But my dad? I was special, his favorite. The one good thing that had come out of his marriage to my mother, or so he used to say. He spoiled me, and I would have done anything for him. And I had done plenty — corralling my mom into resembling a reasonable human being when he needed her for legal meetings or whatever, not complaining when he'd left me to manage our bills and the money we received from his monthly check, keeping my mom from pestering him every thirty seconds, taking the calls from the neighbors when my mom was parked halfway on the front lawn again so my dad wouldn't have to interrupt his staycation with Gigi, etc.
He was always grateful, quick to tell me he knew he could count on me. That I was a “team player.”
Except I wasn't. Not really. Because no matter how grateful my dad claimed to be, no matter what he bought me to say thank you… he never did anything differently. To be a team player, there had to be an actual team, people working toward a common goal. And all I'd had was one parent making a mess of everything while the other avoided acknowledging said mess, leaving all the responsibility to fall on me.
I froze, the realization ringing through my head loud and clear. Yes, my mother had needed me to take care of her alcohol-induced messes… but my father had needed me to take care of her so he'd have the luxury of avoiding it. He'd used me, every bit as much as my mom had.
I felt sucker punched. He'd dumped his responsibilities on me and then forgotten all about me as soon as I was gone. Buying one pretty headstone was all it took for his guilt to be assuaged, apparently.
My mother had long accused him of always chasing after the newest, shiniest object in the vicinity without feeling or regret, be it the latest car, gadget, or wife. I'd thought being “special” had exempted me from that. Guess not.
With effort, I leaned over and yanked some of the too-tall grass away from the base of my ridiculous headstone, my eyes stinging suddenly.
I tossed the loose blades of grass away, but the breeze caught them and sent them fluttering across my grave, just as it would the leaves in a few months and then the snow after that.
I pictured my former self snug in the white casket in the ground below, immune to all the drama and chaos going on up here. And for a second, I wished I was with her. Just gone.
“Why am I here? Why did you send me back?” I asked for probably the millionth time in the last two months, this time aloud instead of in my head.
But the answer was the same. Silence.
Of course. Because that was
I spent longer at the cemetery than I meant to and had to hurry to get back home before Mrs. Turner and Tyler returned. Still, hurrying or not, I should have known something was wrong the second I reached my bedroom window. If I'd stopped and thought about it, I would have remembered that I'd left the window open, and it was now closed. I might have checked things out before barging in.
But my brain was on a constant loop of unhappy thoughts, and I was in a rush. So, it was only after I'd pried the window up from the sill — it's much harder to do that from the outside than you'd think — and stuck my head into the room that I realized two very important things.
First, unless I wanted to end up on my face, it would have been better to start with my feet.
Second, Tyler Turner, Lily's younger brother, was standing in the middle of the room and glaring at me, his arms folded over his skinny chest.
Tyler was the second hardest thing about this gig, coming in just behind Mrs. Turner. It wasn't his fault, exactly. I had no idea how to be an older sister, any more than I knew how to be
Sometimes he seemed to hate all the attention his parents, particularly his mother, put into me. He constantly pointed it out when I answered their questions incorrectly (“No, purple is your favorite color”) or I didn't “remember” something I should have (“But you hate mustard!”).
