That’s how I always felt. But suddenly, I felt embarrassed of it. To have no friends. To be like Dad.

  “Fine, I’ll get it!” I said, because when our parents refused to do something, it became your job, unless you weren’t there, and then it became my job. “It’s probably for me anyway.”

  I left the living room, walked through the kitchen, and as soon as I put my hand on it, it stopped ringing.

  “Hello?” I said, but there was nothing. Just a dial tone. I put it back on the hook, and in that moment of silence, I could hear Mom and Dad from the TV room.

  “Admit it!” Dad said. “You think the president is handsome.”

  Mom laughed. I loved Mom’s laugh. Mom’s laugh was your laugh, and it made things sound funnier than they were.

  “Richard!” Mom said. “You’re being ridiculous.”

  “Only if you admit it,” Dad said. Then he whispered, so low I could barely hear it, but I heard it. “Admit that you want to fuck the president of the United States.”

  “Fine,” Mom said. “Yes. Okay. I want to fuck the president. Are you happy now?”

  “Very,” Dad said.

  I seized with panic in the kitchen. I had no idea there were people in this world that wanted to fuck the president of the United States. It didn’t sound right. It sounded like a crime. Like something I should tell Mom about, but Mom already knew. Mom was fine with it and Dad was even happy about it.

  What?

  If you were there, the whole thing would have been funny. We would have looked at each other and laughed until we were crumbly messes on the kitchen floor. But you weren’t there—you were out. Probably done with Billy’s game now, driving to Watch Hill. The music was probably loud and his hand was probably on your thigh. Or maybe you were already there. Maybe you were already surrounded by the beautiful snow, in the parking lot, kissing. Maybe you were on your back and your boyfriend was on top, undressing you, sucking on your tits, which is what you said Billy called them once, and I was horrified. “Tits?” I asked. I couldn’t picture Billy saying the word. But you said, “Yeah. That’s what they are, Sally. Tits.”

  I felt sick.

  I wanted to go upstairs, crawl into our bed. But I returned to the TV room. I had to finish taking notes. I sat down and couldn’t even look at Mom and Dad, because they didn’t seem like Mom and Dad anymore.

  “Who was it?” Mom asked.

  “Nobody,” I said. “No message.”

  “Telemarketer,” Mom said. “They never leave messages. That’s how you know.”

  I shrugged. I knew nothing about telemarketers. But I knew that Mom wanted to believe it was a telemarketer for some reason. She continued eating her popcorn and drinking her wine and seemed satisfied about her decision to not pick up the phone. To not be the maid, for once.

  “You still getting down the important stuff?” Dad asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  The president continued: This is the information age. We must not use disease as a weapon. We must work with other countries. But none of this sounded important anymore. Now the only thing that seemed important about the president was the fact that Mom wanted to fuck him. And that Dad, for some reason, wasn’t even bothered by it. Dad was just sitting there, drinking beer and munching on pretzels.

  “Want some?” Dad asked.

  “No,” I said.

  I felt a weird kind of pain, spreading across my torso. Mom moved closer to the TV, as if she was on some kind of date with the president.

  This is America.

  This is planet earth.

  And that was the State of the Union.

  “Thank God,” Dad said, and the western came back on again. But it was ten now, and the western was mostly over, which meant all the Native Americans were dead.

  * * *

  I went upstairs and I waited in the dark for you. I kept rehearsing what I was going to tell you when you came home, and how I was going to say it. I decided I would blurt it out right away, before you could take off your earrings, before you could utter one word about Billy and all the amazing places he touched you at the beach. I was going to say, in a comically low and solemn voice, “I don’t know how to tell you this, Kathy, but Mom wants to fuck the president of the United States.”

  And you were going to be shocked. “No!” you were going to say.

  “It’s true!” I would say, and then we would laugh and laugh and laugh, the way we did when we were on the side of the curb, saying fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck until all the bad things of this world were like a joke between us.

