“She hasn’t called or anything,” she said.
“Of course she hasn’t,” muttered Avery. “She knows we’re here.”
“But why wouldn’t she wait to see us?” asked Bonnie in a small voice.
Avery looked at her sisters’ crestfallen faces. They were like flowers with all their petals picked off. She couldn’t believe their mother would do this; first that ice-cold email about the apartment and now this. Except, of course, she could.
“Because she’s a cunt,” she said. The doorman gave her a shocked look. “Sorry,” she added. “But she is.” The elevator doors opened, and the three of them picked the fridge back up, without laughing this time, and only then did Avery have the thought that it was the exact shape and size of a coffin.
—
The three of them stood side by side in front of Nicky’s closet and, as they stared at it, Avery felt as if it grew to an insurmountable height, one hundred feet at least. She had the overwhelming urge to simply lie down. They’d left the Smeg by the front door; the magic that had seemed to encircle it, and by proxy them, evaporating like heat. Suddenly, it was just somebody’s old fridge.
“Right,” Avery said, forcing herself to sound brisk. “We need three piles: keep, donate, and discard.”
Thankfully, the ever-organized Nicky kept her closet tidy. She did, however, love to shop. Since her teacher’s salary was not large, she favored high street brands like Forever 21, Strawberry, or Zara, places she could go for a pick-me-up, as she called it, and get herself something to wear that night like a going-out top or the kind of plated jewelry that left green marks on her skin. As a result, most items went in the donate and discard piles: stacks of pilled T-shirts, a tote bag filled with salt-crusted bikinis, a feather-trimmed cowboy hat, likely for some bachelorette party they all would have made fun of her for attending. Avery had often advised Nicky to save her money and spend it on one special thing instead of ten throwaway items, but Nicky liked the act of stopping in to a store after work the same way others liked a happy hour drink: It took the edge off.
In many ways, Nicky’s taste hadn’t changed all that much since she was a kid; she still loved feathers, florals, and flounce. Looking through her things now, Avery could feel every age Nicky had been present in that room: the gap-toothed child doing dance recitals in the living room, the preening teenager getting ready for a date, the sorority girl laughing with her friends. She touched the feathers of the cowboy hat gently. So what if Nicky had liked things that were a bit tacky? Looking through the piles of off-the-shoulder tops and maxi skirts, fake leather boots and tangled necklace chains, Avery regretted ever giving her sister a hard time. It was sweet that Nicky loved this stuff; if shopping had remained the worst of her addictions, she would have been lucky indeed.
“Motherfucker!” exclaimed Lucky from the other side of the room. “I knew she took this from me.”
She was holding up a vintage Spice Girls tour tee. At the sight of it, Bonnie and Avery involuntarily smiled. Between Avery and Lucky’s seven-year age gap and the vastly differently musical tastes of all the sisters, there was only one band that had ever managed to appeal to all four of them simultaneously and that was the Spice Girls. When Lucky was eight, Nicky was ten, Bonnie was thirteen, and Avery was fifteen, they’d convinced their mother to buy them tickets to the reunion tour. It was too expensive to go in Manhattan, but they had managed to find seats in the back of the Long Island venue. They’d begged to rent a limousine, as some of the other girls from their school had done to take them to the concert in the city, but their mother considered that a ridiculous expense in addition to the tickets, so they took the Long Island Railway instead. Since she didn’t want to pay for five tickets, their mother had trusted Avery to chaperone them, handing her a credit card for emergencies only and strict instructions to come straight home after. The concert was three hours of heaven, all of them scream-singing the words to every song along with thousands of other girls, lifted together on a tide of riotous, unapologetic joy, the feeling that to be a girl with other girls was not some weakness, as they had been told, but a power, the best and luckiest power on earth. Afterward, still riding an estrogen-induced high, Avery had used the credit card to buy Bonnie, Nicky, and Lucky each a tour T-shirt. She claimed that she was too old to wear one, but really, she had just been worried about their mother seeing the credit card bill.
Bonnie picked up the tee, which was emblazoned with five grinning faces and the familiar invocation to Spice Up Your Life.
“No, this one was mine,” she said. “See? It’s a large. I always bought everything size large.”
