The Other Half of Me (9 page)

FIFTEEN

The past two days were a brilliant blur: laughing at Utopia Beach (a place that finally lives up to its name) with Tate, talking on the phone several times with Alexa, swabbing the art decks at Downtown Studios, and avoiding Sid Sleethly so I didn’t have to hear his thoughts about my paintings. My pace was faster, my smile wider, my thoughts scattered with the buzz of liking someone who likes me back—and getting to know Alexa.

Every time we talk, I become more and more comfortable thinking of her as my real, true sister, even though I’m aware that Alexa and I share only as many genes as I do with Sierra, Sage, and Russ. Somehow the fact that we found each other in the way we did seems to mean more to me. It’s hard to explain.

I’ve been sitting here with Tate for a few hours, trying to do just that, and he’s been patiently listening to me ramble, never interrupting. I’m beginning to think he doesn’t have any flaws, even though rationally I know it’s impossible. I fiddle with my newly purchased cell phone, then rest it in my lap.

“So, what do you like most about her?” Tate offers a lick of his maple vanilla cone as we lounge on the stone rim of the enoromous fountain in the middle of town. The statue in the center is a child riding a dolphin, the waves splashing but motionless around her. When I was little I used to want to be that girl, riding away to somewhere unknown. But as I look into Tate’s gleaming eyes, I know there’s no place I’d rather be. I put my phone in my pocket lest I damage another one; then I slide my flip-flops off, spin around, and sit on the edge of the wall so I can dip my feet into the cool water. In the fall the sports teams sometimes come here after big games. Tate has probably dipped his feet in here, or been thrown in, many times. Maybe he’s even kissed someone here. I banish the thought.

“This may sound lame, but right now I’m just happy that she exists.” I look over my shoulder at Tate and use my hand as a visor. The sun is shining so hard. “When I talk to her, I feel as though I have a tether out there. A mooring in—”

“In the ocean of the world?” Tate interrupts me for the first time with his sarcasm.

“Joke all you want, Bro, but it’s true.”

Tate crunches the last of his cone and spins around so he’s facing the water alongside me. “Fitz, don’t call me Bro.”

My brow furrows at this unexpected announcement. “Why not?”

Tate shrugs and looks off in the distance. Every once in a while I wonder if he’s thinking about what’s ahead for us. Do I fit somewhere in the equation that adds the sports season to the back-to-school season? I really hope I do. He takes my hand, brings it up to his mouth, and lightly presses his lips to my palm. “I’m Bro when I’m with the team. When I’m with you, I’d rather be Tate.”

I know exactly what he means.

He tucks a lock of my hair behind my ear and goes in for a kiss when my cell phone rings. He smiles. “Let me guess? The great Alexa is on the line. I’ll take off.”

I look at the phone. He’s right; it’s her. I really want to pick up, but I don’t want him to go, either. “Stay. I’ll only be a minute.”

Tate has that faraway look on his face again. “It’s fine. You should take your time talking to her. I have to run sprints, anyway. The first game is around the corner.”

When he walks away and I think about how soon we will be forced back to our old worlds, I make a wish that summer could last forever.

“It’s like I can feel August being sucked down the drain.” I’m wandering through the town square, cutting across the green so I’m near Downtown Studios. On the way I count twelve signs for the art show, and with each glance at them, I feel another level of anxiety: I have to get into that show, otherwise I have to wait a whole year before trying for it again. And by then who knows what will have happened or where I will be?

“I know what you mean,” Alexa reassures. “The city’s practically deserted. My moms usually rent this house in the Hamptons for the last couple weeks of August, but they didn’t this year.”

Alexa’s two mothers are both lawyers who seem eternally busy, always dashing in for late meals and leaving at the crack of dawn. At least, that’s how she tells it.

“Did you finish any paintings for the show?” she asks. “There’s not much time, you know. Maybe you should just pull an all-nighter and drink lots of Red Bull and just whip something up. That’s what what I would do.”

“Thanks for putting the pressure on,” I say, and smile. “Art’s not like that. You have to think a lot about what you’re trying to create. At least, I do. Besides, I can’t stand the taste of Red Bull. I’m more of a root beer float kind of person.”

Alexa laughs, and I like the sound of it. Her laugh can best be described as a cross between a sneeze and a giggle. “Well, start thinking hard, Jenny. You only have another week.”

