Page 49 of The Last to Let Go
“One minute forty-five seconds,” I say, looking at the place on my wrist where a watch would be. “You could probably shave off at least five seconds if you skip the kitchen portion of the tour next time.”
She takes my face in her hands and looks at me straight in the eyes for a moment. Then she reaches for my hand and leads me into this loft area that the stairs spill out into, a closed door on either side. There’s a window seat straight ahead, and bookshelves and a big red couch with lots of pillows, a TV with some kind of complicated gaming system hooked up to it. There’s a huge dollhouse that sits on a table in the corner, looking suspiciously like a miniature version of this house. And next to the dollhouse, the guinea pig habitat.
“So this is my pad. My sister and I have the whole upstairs. Of course”—she gestures to the closed door on the right, big foam letters spelling outV TORI ’S ROO—“she’s away at college now, so it’s just me. And Bonnie and Clyde,” she adds, pointing at the two balls of white-and-gray fur nested into a kingdom of cedarwood chips.
“I like Bonnie and Clyde. Victoria, is it?” I ask her, trying to read through the missing letters.
“Tori.”
“Okay,Danielle,” I tease.
“Dani,” she corrects. “No Danielle—not ever.”
“Okay,Dani,” I relent, sensing she’s not joking about this one. “You miss her a lot, don’t you?” I ask, though I don’t tell her that I can relate to missing a sister.
She nods, then turns toward the door on the left:DANI S R OM. “She’s my best friend. I know that’s totally dorky, but it’s true. It’s actually kind of ridiculous how much I miss her,” she tells me, trying to cover up her sadness with a laugh. “You may have noticed I don’t exactly have all that many friends.”
The terrible thing is, I didn’t really notice. But now that she’s mentioned it, it’s not like I ever see her hanging out with anyone other than Tyler. “Why is that?” I ask as I follow her into her bedroom. “You’re a nice girl.”
“Ha, ha,” she deadpans, pulling me in and closing the door behind us. I barely have time to look around before she’s kissing me, her hands finding my waist. I kiss her back, running my fingers through her hair, my favorite part the soft, downy fuzz that’s growing in from when she shaved it before school started.
“Hey,” I say softly, pulling away. “Aren’t I supposed to be the one with all the evasive maneuvers? Not that I don’t like your maneuvering, but...” I step away from her to take a look around her room—posters line every inch of every wall, floor to ceiling, so that I can’t even tell the color of the wall underneath. Bands I’ve never heard of, movie posters for movies I’ve never seen, quotes, art, pages torn from books. “Now, your room definitely feels a lot more like Dani than the rest of your house.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she says, coming up behind me and threading her arms around my waist, pressing her mouth against my neck.
“You should.” I walk up to her vanity—formerly white wicker but now covered with bumper stickers that overlap one another so they can barely be read. A mirror is framed by snapshots. “Is that her? Tori?” I ask, looking at one that features a younger-looking Dani with black, shoulder-length hair standing next to another girl who looks almost identical to her, except maybe a little older and with their mom’s dark eyes. “And you... look at your hair—oh my God!”
“Yeah, that’s us.”
There are other pictures too. I recognize a few people from school. But not anyone I ever see talking to Dani. Yet here they all are, smiling, laughing, shouting together in these pictures. I decide not to ask what the deal is. If she wants me to know, she’ll tell me.
“Your mom is adorable. You know that, right?”
“I do,” she says with a sigh. “I know. She’s very sweet.”
“You must get your eyes from your dad, though.”
“My eyes?” she repeats, batting her lashes dramatically.
“Yes, your beautiful eyes,” I tell her. “I’ve been a huge admirer of them since the first day of school, you know.”
“Oh really?” she says with a wide grin, pulling me over to her bed. We lie down side by side. I feel her let out a long breath of air. She has glow-in-the-dark stars plastered all over the ceiling, arranged in haphazard clusters. “Yes, I have my dad’s eyes. He’s white, by the way—not sure if I ever mentioned that. Don’t want you to be surprised when you meet him. I mean, a lot of people don’t realize. My mom’s side of the family is from India. But she grew up here.”
“You never really told me that,” I say. “But I guess I kind of figured.”
“He’s nice too,” she adds. “You’ll see.”
I prop myself up on my elbow so I can see her face. “All right, I have to ask. Why do you seem so damn sad about your parents being nice and sweet?”
“They’re nice, they’re sweet, they love me, they take care of me, feed me, clothe me, all of that, and I’m grateful, I really, really am. But...” She stops, inhales through her nose. “I’ll always be Danielle to them.”
“So they don’t know that you’re... that we’re... you know...together?”
“Oh, they know!” She laughs, bitterly, in this way I’ve never heard from her before—it sounds so wrong coming from her.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, everything is all on the surface with them.”