“And you, extra small,” said Avery, pointing at Lucky, who, true to form, was wearing a tiny cropped T-shirt and low-rise jeans, now topped with the feather-trimmed cowboy hat she’d fished out of the discard pile. “Which hasn’t changed.”
“I let her have it after she gave hers away to Carter Beaumont,” said Bonnie.
“Carter-Fucking-Beaumont!” exclaimed Lucky, like it was all one word. “I’d forgotten about that asshole.”
She glanced quickly at Avery to see if she was going to scold her, but Avery laughed. Carter was an asshole. The middle and high school all four of them had attended was a parish-funded Catholic school in the East Eighties. Because of this, it had substantially lower school fees than any of the surrounding private schools, including tuition breaks for enrolling multiple children, which was how their parents were able to send all four of them to it after their public elementary school. Despite its lack of extracurriculars, especially in the arts and humanities, it had a good reputation for offering a thorough, fluff-free education, which was why a number of wealthy Upper East Siders—especially the ones who worked in finance and lived in fear of spawning arts-oriented offspring who might aspire to fields as unlucrative as writing or, even worse, acting—enrolled their children in it. Also, no one loves a deal more than the rich.
This was why, though Avery and her sisters never lived in fear of not having food, shelter, new schoolbooks, clean uniforms, and even trivial niceties like sparkly stationery and matching pajamas, they often felt poor at that school. It had never seemed weird to them that their six-person family was squeezed into a two-bedroom apartment—after all, at their elementary school they’d known kids with all sorts of living situations, including grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins all in one home—until they met the likes of Carter-Fucking-Beaumont. Carter lived in a townhouse between Madison and Park, a home where the doorbell played the opening phrase of “Nessun Dorma” and each of Carter’s six siblings had their own floor.
None of the sisters were great at fitting into this social milieu except Nicky, who by the end of her first week was already best friends with Carter and a blonde named Mary (there was a minimum of at least three Marys in any Catholic school) and calling themselves “the muskies,” a take on the Three Musketeers. Spoiled and mean-spirited, Carter took great pleasure in pitting Mary and Nicky against each other and testing each of their loyalties to her. Shortly after the Spice Girls concert, Nicky had been invited to Carter’s for a birthday sleepover during which they’d watched Titanic, made ice cream sundaes using the entire Dylan’s Candy Bar assortment, and concocted a face mask following a recipe from one of Carter’s mom’s fashion magazines.
Two terrible things happened that night, according to Nicky. The first was that during a game of Truth or Dare, she had been dared to eat some of the face mask, formulated from a mix of avocado, coconut oil, and moisturizer, just one taste of which prompted her to throw up liquid ice cream all over Carter’s en suite bathroom. This was bad enough, but the lasting effect was worse. Since this had been her very first taste of avocado, Nicky would never as an adult be able to enjoy the delight of a good guacamole, since even the slightest morsel of an avocado’s creamy flesh immediately recalled for her the acrid savor of drugstore moisturizer, a fact that, to her dying day, remained one of her greatest grievances.
But worse even than the face mask fiasco was that their ever-abstemious mother, who, unlike every other mom on the planet, according to Nicky, did not have a goodie drawer filled with viable gifts for the endless tween birthdays she was destined to be invited to that year, had sent her to this sleepover armed with only a disposable camera she’d picked up on sale from the post office as a gift. When Carter had opened this present, the look on her face had not been disgust so much as confusion, a confusion so profoundly humiliating to Nicky that she had immediately leapt up, opened her overnight bag, and fished out the brand-new Spice Girls tee she had been planning on proudly wearing the next morning. She offered it to Carter, explaining that her mother hadn’t had time to gift wrap it, who accepted it with a satisfied shrug.
“You gave her yours after that?” asked Avery.
Bonnie nodded, still gently holding the shirt.
“She was so upset afterward,” she said. “Remember her crying when she got home?”
