Reputation(20)
I sit down on the leopard-print couch. Willa perches on the slipper chair stamped with hallucinogenic poppies. Our usual spots. My gaze moves down the hall, where I notice Willa’s suitcase resting on the front mat. “Wanna take that upstairs?” I ask, gesturing to it.
“Oh.” Willa shifts awkwardly. “Actually, I got a room at the Marriott. I’ll take my stuff there later.”
I run my tongue over my cracked lips. What is it with her and that freaking Marriott? Every time Willa visits—at least since she’s had enough money to do so—she’s stayed there. She says it’s because she doesn’t want to get in our way . . . but it feels so impersonal, especially now.
I sit dumbly on the couch. My mind crawls. Finally, I pick up the Coffee mate creamer I grabbed from the kitchen and pour a hefty amount into my mug. Willa gives me a horrified look. “What?” I ask.
“Do you know how many chemicals are in that?”
I shrug, then dump the rest into my coffee. The liquid is vanilla-colored by now. I take a long sip, but now, of course, the creamer tastes like piss. Buzzkill.
“So are you still surfing?” I finally say, remembering that the last time I visited Willa in LA, I’d seen two surfboards leaning against her back deck. One of them, she said, belonged to a guy friend. I never did get to meet the guy.
My sister blinks. “Not in a while. I’ve been busy with work.”
“Oh.” I wrap my sweater tighter around me.
“I can’t wait to get back into it. It’s why I moved to Venice. Surfing . . . grounds me.”
I never know what people mean when they say something grounds them, but then, Willa and I have always been on different planets. We were closer when we were young, but that was only because we lived in the same house with the same rules and routines. Our personalities were nothing alike. Despite our shared last name, some teachers were surprised to learn that we were sisters. I was the friendly one who had so many friends there was hardly autograph space left in my yearbook by the end. A girly girl, I hated to get dirty in chemistry lab; I walked the track in gym instead of participating in sports. I had a head for math and history, but English bored me—much to my father’s chagrin, as he’d been in the English department before becoming an administrator.
Willa, on the other hand, was an English teacher’s dream. She also played every sport there was, including on boys’ teams when girls’ weren’t offered. She was one of those strong-looking, slightly scary girls who walked into a room and just dominated . . . but you didn’t exactly want to be friends with her.
After our mom’s death—I’d been a freshman at Aldrich University, and Willa a junior in high school—Willa got . . . weird. She dropped out of sports. She bought a pet tarantula, Stewie, and let him walk up and down her arm, hoping to freak people out. She started hanging out at the punk club downtown. She wrote angry poetry on her bedroom walls, and she regularly told people to fuck off. Though she didn’t toe the line, my dad never punished her—I guess he figured this was her version of grief. Besides, her grades were always great, which was what mattered most to our dad. He so wasn’t equipped for the emotional parts of having teenagers. It’s probably why I got married so quickly—I needed someone to rely on. And maybe it’s why Willa left.
The year after my mom’s death, I threw myself into my friends, activities, and my boyfriend, Martin. Martin was my everything: handsome, sweet, loyal, funny, empathetic. He was my nursemaid as I grieved, helping me get through the days. I was practically living in his dorm room when Willa made the announcement that she was reneging on her acceptance to Aldrich and going to California instead. Maybe I should have tried to connect with her about this sudden change of heart—Willa had always said that she was going to apply to Aldrich and nowhere else. Maybe I did try, but I don’t recall us having any meaningful conversations about it. Willa was resolute. She was leaving.
After Willa moved, we talked even less. The tragedy with our mom became sealed off, rock hard. We went on our separate trajectories, doing our own things. I became the Kit Manning who married Martin and got pregnant at twenty, who scrambled to find child care so I could finish my last year of college. Willa became the Willa Manning who, well, I don’t really know. Works as a reporter? Avoids nondairy creamer? Is celibate? Even though she comes home for holidays and weddings and such, she never shares much.
Out the window, three news vans shimmer through the lifting fog. The reporters sit on the curb with cups of coffee and a box of Dunkin’ Donuts, having a little party. “Have you seen Facebook?” I ask. “It’s the weirdest mishmash of posts about Greg ever. There are all these judgmental comments about his e-mails . . . and then once the murder story went up, some of those same people also posted stuff like OMG, RIP, he was always such a good man.” I shake my head. “Such hypocrites.”
“Wasn’t that what the hacker said, too? Called everyone hypocrites?”
My head snaps up. “Where’d you hear that?”
“I read it in the news.”
God, all the stories: the hack, Greg’s affair, his murder. It’s almost too much to keep track of.
“Have they let you see him yet?” Willa asks.
“Who?”
Willa cocks her head and gets an uncomfortable look, as if to say, Who else? I feel a tug of dread. “Not since the hospital. They’re performing an autopsy. I don’t understand why. I mean, he obviously died of blood loss from the stab wound. What else do they think they’re going to find?”