Page 3 of Fade into You
This is very me.
BIRD
My alarm goes off atsix thirty, and the theme song fromDawson’s Creekturns on midway through. I was feeling ambitious when I went to bed last night; thought I’d get up early and make myself coffee, take a walk, journal in the backyard, and then edit some of my stuff from the summer, all before anyone else woke up. But I reach for the snooze button and mash it three times, instead of getting up and doing any of those things.
Then I’m back in my stuffy dorm room, waking up to the scents of clove cigarettes and coffee already brewing in the kitchenette down the hall. I walk, barefoot, into the hallway and suddenly I’m in the tiny TV room in the Commons, and all seventeen kids from the creative writing workshop are crammed in. They burst into song at once when they see me, crooning,“I don’t wanna wait… for our lives to be ove-err-er…”
I start laughing, but it comes out of me slow, like honey.
Dawson’s Creekwas our Tuesday night guilty pleasure all summer. Someone turned it on that first week to make fun of it—Ican’t remember who it was anymore—but then we all quickly got roped into the drama, the love triangles, the small-town scandals. The Capeside fan club grew in numbers, and soon we all adopted their “walk the dog” euphemism as if we’d made it up ourselves, and we came back week after week until it was standing room only.
Silas and Kat call me over now, the crowd parting like some biblical sea to make space for me between them on the dusty old green corduroy-clad couch. But then, behind me, someone shouts, “Turn it off!”
My eyes fly open just in time to see Liv throwing her pillow at my face.
I jolt up and nearly hit my head on the slanted ceiling of our shared bedroom. “What the hell, Liv?”
She tears her eye mask off so she can fully glare at me. “It’s the last friggin’ Friday of the summer, you reject!”
“Okay, god!” I reach over and switch the alarm off.
“Do you realize I’m not going to be able to sleep in again until December? December!” she shouts. “Cheer practice starts tomorrow morning and I’m juggling student council this year and varsity volleyball, not to mention—”
“Oh my god, it’soff!” I interrupt what could become an all-day monologue, which only causes her to narrow her eyes even more. “Sorry to disturb your beauty sleep,” I mutter under my breath. It’s the best I can do with the better half of my brain still in the happiest place I’ve ever known.
“Birdie.” There’s something about the way she always says my name that makes me hate it, and her. “You have no idea whatkind of pressure I’m going to be under—this is mysenioryear.”
“Um, yeah, it’s my senior year too, Liv.”
She scoffs and rolls her eyes.
“What?”
“It’s not the same thing and you know it.”
“Oh, and why’s that?”
She sighs and lies back down, carefully splaying her hair over her one remaining pillow—god forbid her perfect hair gets messy while sleeping. “Don’t start with me, Birdie,” she says, whisper-soft and sweet, the way she talks to her friends on the phone.
“I’m notstartingwith you—I just—why? Why is it so different?”
She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t have to. She thinks I don’t have pressure. Because I only have three friends to her three hundred or because teachers don’t know my name or find me charming and cute enough to give me higher grades than I deserve. Or because I’m not a member of every single team and club our school offers, and every girl in our school doesn’t copy everything I do and say and wear. Or maybe it’s because I don’t date the captain of the football team that she thinks I don’t have pressure.
What a joke.
Simplybeingthe Great Olivia Rubens’s stepsister is pressure. Sharing a bedroom with Olivia Rubens for the last eight years is pressure. Every day a reminder she resents the fact that nine years ago my mom and her dad went on a date that resulted, nine months later, in our little brother, Bailey. Which also resulted, shortly after, in the two of us wearing matching yellow tulle dresses at our parents’ wedding. And every moment since hasbeen an excruciating reminder that her dad isnotmy dad because my dad is… somewhere-elsewhere-nowhere to be found. That’s fucking pressure right there. But I don’t say any of it; I never do.
I’m one step out of bed when my foot sticks to something. I look down at the line of silver duct tape Liv plastered down the center of the bedroom while I was away. Her part of the room on one side, mine on the other, as if I ever had a doubt that’s the way things are between us. I peel the tape off the bottom of my foot and step on her side for just a moment. I want to throw something of mine at her now.
“Nice r-r-re-redecorating, by the way, Liv.”
She turns her head to look at me and rolls her eyes, sighing again. Then she re-splays her hair, closes her eyes, and says, in that whispery monotone voice again, “It’s just so you remember to keep your crap on your own side. You don’t have to get a stutter about it.”
I hate you,I think. But what I say is, “If anyone asks, I’m going to Kayla’s.”
She grumbles something incoherent, turning over in her twin bed, identical to mine.
Downstairs in the bathroom I run the faucet to only a pencil-width stream and try not to make too many sounds as I brush my teeth and silently spit into the sink. Being the first one awake means no waiting for the bathroom—this house was not built for the number of people who live here. The twins arrived two years ago, just as Charlie went off to college, and along with them went the chance of me ever having a room to myself. I rummage through Liv’s shoebox of hair and makeup stuff under the sinkand find a scrunchie I doubt she’ll miss. I start to pull my hair back when I hear the first rumble of toddler tears. If I don’t get out now, I know I’ll be stuck here all day.
