part of him I can’t ever relate to, the guy in the varsity jacket in the hallway at school, the MVP hefted onto his teammates’ shoulders, the ultracool guy who gets the shiniest girl. The girl who gets a hole in one, like Alexa does on the last hole.

“Where’d you find her?” Tate cracks up while Alexa shows him in slow-motion her perfect swing.

“On the Internet,” I say seriously, which makes them both heave with laughter. They laugh so much that I start giggling, too. Then I put my feet in the fountain and Tate puts his foot on mine under the water. It feels cool and soft, as if we’re swimming and no one else can see us.

Just as I’m relaxing into his touch—it’s the first time we’ve touched all night—he points to a sign and says, “Hey, Lex! You get a free round. We all do. See?”

Alexa reads the sign, too. “Sign me up! I never say no to free.”

I glance at my watch. Another eighteen holes will take a long time, especially with how I’m putting. Alexa eyes me as I hold my putter passively. Tate jumps up on the stone bench and checks out the first hole. “If we go now, we won’t have to wait.”

Alexa jumps up where Tate is standing, and I watch my own feet, alone now in the little pond. Suddenly, having my skin in the water feels gross. Who knows what kids spit in here or what bacteria lurks underneath? I take my foot out and shake it off.

“You okay, Jenny?” Alexa asks while looking down at me. It’s like she and Tate are in the bleachers and I’m on the field with no tricks to show off.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I say. “So, do you guys want to get ice cream? Luscious Licks is open.”

Tate nods. “The guys are there, too. We could meet up with them.”

Guys
is shorthand for the football team, also known as the people who would normally not share a lunch table with me. Granted, more than half the time at school, Faye concocts some interesting and unique sandwich and brings two—one for her, one for me—to the art rooms so I can paint while eating and she can discuss the ingredients. But if I did go to the dreaded cafeteria more often, I sure as hell wouldn’t be one of the girls at the player tables (player tables being the sports section of the cavernous lunchroom).

Thinking about the colors of the cafeteria, seeing people’s shirts as dots of blue and orange, red and black forms a picture in my mind. I could paint that—a rectangle of the communal tables at schools, how speckled the lunchroom is, how different it is from right now, when I see only two faces in front of me.

“You both look like a painting,” I say, trying to be in the moment and not live only in my head. “Maybe I’d use a dark blue background.” I look at the sky, taking in the fake glare from the tinted tiki torches. “With a hint of red here and there.”

Tate’s eyes light up. “Wow, we are witnessing a moment of inspiration!”

“You are not,” I say, reaching up to poke him in the stomach. I need that physical contact right now, some proof he’s still mine. Or will be.

Alexa smiles. “I’m going to side with Tate on this one, Jenny. That sounded like a great idea for a painting.”

I look down at my wet feet. She should be siding with me.

“Maybe you should run with it, you know? Right now, while it’s fresh in your mind.” Tate is trying to be supportive, but it feels all wrong. He should want me near him.

“Oh yeah? Just where am I going to run with it? In my unventilated closet? No thanks.”

“What about Downtown?” Tate asks. He looks at Alexa and explains, “Her studio is over there.” He points diagonally from where we are, across the lamplighted street and behind the still-f summer trees to the brick building.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Sid only lets a couple people paint there after hours.”

“That’s neither here nor there, Fitz,” Tate says playfully as he and Alexa step down from the bench and face me.

Alexa puts her putter across her chest, which just accentuates her assets. “How about this? We escort you to the studios and make sure you can get in and paint the world’s best painting ever. Then I drag your boyfriend to go get ice cream with the guys?” She checks out Tate’s reaction. “Or we could hang here and putt while you paint.”

Alexa’s sentences are so problematic I don’t know where to begin. How can she use superlatives when referring to my paintings, which not only aren’t the “best,” but right now aren’t even completed? And now Tate has heard that he’s my boyfriend—from a third party—when he hasn’t even called himself that, at least not to my knowledge. And then there’s the underlying problem of my gorgeous new half sister going for ice cream with my could-be-maybe-unclarified-boyfriend while I’m cloistered away in the paint annex. And said ice cream jaunt would be with Tate’s crew, who might not know about my presence in his life. It feels weird to think about their seeing Tate with Alexa and not with me. Or worse, the two of them flirting and putting together without me to chaperone.

