Page 78 of Saint Céline
Katherine looked at me then, and the hurt in her face was so immediate I almost regretted saying it.
“Yes, I do,” she said. “You have them.”
The words settled between us in an awkward silence.
Below the terrace, the Hawthornes’ lawn stretched dark and perfect toward a line of trees strung with fairy lights. Inside, someone shouted my name, and several people laughed.
“Céline, come here!”
I felt Katherine hear it too.
Her expression changed before mine did.
I should have stayed.
I should have told them to wait. I should have taken Katherine’s hand and made the party widen around both of us properly. I should have understood that every time I stepped toward the people calling my borrowed name, I left her standing behind with the real one.
Instead, I smiled apologetically.
“Just a second,” I said.
Katherine nodded quickly, already closing herself off.
“Go.”
So I went.
That was how it began to happen.
Not all at once. Not cruelly. Not even consciously at first.
I became the girl people invited to places, and Katherine became the girl who came with me. At school, she still corrected my essays and explained biology after dinner and rewrote my lab reports until they sounded like someone who belonged in honours classes. At parties, I softened her edges, translated her bluntness into wit, turned her awkward silences into mystery when I could.
We helped each other.
That was what we called it.
And for a while, it was true enough to survive on.
* * *
By winter, people no longer said Katherine and Céline.
They said Céline and her cousin.
Sometimes they did not say Katherine at all.
When we came home late from parties, my mother would be waiting in the cottage kitchen with tea she pretended she had not stayed awake to make. Katherine would spread her books across our table and begin fixing whatever homework I had neglected, still wearing eyeliner I had put on her hours earlier.
“You need to stop guessing on lab questions,” she said one night, circling an entire paragraph in red.
“I don’t guess.”
“You wrote that mitochondria are emotionally resilient.”
“That was metaphorical.”
“It was wrong.”