  But you were late. And I got tired. I opened your notebook and I wrote in all capitals, MOM WANTS TO FUCK THE PRESIDENT so you would see it as soon as you came home.

  * * *

  In the morning, we all slept in by accident. We didn’t wake up until Billy knocked on the door.

  “Shit,” you said. You ran to the bathroom. You brushed your teeth while you peed, combed your hair while you ate an apple. Then, before you left, you looked at me. “Sally, where are those notes on the State of the Union?”

  The notebook was still in my bed, under my covers. “I have them,” I said.

  “Can I have them?” you asked.

  And maybe if you had said please.

  Maybe if you had asked nicely.

  Maybe if you had said thank you, Sally, for taking notes on the State of the Union while I was out fooling around with my boyfriend. But you didn’t.

  “Only if Billy takes me to school,” I said.

  “What? That wasn’t part of the deal.”

  “Yeah, well the deal was not good.”

  “Sally, you’re my sister,” you said. “Sisters do each other favors.”

  “When was the last time you did me a favor?”

  “Honestly, I can’t think of it. But he can’t take you to school. Hendrick is in the opposite direction. We’ll be late for the quiz!”

  “So?” I said, and I made sure to say it exactly like you. “It’s just a quiz. Who cares?”

  “I do,” you said. “I need to get a good grade.”

  You begged. You said something about Villanova. Something about needing to be in the top 10 percent of your class.

  “This is my future, Sally,” you said.

  But I was unmoved. I didn’t want to think about your future with Billy at Villanova. I wanted you to stay here, in our house, forever.

  “Then maybe you should have stayed home last night,” I said.

  “Sally! Come on. Why are you being like this?”

  I could have told you. I could have explained what this year had been like for me, what the boys did to me on the bus, what it felt like to lose you a little bit each day.

  But you were in a rush. And I was silent, spiteful. I held the notes firmly behind my back. I was tired of you getting all the things you wanted. You lunged for them, and you missed, and I was glad.

  “Fine,” you said. You grabbed your coat. “Come on.”

  * * *

  You didn’t talk to me on the drive. I didn’t know if this was because you were annoyed with me or if you were just busy trying to absorb all the things the president said before your quiz. But at the time, I didn’t care. I got what I wanted. I was in Billy’s back seat, and I felt like a queen as we drove by Rick Stevenson and Billy turned up the music. Counting Crows.

  “Here we go,” Billy said.

  “Drive fast,” you said. “I can’t be late for this quiz.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Billy said.

  You returned to your notebook, and Billy drove faster. He put his hand on your thigh. He stopped at the red light on Main and started speaking to me through the mirror.

  “So what do you think, Holt?” he asked.

  “What do I think?” I asked.

  “About the car.”

  Nobody had ever asked me what I thought about a car.

  “I don’t think anything about cars,” I said.

  “Of course, you do,” he said. “You’re always thinking, Holt. It’s what you do.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked, confused that Billy had, at some point, drawn conclusions about me.

  “Because you always look like you want to say something, but then you don’t.”

  I wanted to ask him to keep going, to talk about me some more, but I blushed. Looked out the window. This whole time, I had no idea that Billy had real thoughts about me. “Well, I don’t think much about cars,” I said.

  Then I told him all I knew about cars, which was everything I learned from listening to Dad try to buy a new one for himself all year: a good car is a Subaru, because every other car is a death trap. No exceptions.

  He laughed. “Oh, great,” he said.

  “But I mean, it’s nice. It’s really clean.”

  I ran my hand over the leather of the back seat. “Yeah,” he said, as if this was his only complaint about the car. “Sometimes, I think it’s too clean. It feels like a rental.”

  Your boyfriend said he preferred his cars to be a bit more disgusting, like his old one, which was so disgusting it was awesome. Once, he found an entire stick of butter in the back seat and he couldn’t remember why it was ever there in the first place. He sounded proud of this, like these were the things that real cars are made of. Butter.

