Page 22 of Devil

I pressed my lips together and looked down at her feet. Her toenail polish was chipped. The bruise just above her ankle was long and a queasy purple. The rain drummed so hard on the old metal roof of the trailer that it felt like noise was all the world had ever been.

I found that after twenty-nine years of sharing everything with Busy, I suddenly couldn’t share what had happened yesterday. If my own twin looked at me the way Kaitlyn had looked at me…

There was something else too, something underneath the fear of not being believed. The fear of not being believed was logical, but the whispering, slithering thing under the fear, the thing that would always smell like incense and taste like pomegranates in my memory…that thing was the furthest thing from logical.

I worried it meant there was something worse than sinfulness inside me. I worried it meant that I was very, very, very fucked up.

I couldn’t let myself think about it, which meant not talking about it, even to the other half of myself—who was no longer really the other half of myself anyway and hadn’t been for a long time.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, still looking at Busy’s bruised ankle. “I violated my contract and the student safety policy, and Kaitlyn thinks I’ll hurt her chances of getting hired on at the diocese. So I’m evicted.”

When I looked up, my sister’s lip was curled. “I always knew she was a cunt.”

I’d defended Kaitlyn to Busy and Busy to Kaitlyn for what felt like my entire life, and there was too much muscle memory built in to stop me from shaking my head. “She’s just doing her best. I was the one who didn’t stop things with him.”

Busy’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” I answered quickly.

I couldn’t talk about this with Busy because I would cry, and even if I managed to speak clearly through the tears, the clarity would only be voice deep. I wouldn’t know how to explain everything without explaining that what Bell did to me felt like assault and also that heat flickered through my body at the memory of it. That I wished we hadn’t been interrupted.

I looked back down at Busy’s ankles. Nothing had changed about the light or either of our positions, and all the information coming to my brain via my optical nerves was the same, but my mind was now making different sense of it all. The long bruise just above her ankle wasn’t a single bruise—it was four in a row, with a fifth a little farther out. Four fingers and a thumb. Someone had grabbed Busy by the ankle, hard enough to drag her.

When I met her eyes again, they were defiant. She had a face on like she was daring me to say something about it, to utter the wrong thing, to give her a reason to fight.

“Come home,” I said. “I won’t… You don’t have to tell me anything. But please come home. Don’t be alone.”

“You’re always trying to get me to come home,” she said bitterly. “Did you ever think that maybe home is the reason I’m so fucked up?”

“I don’t think you’re fucked up,” I said quietly. It was barely audible over the rain on the roof, but she heard me.

“Yes, you do.” Her voice was a sudden hiss. “You’re fucked up too, you know. A dead father and then whatever was wrong with Mom, living with it for two years before she decided to follow Dad. It crawled into both of us, but it only made one of us pathetic.”

It was so unnecessarily cruel that I simply stared at her.

“You want to drag me home and make me as small as you are as a punishment for daring to leave and trying to have my own life,” she went on. There was something unfamiliar in her voice, something beyond a normal outburst. It was vicious and oddly earnest—shebelievedthis. Completely. “You want to punish me for having friends, for seeing places. You want me to be trapped just like you, a nobody in a tiny, shithole town, trapped in the house we grew up in like a dead bug on a giant sticky trap. Fuck that.”

“Busy,” I said, stunned. “No. No, that’s not—I’m not trying to trap you. I’m trying to help.”

“Sure, and I guess that help will come for free?”

“I’m your twin. Of course it does!”

Her mouth jerked into a sneer. “My twin.My twin who’s embarrassed of me. Who thinks I’m a burden. Who makes me feel like trash when I ask for money. That’s the twin who will help me for free? Without taking payment in my humiliation and shame? I don’t think so, Birdie.”

I couldn’t—I had no way to respond to this. It was so abrupt and sounfair, and I had tried so hard to be good, to be generous, and of course, she’d still noticed the hesitations and imperfections in my sororal care. Of course she’d noticed that I did have to try.

I took a deep breath and tried to reset the conversation. She had four fingerprints and a thumbprint daubed in shades of carbon and aubergine on her ankle. She needed to come home.

“We both need to get back on our feet,” I said as calmly as I could. “We could do it together.”

“Right,” she said. “Like either of us has ever been any fucking good at that. All you want to do is whittle for pennies, and I am a constant fuckup who has no education, no future, nothing.”

“You’re so close to selling the cabin,” I said, trying to reassure her. “You can come home and rest a little while you figure out what you want to do with the money.”

I’d meant it as comfort, as space and time to figure things out, but the fury in her face immediately told me that this was the wrong thing to say.

“I knew it,” she said in a low, shaking voice as she scrambled to her feet. I got to my feet too in time to see her ball her fists as she seethed at me. “You want the money. You’ve always wanted it because you know no one will ever buy those cursed fucking houses back home. You’re going to take the money the minute you can and leave me with nothing.”