“There’s got to be a way for us to sneak in,” Alexa says. She rubs her hands together even though the night is warm. I suddenly flash forward to fall, winter even, and try to imagine where we’ll all be when it’s cold. Only I can’t quite see that far ahead.

“I could scale the wall or something.” Tate sounds the most jocklike he ever has with me. Maybe it’s Alexa, or maybe it’s the thought of performing heroic tasks, but he looks ready to rumble, and not in a way that’s appealing. More in the way that reminds me of all the things I am not. Yearbook candids insert themselves into my brain, bringing a vision of Tate lifted shoulder-high, and another of him with his arm around a cheerleader.

“You guys are way too dramatic.” I point to the studio building. “Sorry to debunk your breaking and entering fantasy, but it’s not locked. Sid Sleethly keeps a brick wedged into the back door so that the special night owls can get in.” I think about how Sid gets fifteen percent of the commission for displaying and selling these artists’ pieces. I’d give him twenty if I could just have my work on display.

Alexa takes our putters back to the golf shack while Tate pulls me by both hands toward the path that leads across the green to the crosswalk that bridges the road to the studio.

“Come on, Fitz, I know how much you want to get into that art show.” Tate smiles at me and I grip his hands tighter.

Alexa catches up with us, sticking close to my side. We look at each other quickly, just enough to lock eyes and smirk. It’s impossible to imagine that I didn’t know her before, which I guess is that sisterly thing creeping in somewhere.

With each footstep I think about what I’d write on the message board at the donor sibling site:
I met her, and we clicked.
No, that doesn’t sound right. How about,
Since you can’t guess what meeting your sib is going to be like, you may as well just jump in and find out.
Which I guess is what I’ve done, only meeting Alexa in person is more fluid than a jump. It’s like that weird feeling of being on a diving board, when you’re nearly on tiptoe and know you’re about to go into the water but haven’t yet. When you don’t have any clue how it will all work out.

True to my memory, the heavy back door is propped open with an oversized brick.

“I don’t know, guys,” I say. “What if Sid catches me here and I get yelled at?”

“Are you twelve?” Alexa asks mockingly. Sometimes her comments carry a pinch that continues to sting after the words have faded. She doesn’t realize it.

“I just don’t want to lose my privileges here.” I kick at the ground and bite my lip.

“Most likely, you won’t,” Tate says. “Right?”

I sigh. If I were alone right now, sneaking in wouldn’t feel so weird. I’d just suck it up and say inspiration came to me and voilà, here I am. But with my enablers, I feel like I’m part of a truth or dare game gone awry. Well, not awry quite yet, but on its way.

I take a step toward the door and Tate follows close enough that I can feel his breath on the back of my neck. Part of me wants to turn around and kiss him right in front of Alexa, and I pause, about to do it, but then I stop. Public pawing has ownership attached, and Tate and I don’t have the history. I hope we will soon. Plus, a part of me thinks Alexa has the same competitive spirit my parents say I lack. I feel bad even thinking it, but a part of me wonders if she’d try to sway Tate’s attention toward her. Still, it’s like what Tate said about getting in trouble here: that probably won’t happen. But you never know.

Inside, the dank entryway echoes with our footsteps, and I cringe when Alexa sneezes. Then when she looks at me, we get that laughter rising, like in church or in an assembly when you know you can’t laugh, and it makes it worse.

“No, wait, shhhh,” I say, choking back the laughter.

“I can’t.” Alexa puts her hand over her mouth, but the laughter leaks out until we’re both clutching each other and shaking. Happy tears form in my eyes, and Alexa finally guffaws so loudly it’s not worth hiding anymore. All worries of her competitive streak wash away as she pulls me up the stairs. “If we get busted, just blame it on me, okay?” she says. “I can take the heat.”

My heart feels full. I have Tate, whom I’ve lusted after and pined for for years, trailing behind me, and my sister in front of me. I take his hand and squeeze it, and he squeezes back. But then, right when I’m ensconced in the good feeling of having them both on my side, Alexa stares at Tate, and rather than holding me still, he drops my hand right away.

“You know what it’s like?” I say to Alexa when Tate’s in the bathroom at the studio and she and I are in the back stairwell, our voices echoing even though we’re whispering. I want to convey to her how much I like Tate, just in case she’s moving in on him, but I can’t.