  The new car was automatic. Another problem with the car, Billy said. He liked shifting gears. He said it kept you connected to the car. Like it was a part of your body.

  I agreed, though I had never driven. Except when Dad used to let us drive down the street while sitting on his lap. Mom used to get so mad about this, but Dad didn’t understand what the big deal was. “I’m in control, Susan,” he’d say.

  When the light turned green, Billy sped down the quiet part of Main Street, away from the stores. That’s when you finally looked up from your notebook.

  “Mom wants to fuck the president?” you said.

  “What’d you just say?” Billy asked. He turned down the music. I blushed again. I had completely forgotten what I had written in your notebook. I had forgotten all about Mom and the president.

  “Oh my God,” you said. You turned around to look at me. You started to laugh, just as I wanted. “Sally, why did you write this in my notebook? I have to give these notes to Mrs. Klausterman.”

  “Wait, who wants to fuck the president?” Billy asked. “Your mom?”

  “Look,” you said, holding up the notebook. “Look at what Sally wrote.”

  And Billy looked.

  That’s how quickly it happens. That’s what Dad has always said about accidents. All it takes is one second, one glance, girls, one moment of not paying attention, and all of a sudden, there’s a wrench falling a thousand feet from a cell phone tower. And Jesus Christ, this time it fell on Jim’s head, and Jim wasn’t wearing a hard hat, and now poor Jim is going to be dribbling oatmeal out his mouth for the rest of his life because some jackass didn’t keep his wrench secured to his belt.

  “Fuck!” Billy said.

  There was a deer in the middle of the road. A stupid deer. And Billy didn’t want to hit it. Billy didn’t see it coming. It was just standing there in the middle of the road, not even moving, as if it had been waiting for us. Billy swerved hard to the right, toward a tree.

  “Billy!” you shouted.

  And that was it—your very last word. That’s what I told the police. That’s what I put in the official report. It seemed important to document for some reason. It seemed like something people ought to know, how you called out for Billy even in that final moment, even as he killed you. Because that was how much you loved him.

  THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

  (AND OTHER VERY IMPORTANT MOMENTS IN HISTORY)

  At this point, I’m not sure what to tell you about your own death. The people at the morgue, they stood in front of Mom and Dad, and they said, It all happened so fast—blunt trauma to the head—you wouldn’t have even felt it. They somehow made this sound like a good thing, as if you were spared the knowledge of your own death.

  But I wasn’t fooled. I was over in the blue chairs at the morgue, and I knew you’d want to know everything about your death, the same way you wanted to know if Billy was talking to Lisa at the pool or if you had spinach in your teeth or if your hair had become frizzy after a summer storm.

  I knew it was my job to tell you the truth, because when I didn’t, you would look in the mirror and say, “Sally, why didn’t you tell me my hair was so frizzy today?” which is exactly why I didn’t tell you. You sounded mad at me, as if I was your hair—I was your ugliness—following you around, haunting you from all sides.

  But I am much older now. I am twenty-eight. I know a lot of things I did not know when I was sitting on those blue chairs, waiting to identify your body. I know there are some things people are better off not knowing, which is why Billy kept ordering me not to look at your face after we hit the tree. “Don’t look!” he kept shouting, and yet I looked, because you were my sister, and not looking felt wrong, as if I were leaving you all alone in your own death.

  But now sometimes when I am combing my hair in the mirror, when I am brushing my teeth, when I am smoothing cream on my face at night, when I am laughing with my fiancé on a balcony in New York City and I forget, for one moment, that you ever existed (amazing that this kind of thing can even happen), I close my eyes and see your teeth. They were hemorrhagic, the autopsy report documented. So bloody, it makes me feel faint.

