“That sucks. I wanted to see if I could bring friends,” Jamie said, and shrugged. “I’m starving. Can we eat?” Typical Jamie; he was never really bothered by anything for very long.
“Let’s wait for Mom,” Leda said quickly, but her dad was already pushing a discreet touch-screen pad at the center of the table. Their chef, Tiffany, appeared, pushing a wide cart laden with dishes.
“Mom said to start without her. She’s held up in a meeting,” their dad explained. Leda pursed her lips and reached for the bowl of pasta without comment. She saw that it was her favorite, a kale-noodle penne with crumbled soy protein and phenerols. Her mom had totally picked this menu to cheer Leda up. A stubborn, contrary part of her was determined not to like it.
“How was school, Leda?” her dad asked. That was his version of parenting: asking scripted questions that he’d gotten from some How to Talk to Your Teenage Daughter book. Leda wondered if they shelved that one next to How to Hide Your Teenage Mistress.
“Fine,” she said curtly, and started to take a bite of the penne, only to put down her fork with a clatter. “Although, there was a new girl at school today. Isn’t that weird, that she was able to start mid-semester like that?”
“I think I saw her,” Jamie chimed in, for once. “The scholarship student?”
Leda glanced at him in surprise. Jamie usually never noticed anything, unless you could smoke it or drink it or had given it to him as a present. Then again, Rylin was pretty, if you could look past her disrespectful attitude.
“Exactly. She moved here from the twentieth floor,” Leda said dramatically, wrinkling her nose at the thought. “Can you imagine?”
“Sort of like how you felt, when we moved here from midTower,” her father said, which shocked Leda into silence.
“No, not at all like me,” she countered after a moment. She didn’t appreciate being compared to an arrogant lowlier. “This girl is rude and insulting. She thinks the rules don’t apply to her.”
Jamie burst out laughing. “Look who’s talking. Leda, you’ve never thought rules apply to you!”
Matt Cole tried to stay impartial, but amusement danced across his features. “Leda, I think you should give this girl the benefit of the doubt. I’m sure she had a tough first day, starting at a new school in the middle of the year. Especially as a scholarship student.”
This was her opening. “You’re right,” Leda said, her voice dripping with false sympathy. “And I imagine it’s been extra hard on her, because she won Eris’s scholarship, and of course we all miss Eris so much.”
Silence settled over the room. Leda’s family knew she’d been on the roof, of course; they’d picked her up from the police station that morning after everyone provided their witness statements, and had reviewed it with their lawyer in excruciating detail. Eris’s death was one of those things they seemed to have collectively decided not to talk about. As if all their family’s dirty little secrets could be wrapped up and buried, just the way Eris herself had been, and then they would disappear.
Leda watched her dad’s face closely. Looking for what, she wasn’t quite sure. An acknowledgment of his relationship with Eris, she supposed.
She saw it right away. He flinched at Leda’s words, just barely, but it was enough. She quickly looked down.
Leda had expected to feel pleased at seeing the proof, right there on her dad’s face—yet all she wanted, suddenly, was to cry.
For the rest of the meal she pushed her food around, letting her dad and Jamie talk about lacrosse and some great save Jamie had made and whether or not the school would hire a new coach next year. As soon as she could, she mumbled an excuse and escaped down the hall to her bedroom.
A knock sounded at her door. “Leda?”
“What?” she snapped, wiping at her eyes. Didn’t her dad understand that she had no desire to see him?
He tentatively pushed the door open. “Can we talk?”
She swiveled her desk chair around but stayed where she was, her legs crisscrossed beneath her.
“I just wanted to check on you,” he said, fumbling. “You haven’t spoken about Eris much, since she died. And then what you said, at dinner …” He trailed off awkwardly. “I just want to make sure you’re okay.”
Of course I’m not okay, Leda thought. She almost pitied how clueless her dad was. She’d mentioned Eris at dinner because she wanted to provoke him, because she was sick of pretending that everything was fine, that a cozy pasta dinner could fix things the way it had when she was little. He was the one who’d started sleeping with her friend, and had betrayed everything their family was built on.
But more than that, Leda was disgusted with herself. She’d been keeping it a secret too, and that made her as culpable as he was.
So many times since Eris’s death she had wanted to confront her mom with the truth. She would march up to Ilara, ready to spill it all: that Dad was a two-timing scumbag and that they needed to leave him. “I have something to tell you,” Leda had said, on more than one occasion, “something important—”
Yet Leda could never bring herself to actually say the words. Eris was already gone, she told herself; what good would it do to tear her family apart now? Each time Ilara looked at her with those dark eyes, so full of love, Leda wavered and fell silent. She didn’t want to be the one to break her mom’s heart.
The child in Leda couldn’t bear the thought of her parents splitting up. Her family might be riddled with secrets and betrayals, but it was still her family. And she would rather keep them together, even if it meant sitting on this secret for the rest of her life.
She had earned this, she thought darkly. This twisting, tormenting guilt was her penance, for what she’d done to Eris.
“I’m fine,” she said tightly, in answer to her dad’s question. What else could she say to him, anyway? Hey, Dad, remember how you were having an affair with my friend, and then she fell off the roof? Guess what? I’m the one who pushed her!
“You and Eris were close, right?” her dad persisted. God, why couldn’t he just go away? And why did everyone keep asking that? Just because she and Eris had some friends in common didn’t mean they were attached at the hip.
“We were friends, but not best friends.” Leda was ready to end this conversation. “Actually, Dad, I have a lot of studying to—”
“Leda,” her dad interrupted, and now he was the one who seemed to be desperate, “There’s something I want to tell you about Eris—”
No, no, no. “Sorry!” Leda stood up abruptly, knocking her chair to the floor, and began frantically throwing items in her massive tote bag. She was wearing floral yoga pants and a black zip-up, but it didn’t matter; she needed to get the hell out of here. She absolutely could not stay and listen to her dad’s fucked-up confession about how he’d been sleeping with her so-called friend. “I’m late to study at Avery’s. Can we talk later?”
Understanding, and a little bit of hurt, flashed in her dad’s