I can’t stop grinning. It’s actually
nice
to have someone care enough about my painting to be on my back about it. My parents have known me all my life and they’ve never shown as much interest as Alexa is now. “I still have a few more days before Sid makes his final decisions, and I promise to work hard. What about you? When do you leave for the beach?”

I hear street noise in the background: bus brakes squealing, people honking. “I’m checking on my project,” Alexa says. “It’s really loud here, but it’ll get better once the trees grow.”

For some reason I thought Alexa would be an artist, too, but she’s not. (Maybe I’ve seen too many Disney movies about twins separated at birth.) In fact, she single-handedly coordinated a coalition at school to raise funding to turn a local run-down former tire factory into a children’s center with a huge outdoor park. It was an impulse of hers after reading about the plight of the urban child in the
New York Times.

“Hold on, I have to move something,” Alexa says. She grunts into the phone and then comes back. “Sorry. There are still a lot of finishing touches to make. Paint the fence, plant the last of the shrubs. But it’s going to be great!”

“I wish I could see it,” I say.

“You
can
see it. All you have to do is get your butt on a train!” The excitement in her voice ripples through the phone wires.

I bite my lip. My instinct tells me that I need more time to prepare and think about how a visit might go. But when I stop and really check my feelings, I know it’s not an instinct—it’s fear. Fear that if I go there, it might be too hard to leave her behind.

“Jenny, just come in for the weekend. It’ll be fun!” I don’t want to push her away again, but that’s what I end up doing. “I can’t,” I say. “Like you said, I have to focus on my painting.”

I feel so bad for turning her words against her. Why am I doing this?

“I did say that, you’re right.”

Her voice is thin and shallow, not upbeat and enthusiastic as before. I look up at the clear blue sky, noticing the darkest leaves on the trees and thinking about how soon they will morph into reds and oranges. I have to level with her. “The thing is, and please don’t take this the wrong way…” Beads of sweat form on my upper lip.

Silence from Alexa. All I can hear is more street noise. And then she speaks. “You haven’t told your family yet, have you?”

I look down at my feet in shame. “No.”

“My moms were in this right from the beginning,” she says. “Your parents will be so supportive.”

I shake my head. “You don’t even know them. They’re not like that.”

“Maybe you need to give them a chance.” She waits for me to say something, but I can’t. All I can picture is how awkward it would be to face them. Won’t they assume that I went to find Alexa because something was wrong with our family dynamic? It’s kind of true, but it’s one thing for them to suspect it, and another thing for them to know it for sure.

Alexa clears her throat. “Jenny? You still there?”

“Yeah.”

“Listen, if you can’t come to see me because you have to work, I could come visit you.”

In the middle of the busy summer street, where Popsicles drip down kids’ arms, where parents chase their toddlers, where people on their lunch breaks sit on the benches eating sandwiches, I feel everything stop. Alexa Mason-Cohen could come here and meet my world. And then the biggest fear of all hits me.

What if she doesn’t like me?

My heart is racing so fast I can barely answer her. “I’m not sure.”

“Well, guess what?” she says confidently. “I am sure enough for the both of us. Take that!”

All of a sudden I’m laughing so hard I grip my side.

“Okay, okay, you’ve worn me down.” I must give in to the unknown this time. Tate, I’m sure, would agree. “How about the day after tomorrow? I can break the news to my parents and clean up and everything.”

“Oh, you don’t have to clean, Jenny. I’m family, remember?” She says this with such conviction that I almost look forward to telling my parents.

Almost.

SIXTEEN

“Will you pass the butter?” I ask, wishing that somehow my mom would interpret this phrase as
I have a half sister, and her name is Alexa.

“Sure, honey,” my mom says, handing me the cow-shaped butter dish. “Anything else?”

Alexa’s coming to visit. I think you’ll really like her!

“No, this is great. Thanks.” I spread a pat of butter onto my steaming ear of corn. When I gaze out the kitchen window, I see that the patio is slick with fresh rain. The showers hit suddenly, as soon as I got home with the twins. It was as if Mother Nature knew I was about to blow the lid off our normal family routine.

It’s such a typical scene, the kind of dinner that screams the words
everyday, normal, plain.
I survey the cast of characters and the setting, and bottle up the tension and excitement about what the day after tomorrow will bring. Namely, another person at this table. Another person, who shares my genes and no one else’s here. If I only knew how to tell everyone.