She had sobbed until a blood vessel beneath her eye burst, but Avery knew Nicky wouldn’t have done it differently if given the chance. She wanted to fit in with those girls at any cost, and she had succeeded. Avery wished she had Bonnie’s compassion, but what she remembered feeling was frustration. Why had Nicky given away something she loved, not to mention something Avery had gotten royally reprimanded by their mother for buying, to suck up to the likes of Carter? Why was she so quick to abandon herself to be popular? Even once she reached her twenties and, to Avery’s relief, developed deeper friendships with more substantive people like her fellow teachers, she maintained the relationships from her youth. Your sister has a knack for friendship, their mother used to say, and it was true, but she also had a knack for becoming whoever anyone wanted her to be. Carter-Fucking-Beaumont had even attended the funeral, sobbing between her millionaire father and her finance fiancé, her hand weighed down by a hefty diamond engagement ring. Don’t dim to fit in, Avery had implored her sister, but Nicky had only grown defensive. Why does everyone in this family think it’s bad to be normal? she’d retaliate. To be liked?
But their family wasn’t normal. Addiction whirred through all of them like electricity through a circuit. Even Nicky had it in her. Why else would she have secretly started buying more pills? She was addicted to the fantasy of normalcy she’d created for herself, the fantasy of an ordinary, pain-free life. And Avery had bought into the fantasy, too, turning a blind eye to Nicky’s contracted pupils, her irritability, her growing secrecy. Staring at the piles of Nicky’s things, each an attempt to fill her life with color and sparkle and joy, Avery felt her chest ache with the unfairness of it. Who could ever blame Nicky for wanting to be normal? It was Avery’s fault for missing the signs, not Nicky’s for creating them.
“Well, it’s mine now,” said Lucky, plucking the T-shirt from Bonnie’s hands.
Bonnie laughed this off, but Avery flared immediately. Beneath the self-recrimination, there was another nagging thought too. Yes, she should have seen what was happening to Nicky, but why didn’t anyone else? Where the fuck had her sisters been? Her mother? Her father? Anyone?
“Why should you get to keep it?” she snapped. “It was Bonnie’s first. And, anyway, I bought it.”
“It’s fine, Aves,” said Bonnie. “It’s not like I’m going to wear it.”
“And I’m the baby,” whined Lucky, evincing that unique mix of self-indulgence and self-awareness that drove Avery crazy about her sister. She tried to snatch the shirt from her hands, but Lucky was too fast. She whipped off her T-shirt, exposing her bare chest, and pulled the new one on with an unselfconsciousness drilled into her early from modeling. Lucky never really acted like her body was her own, Avery thought fleetingly; it had been made public property too young. “Fits perfectly,” Lucky declared, smoothing down the front.
“You don’t respect anything,” said Avery.
“Respect?” mimicked Lucky in a stuck-up voice that sounded nothing like Avery’s. “It’s a Spice Girls tee! What the fuck am I meant to be respecting?”
Lucky had leapt onto the bed to escape her. She picked up the feather-trimmed cowboy hat from where she’d dropped it and plopped it onto her head to complete the look.
“It’s not just this, it’s everything!” Avery began counting on her fingers. “You didn’t call us on the one-year anniversary. In fact, you never call me. You’re barely helping with packing up her stuff. Just because you’re the youngest doesn’t mean you don’t have to deal with anything.”
Why was she picking this fight? Why couldn’t she stop herself? Too many reasons to count. Because she was tired from the flight. Because she didn’t want to be sorting through closets right now—she had simply wanted to make a point to Bonnie and Lucky that all you had to do to get something done was to do it. Because once again Avery’s ruthless efficiency was backfiring on her, leaving her resentfully doing a task no one had asked her to do. Because Bonnie and Lucky were friends now and she should have been happy about it, but instead she was pissed. Because she was in the middle of destroying her marriage and she couldn’t tell anyone because she was the eldest, and therefore exemplary. Because their mother had rejected them all over again and Avery had to make it okay. Because without Nicky the balance between them was off; they were meant to be an even number, and now they were odd. But mostly because her sister was dead, her beautiful, vivacious, silly, charismatic sister was gone, and nothing on earth would ever make that right.
“You seriously think I didn’t remember what day July Fourth is?” asked Lucky. “Do you honestly think I’m that much of a fuckup?”
“Well, you forgot her last birthday,” shot Avery.
Lucky winced as if struck.
