MARISSA
"You want the zoo. I want Michael Feeney."
"Huh?"
"Michael Feeney." Gillie hugged a pillow to her chest and fell back against the headboard. "He's amazing, Rissa. He has the body of a Greek god and the soul of a poet." She stared up at the ceiling with a small, private smile, her eyes catching the light the way they only did when she was thinking about something she hadn't fully decided to share yet.
Marissa wrinkled her nose. "Yech. Spare me the details."
"One day you won't find boys so disgusting. In fact—" Gillie snatched the paper off the bed and grabbed a pen from her nightstand, the one with the feathered top that she'd had since sixth grade. She pressed down hard as she wrote, the way she always did, and held it up. "Toe-curling kiss." She had underlined it twice. "Trust me on this one."
Marissa read it upside-down and felt her face do something involuntary. "I'm going to retch. No boy is sticking his tongue in my mouth." She took the list back anyway and smoothed it against her knee, looking at the new addition for a moment before deciding to leave it.
For the next few minutes, they argued over what should go on Marissa's Fun Stuff (a.k.a. The Wild) List.
Rissa loved these arguments.
Gillie fought for everything with her whole body—both hands off the pillow and into the air, hair falling across her face, nearly knocking the feathered pen off the nightstand at one point.
When she laughed, the room actually got brighter, the way a room gets brighter when someone turns up a dimmer switch. Rissa had never once in her life turned up a dimmer switch. She was the wall. She was the outlet the switch was mounted on.
Now Gillie had one more thing she didn't: a boyfriend she loved so much, she risked the wrath of their parents to be with him.
"Hey, kiddo, I gotta go."
Marissa watched Gillian raise the window. "The alarm!"
"I re-routed the leads to this one." Gillie grinned.
A boy waited for her sister somewhere out there in the dark, someone Gillie loved so much that she had learned to re-route alarm leads and memorized the exact angle at which a window could be raised without squeaking.
"I'll be back before dawn. Don't worry about me, Rissa. I'll be fine. Like I said, tomorrow we'll go to the zoo, okay?"
"Promise?"
"Giraffes, popcorn, and the rain forest display...the whole caboodle. Pinky swear."
Gillie extended her smallest finger so decisively that Marissa, half asleep and throwing out a token protest, couldn't help but meet it.
Their pinkies locked, and Rissa felt the bone in her sister's finger: thin, strong, more real somehow than anything else in the room. For an instant, the myth of Gillie—the rebel, the unstoppable, the one who always got what she wanted—collapsed into the ordinary but electrified flesh of someone who was, impossibly, both her sister and her best friend and the only person in the world who could make her feel both safe and terrified at once.
Gillie grinned, the lopsided, slightly dangerous smile she reserved for rule-breaking and sneak-attacks.
"I'll bring you back an adventure," she whispered, and her breath was so close to Rissa's cheek it gave her a chill.
Then, without ceremony, Gillie swung her leg over the sill, planted her sneaker on the sloped shingle outside, and twisted around to look back through the window one last time.
She blew a kiss—fingers flicked from lips to glass—and the sudden intimacy of it made Marissa want to hide under the covers, or maybe throw herself out the window after her.
The pane fogged where Gillie's breath touched it. In the perfect white oval, Gillie wrote, backward and upside-down: evol uoy.
For a moment, Marissa stared at the ghostly letters, and felt a strange chill. Love you. Then Gillie wiped the message away with her sleeve, leaving a streaky crescent that collected water in the morning, and vanished into the night.
There was a ritual to this: the waiting, the silent count to one hundred to see if Gillie would come back, laughing, with some excuse about tripping over a gutter or remembering she left her phone.
The count, this time, made it only to thirty before a low rumble vibrated through the floorboards. Marissa pressed her face to the glass, squinting in the moonlight at the gap in the hedge where the motion lights sometimes failed.
A tiny point of blue light glowed out on the street—her sister's phone flashlight, signaling the all-clear to whoever waited at the curb.
The motorcycle started with a wet, angry yowl. It was nothing like the smooth, suburban purr of their father's Lexus.
This was a sound for ruining things: sleep, curfews, reputations. It was the sound of the future, of getting gone.
For just a second, the headlight swept across the bottom edge of Marissa's window, throwing her shadow huge and misshapen onto the wall behind her.
Then the bike shrieked down the block, the purple of Gillie's jacket bright in the beam, and the night snapped shut.
Marissa crawled into bed, but didn't close her eyes. The house felt different when her sister was gone. The little noises multiplied, grew claws.
She pressed her pillow over her ears, but couldn't block out the possibility: Gillie in the dark, helmetless and wild, arms tight around someone Rissa had never met, chasing a joy so urgent she couldn't wait for morning to find it.
She tried to imagine the city the way her sister must see it: every alley a shortcut, every street a dare, every light a signal meant just for her.
For Marissa, the world outside the gates was full of too many strangers and too much air, but for Gillie, it was nothing but invitations.
Sometimes, Rissa envied her so much it felt like a fever, burning up all the carefulness inside her until only the want remained.
The window was still slightly open, and a cold breeze swept over her face. She traced where her sister's breath had marked the glass. The message was gone, but the condensation lingered, fading as the minutes passed.
Marissa tried to remember the exact shape of the letters, as if she could press the memory into the window and summon Gillie back with the right arrangement of lines.
Down the hall, their parents' bedroom was quiet. Dad would have double-checked the alarm sensors and the perimeter cameras before bed, but Gillie had already shown her the workaround: a binder clip here, a magnet there, and the whole system went blind.
It wasn't that Gillie was smarter. It was that she wanted things more, and so the world bent itself accordingly.
Nothing could defeat her sister.
Nothing.