I watch my dad as he eats his corn. He’s like an old-fashioned typewriter, sliding the cob back and forth, only eating one row at a time. He juts his lower teeth forward and chomps down hard, sending a few bits of corn flying into the air.

“Daaad!” Sierra whines, wiping a piece of stray corn from her T-shirt. “Stop being so gross!”

“Sorry,” he says with a grin. He holds up the cob with the neat rows of pecked corn. “My technique may not be the most delicate, but it works.”

I pick up the ear from my plate, holding it by the ends. It’s hot, so I drop it quickly. My mom flits to the other side of the table, opening the drawer at the end of it and handing me two plastic corn holders in the shape of hot dogs.

“Here,” she says. “You don’t want to get burned.”

“Mom, I’m fine. I can hold it without those things.” I pluck them off the ends of my ear, where she’s shoved them in. “Plus, it freaks me out that they’re hot dogs. What does that have to do with corn?”

Everyone at the table laughs. “That’s a good point,” my mother says.

“Maybe they’re just supposed to symbolize picnics?” I suggest.

“Maybe. But what I want to know, Jenny, is how do you eat your corn?” Dad says in a playful tone.

“Uh-oh,” Russ says. “Is this one of those psychological games that reveal something about you?”

Dad bites his corn again. “It’s more of a theory that I’m tinkering with. For instance, look at Sage and Sierra. They take a bite, chew it, and then turn the ear of corn in a circle, making rings.”

The twins look at their ears of corn and their nearly identical patterns of marks.

Dad continues, “Then we’ve got you, Russ. You’re all over the place.”

We all chuckle when Russ shows us his ear of corn. “It’s pretty hacked up,” he says, pointing out the patches gnawed down to the cob.

I actually kind of like this game. It’s about observation and paying attention to detail—two things that any good artist needs to do.

“Well, Mom’s big into the bite ’n’ slide routine,” I say, pointing to the corn on her plate. “She takes a careful bite and then goes to the exact same spot side to side, whereas Dad works row to row.”

Dad smiles at me proudly. He hasn’t done this in ages. “Good job, Jenny. So what do you think? Are you more like Mom, or are you more like me?”

Suddenly, I’m blinking back tears while staring at the butter melting on my plate. Slick and colorless, it reminds me of diluted paint. It doesn’t even occur to my dad that I might have my own unique style of corn eating, like the twins or Russ. And yet when I think about what makes me different from all of them, I wish I could be up in my closet, alone and safe with my canvases.

But I have to tell them about Alexa, and I have to tell them now. I’m sure they can see that something’s wrong, anyway.

Sierra picks at her plate nervously. Perhaps for once she can sense how I’m feeling. “Jenny, I’ve got something important to tell you,” she says, her voice quivering.

Oh, the irony
, I think as I spear a leaf of lettuce with my salad fork. “Out with it, Sierra.”

She glances at Sage and then swallows hard. “Our recital is on September fifth.”

September fifth is the day of the art show. I think I’ve said this out loud, but no one is reacting, so maybe I haven’t. Not that it matters—Sierra and Sage have obviously seen the signs around town and made the connection on their own. I take my fork and begin stabbing at the piece of chicken on my plate because I know that in a head-to-head matchup with the twins, I always lose. I feel defeated right now, to the point where I can’t even begin to think about revealing my secret, which I told both Alexa and Tate I’d do. All I can see is red, and I snap.

“Why haven’t you visited me at Downtown Studios, Dad? I’ve been there working hard all summer, and you haven’t made the trip. It’s as if the building were located on top of a mountain or something.” My tone is sharp and bitter. I don’t like the sound of it, but I can’t help it, either. “You and Mom always seem to make time for Sierra and Sage’s special event of the moment.”

My dad leans back in his chair, looking confused.

“You also managed to attend Russ’s tryouts for all-state in the middle of mediating the Wilson case, which you said was the toughest you’ve ever had to contend with. They were
tryouts
! Not even the real thing.”

“They still count,” Russ says, slightly dejected.

“Jenny…” My mom is using her
settle down
voice.

I push myself away from the table and stand up. “You don’t get it, do you? I’m so sick of being treated like the reject Fitzgerald.”

Dad wipes his mouth with his napkin and tosses it on the table. He appears annoyed. “No one feels that way, Jen.”