  So that is all I am going to say about it for now. Because there are other things—better things—I know you’d want to hear. Like the fact that Billy leaned close to you, hovered over your body, shouting “Kathy!” with such purpose and determination that I believed he loved you. I believed that the louder Billy shouted, the more you’d come alive. Like one of those clap-o-meters on The Price Is Right, the louder your boyfriend shouted, the more the red thing on TV would rise, and you would win. You would stand up and reclaim your life. Your prize.

  But you didn’t move. You were clearly dead. And yet, I kept asking, “Is she dead?” as if only Billy knew the truth about death. But Billy wouldn’t answer. Billy just continued to shout, “Sally, don’t look at your sister!” and then added, “Go get help!”

  It was the first time Billy had called me Sally since the day he saved me at the pool. It made things feel very serious again—too serious—like this was a thing that was actually happening. You were actually dead. So I got out of the car, and the whole time I ran for help, I kept thinking, Was that really my sister? Was that Kathy?

  I knocked on a house with a red door, but the woman inside was already in the process of opening it. The children, already at the windows. She had heard the crash. She had called 911. And yet this didn’t feel like enough. She didn’t understand. She hadn’t seen you. “You have to help my sister!” I shouted at her, and in the silence that followed, I noticed the white sweatband wrapped around her head. I heard the TV in the background. I saw the woman on screen, lifting her thigh to the beat of Gloria Estefan. Aerobics.

  By the time I returned to the scene, it felt like the accident had nothing to do with me anymore. It looked like a scene out of some terrible movie Dad might make us watch. The cops kept going, “Come on, son, you have to leave her,” and the boyfriend—much bloodier than I remember Billy being—kept saying, “No, I won’t leave her!” And then the cops said, “You have to leave her, son. We need to clear the scene,” in their deepest, most cop-like voices, as if it was in everybody’s manly interests to comply, but the boyfriend didn’t see it that way. The boyfriend was bleeding from nearly every part of his face—his jaw, broken in three places, I would learn later—and yet his only duty, as boyfriend, was to stay with you. He shrugged off the cops and ran back to the car to hold his girlfriend one last time because he has just realized something important. He realized, at the very end, how in love he was. He realized this was his last chance to tell you, and what an idiot he had been. Why didn’t he tell you earlier? What a stupid boy he was. “I love you, Kathy,” Billy shouted, over and over again. And then he put his hands to his face and cried between the spaces of his fingers because that was how, I learned, your boyfriend cried.

  “I was in the accident!” I told the officers. “That’s my sister! Let me back in!”

  But this only made them concerned for me. They brought me to the back of an ambulance so I could get my vitals checked. I was fine, an EMT said, which disappointed me greatly. I was perfectly fine. Emerged from the car without a scratch.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  As I sat there, I kept waiting for someone to tell me that I was dead. To put a stethoscope to my heart and say, She’s not working. But then I saw myself in the glare of the ambulance window. I saw my ponytail, still high up on my head just as I liked it. My snap bracelets, all four of them, latched to my wrist. Mom and Dad, running toward me like I was still alive.

  I was fine. But Billy was not. Billy was bleeding from his head. Billy’s face slammed into the steering wheel when we hit the tree. Billy needed to get into the ambulance right now. Come on, son, the police said one more time, and finally Billy was too tired or too bloody to refuse. He got into the ambulance, and then he was gone.

  None of us even said goodbye. But that was okay. I kept thinking I would see you both again very soon. So I just sat there, by the ambulance, watching the cops take photos of you in the car.

  While I waited, the cop asked me questions. How did the accident happen? Did Billy swerve on purpose? Was he driving recklessly? Did he mean to drive that fast into the tree? What kind of boyfriend was he? And why were they asking me? Did they think Billy did this on purpose? Did they think this was Billy’s fault? This was my fault. I was the one who made Billy drive me to school, and he did because he was a good boyfriend.

  “He is a very good boyfriend,” I said to them. He always rang the doorbell. He brought us tulips. He ate Mom’s potato salad with a gusto we could never muster up. “He really loves my mom’s potato salad.”