You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone

Great. We’re stuck in this loop. “I guess I’ll stay, then.”

All the amazing things I usually feel with him—beautiful, admired, even sexy—are gone. The confidence I stole from Adina is gone too. I flick my gaze between his striped sheets, the jacket with elbow patches draped across his desk chair, the canvas boards mounted on the walls. I finger-comb my hair, trying to erase the evidence of what we didn’t do.

“Do you still feel like going to the party?” he asks.

“I don’t know that I could handle a party right now.”

“Yeah. Same here.” Zack stands up. “Maybe we could go downstairs and watch a movie or something?”

“Sure.”

We sit a cushion apart on the couch watching an old Wes Anderson movie. All I can think about is how this would never have happened to my sister. She’s the girl who always gets what she wants, and I’m the girl who tries and tries and tries but can never quite get there.

Two of the walls in my room are still bare, a result of my Johns Hopkins meltdown. It’s nine thirty and I’m home from Zack’s and ready to fall asleep for about a week. But something stops me from collapsing onto my bed.

Se

veral dozen scraps of red paper are spread across the sheets like confetti. At first I assume they’re from when I tore this place apart, but I was meticulous in my cleanup. I can’t have missed something as obvious as this.

I pick them up with my fingernails. It takes me only a few seconds to puzzle them together, and when I do, my stomach plummets so quickly I nearly drop to my knees along with it.

It’s the Nirvana ticket that used to hang above my desk. The only thing on my bedroom walls I loved enough to keep. A connection to Aba my sister can’t begin to understand.

“Adina,” I hiss under my breath, and it sounds like a vow of vengeance.

I have no idea what I’d have done had our results been flipped, but I wouldn’t have destroyed something that meant the world to her. I wouldn’t have smashed her viola or sabotaged her future.

I’ve been kind to her—as kind as I could. So understanding. I’ve held myself back when I wanted to explode so many fucking times. I’m done with that. We’re both the evil twin.

I want to scream at her. I want her grab her by the shoulders. I want to force her to piece together the ripped-art concert ticket until her fingers are covered in paper cuts. But I’m not allowed to do any of that, am I? Because she tested positive, and I tested negative.

“Where is she?” I ask my parents as I race downstairs. “Where’s Adina?”

“She went out,” Aba says. They’re eating a late dinner. He’s cutting a piece of chicken into more easily chewable chunks for Ima. She struggles with a fork and knife, and she continues to have trouble swallowing. “Some kind of senioritis party? What does that mean?”

Ima’s face scrunches with concern. “What’s going on?”

I ignore her. How could I possibly explain what her darling daughter has done? I grab my keys and then I’m out the door, touching my fingertips to my lips and then to the mezuzah and praying I finally have the strength to tell my sister exactly how I feel about her.

Thirty-one

Adina

I DON’T WANT TO BE alone tonight, so I am going to drink until I can’t remember how monumental a mistake Arjun was, and maybe I’ll keep going after that. The scene from earlier today in his apartment repeats over and over and over in my head with no coda. Perhaps the coda is the successful execution of my plan.

Most of the faces in the living room are familiar, but no one says hi to me. I don’t say hi back. This is nothing like the New Year’s Eve party. The windows are fogged up and it’s hot and it’s loud and I don’t recognize the music and no one is dressed up. You should have to get dressed up to go to a party. When I used to imagine my future, I conjured more parties like the one on New Year’s Eve. Then I replay what Arjun and I did in the coatroom at that party. I was trying to control him with my body, hoping that would make him love me. Stupid, stupid, stupid, thinking he might actually love me back.

Tovah’s friend Lindsay waves at me, but she doesn’t say anything. She’s glued to her boyfriend, Troy. Thank God she doesn’t ask me if I want to hang out with them again. I am done being pitied.

Maybe I should have joined student council, or tried track, or taken “at least one AP,” like Aba always said, and then Tovah and I would still be close as we were when we were kids. Or at least I would have had someone to talk to at this party, someone who cared that my heart broke this week, someone who could help me put it back together, if such a thing is possible. Someone who will hold back my hair later if I drink too much.

After I get another drink, I stagger into the next room, where a few people are playing pool and others are watching a superhero movie on a giant TV. I watch a girl from my English class make out with a guy from my physics class.

Did I really think Arjun and I would become a real couple? That I could introduce him to my parents, not as my teacher but as my boyfriend? He is twenty-five—what kind of future could we have had? He was right—at some point he would have had nothing left to teach me. I will become a better musician. I know it. He is stagnant, stuck in that shitty apartment with no aspirations. He wanted me for only one reason—the same reason the other guys wanted me.

But I fucked up too. I threatened the one man I’ve ever loved. The tornado of emotions in my mind flashes with a guilty bolt of lightning. Childish. That is how I acted.

“Hey, Adina.”