“Well, guess what?
I
feel that way!” I’m shouting now. This isn’t going to help matters, but I still keep pressing. “Dad, you didn’t answer me. Why haven’t you made the effort to come and see my work?”

Mom shakes her head as she begins to clear the table. Sierra and Sage are silent for once, stacking the dishes into piles. Russ wolfs down another roll while he listens.

“Sometimes, Jenny, it’s as though you can’t see what’s right in front of you,” Dad says with a sigh.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Sierra and Sage whisper something and my mother shoots them a look. Russ shrugs at me helplessly.

“You haven’t asked us to come, Jenny. Not once,” my dad says simply.

I put my hands on my hips and look down at my sneakers. I’m suddenly aware of why I’m so fixated on arguing with him—it’s a distraction from the conversation that we really need to have. Besides, it’s true. I never asked anyone to come see me at work in the studio. Even Tate invited himself along the other night.

“We don’t want to rush you,” my mom says. The water from the sink is making a waterfall sound in the stainless steel basin, reminding me of that beautiful fountain in town. I wish I were on the stone dolphin now, being carried away to somewhere else. “We just thought that when you were ready to have us there, you’d let us know.”

The doorbell rings, and it barely registers on my radar. I’m too caught up in my emotions to care who’s on the front porch. “Well then, I’ll be ready on September fifth, the day of the art show.”

Mom and Dad exchange surprised glances. They know they’re going to have to make a choice here. I study Dad as he thinks of what to say. He’s always careful with his words; because of his line of work, he knows how powerful they can be. However, when I take notice of how long the big gaping pause is, and how hard he has to think about this, I don’t give him the chance to say anything.

“Forget it. I was crazy to expect you and Mom to duck out on the twins’ precious Dance Project performance.”

“Ours is more important,” Sage says, and we all turn to look at her. Sierra’s mouth hangs open. Even she didn’t see that coming, or maybe she thought the same thing but had the sense to keep it to herself.

“Sage! That’s a terrible thing to say,” my mom scolds.

“Well, I’m sorry, it
is
,” Sage pleads. “Jenny can paint whatever anytime and show it to you guys. We have this huge deal on
one day.
”

I never noticed the resemblance between Sage and Sid Sleethly until now. Just as I did when Tate was with me in the studio, I wonder if Alexa Mason-Cohen would defend me if she were here. I find a source of strength from inside me when I remind myself that I’ll find out the day after tomorrow. I’ll know so much more then, and perhaps feel so much better.

“You know what? It doesn’t matter. If I get accepted into the art show, I don’t need you there. Go see the twins. I’ll be fine.” My words are firm and confident, not mean and sour like before. Alexa is not even here yet, and she’s somehow already helping me.

“Hey guys, look who’s here,” Russ says from behind me.

I turn around and see Tate standing by his side. “Hi, Jenny,” he says.

“Hey, you.” I’m sure my big smile is a dead giveaway to everyone in the room.

Russ sprints over to the table and chucks Tate a dinner roll. “You guys can let us finish cleaning up in here.”

But my dad still wants to finish our discussion. “I want to support you, Jenny. We all do.”

He’s about to say more, but Tate doesn’t realize this, which is probably why he excitedly interrupts. “So everything’s cool, then?”

“What do you mean, Bro?” Russ crumples up a napkin and lobs it into the wastebasket.

“You know, Jenny’s big announcement!” Tate says. “About Alexa?”

I almost faint when these words escape Tate’s luscious lips.

“Who’s Alexa?” my dad asks.

“Yeah, who is Alexa?” Sierra repeats.

“You didn’t tell them? Oh, Fitz, I’m so sorry.” Tate runs his hands through his hair, looking as though he wishes he could curl up into a ball and be hiked out into a field somewhere. He just unknowingly stole an important moment from me, but I’m not mad at him for it. I’m practically grateful. Now I can’t avoid it any longer.

“What’s going on?” Mom’s eyebrows rise with curiosity as she dries her hands on a dish towel.

When I don’t answer her, everyone stands motionless and stares at me.

“Jenny, who is Alexa?” Dad asks again. The worry in his voice is echoing the looks on my family’s faces.

I clutch my hands together behind my back, wringing them the way I do after I paint for too long and they ache. Only now I’m aching on the inside, and the only way to make it go away is to let everything out.

“Alexa is my half sister, and she’s coming here soon. Really soon.”