Wicked Darlings

Chapter 1

I would have hated this party if my sister were alive. Leah would have strolled out in the cutest bikini imaginable, showing off her sculpted muscles from soccer and her glowing skin that by some scientific miracle only tanned and never burned. She would have replaced my Top 40 playlist with something obscure but catchy that got everyone gushing over her music taste. She would have introduced some fun new drinking game, and told wild stories from her first year of college. She would have been funny, and magnetic, and smart, and beautiful, and perfect.

And everyone would have forgotten that I was the one who invited them.

I couldn’t not plan a party when I found out my parents would be in Canada for some cousin’s daughter’s bat mitzvah the weekend before graduation. For the first time ever, I wouldn’t have to wrestle with Leah for the spotlight; I could just bask in its glow, knowing my friends had come to see me, and me alone. I went all out. I messaged everyone in my grade. I ordered a cornhole set and giant pool floatie shaped like a unicorn. This morning, I spent hours hanging string lights, cleaning the pool, and blowing up so many shiny Mylar balloons that I legitimately almost passed out.

But holy hell, was it worth it. Because here I am, encircled by friends who knew Leah, but now they’re all chanting my name: Noa. Today, I’m not the other Falk sister; I’m the Falk sister. And I’m sorry, but it’s awesome.

On the count of three, I knock back the shot of dragon fruit vodka my friend Charlotte just shoved into my hand. Ugh. It tastes like lipstick and bleach had a baby, but whatever. People are cheering, and that takes the edge off the burning in my esophagus. I hold out my little plastic cup so Charlotte can top me up.

“Oi! Noa!” Someone with a sexy British accent shouts my name from the pool. It’s Alistair, the exchange student I’ve been casually hooking up with for the past few months. He shakes his wet curls out of his eyes. “Come be my chicken fight partner.”

“One sec!” I down the second shot--dear God, this is literal poison--and bounce over to the pool, where I take off my linen shirt and shimmy out of my denim cutoffs.

“Wow.” Alistair’s eyes travel up and down my red one-piece bathing suit. I’m a shorter, paler, much-less-athletically-inclined version of my sister, but Alistair doesn’t know that. He’s never met Leah, since she died last summer, and he came to New Jersey in the fall. I have to admit, I like it that way, and I’m going to miss him after he flies back to England tomorrow. I sweep my shoulder-length dark-brown hair into a bun and slip into the water. Alistair dives beneath the surface, swims through my legs, and lifts me up on his shoulders.

“Is now a good time to say I’ve enjoyed being between your legs? ” he jokes.

“AL!” I swat his arm, but he can obviously hear the glee in my voice. When Leah was alive, guys would only take interest in me after she rejected them first, and a few girls only kissed me for a shot at becoming her friend.

Our first matchup is against a pair of girls on the softball team, each with biceps the size of grapefruits.

“Al, we’re screwed.”

“No, we’re not. C’mon. You’ve got this.”

We are, in fact, screwed. It takes Sarabeth approximately six seconds to knock my shrimpy body backward off Alistair’s shoulders. I come up for air, laughing. “Told you.” I splash him. “That was a total fail.”

“I bet we could win at something,” he says. He nods toward the grass, where Millie and Reza, this year’s prom king and queen, are tossing beanbags back and forth. “What about the game I can never remember the name of? ”

“Cornhole? ”

“That’s the one.” Alistair smirks. “You did say I have to try this time-honored American tradition before I leave.”

I did say that while I was ordering the cornhole set the other day, but I didn’t envision us playing it with Millie Santiago, who, aside from being prom queen and valedictorian, is also the unofficial president of the Dead Sisters Club. I’d rather let Charlotte pour dragon fruit vodka straight down my throat than play cornhole with Millie, but it’s too late to make up an excuse. Alistair’s already pushed himself out of the pool, and he’s waving to the couple, asking if we can join. Millie’s overjoyed at the suggestion, because of course she is. She’s the only person here who I wish liked me less.

Bouncing on the balls of her bare feet, Millie gestures with her arms for me and Alistair to split up. “Let’s do me and Rez versus you guys,” Millie says. “Noa, you come stand with me.”

Fabulous. But I’m not about to be a bad host. “Okay,” I say as I drag myself out of the water.

We launch into a practice round so Alistair can learn the rules. When he immediately sinks a beanbag through our hole, I jump up and down and cheer. Millie flips her long black hair over her shoulder and lobs a beanbag over. As soon as it flies out of her hand, she asks me a question under her breath. “How are you, Noa? ” Emphasis on the are, like she knows something other people don’t.

Millie’s older sister, Gabby, died by suicide when we were sophomores. Before that, Gabby had dealt with terrible depression for years. After Leah took her own life last summer, Millie rushed to my side to support me, having gone through the same thing herself. She started inviting me to eat lunch with her at least once a week; then she asked me to join her at family fun runs and bake sales and dance-a-thons for mental health awareness. She was a good sister, clearly. I had to tell her I was way too busy with college applications and newspaper stuff to hang out, because the truth was way too complicated to explain.

“I’m good,” I tell Millie.

Alistair’s beanbag thuds onto the edge of our board. “You’re doing so well!” Millie shouts. As I line up my shot, Millie lowers her voice again. “But how are you really, Noa? ”

“I’m fine,” I mutter to Millie. “Seriously.”

I throw the beanbag way too hard. It flies over the boys’ board and smacks Alistair in the hip. “Ow!” he yelps. “Hitting your teammate isn’t extra points, as far as I understand.”

“Sorry!”

“You know you can be real with me,” Millie murmurs.

“I am being real with you.”

She gives me a pitiful look as we collect the beanbags for the next round. “After Gabby passed away, I found it so hard to enjoy stuff like this,” she says gently. “I might have told you this before.” Only forty billion times, but let’s make it forty billion and one. “This voice in my head would be like, It’s not fair that I get to be here and my sister doesn’t. You know? NICE ONE, BABE!” Reza’s beanbag just skidded onto the board and knocked Alistair’s through the hole. Play-fighting, Al elbows Reza, and Reza shoves him back. They laugh like they don’t have a care in the world, and my chest aches with envy. I wish I could just exist without constantly having to calculate how much I should loathe myself. “Just know that if you’re feeling that way--hypothetically, of course,” Millie continues with a wink, and it makes me want to hurl a beanbag at her forehead, “my therapist, Gloria--who’s amazing, by the way--says it’s totally normal, but we also have to challenge that belief. And you want to know how we challenge it? ”

Not especially. “How? ”

“By having fun.”

Millie winds up for her next shot. She doesn’t realize I was having fun until she had to go and remind me what a monster I am. Her next beanbag makes a perfect arc through the air and whooshes through the opposite hole.

“OH, YAY! WE WIN!” She skips across the grass and throws her arms around Reza’s neck. She kisses him on the lips, then asks, “You guys wanna play again? ”

“Actually, I really need the bathroom,” I say. “You guys don’t have to wait for me.” Before Millie can say anything else, I turn on my heel and march into the house, through the kitchen, and into the foyer. Oh no. I’m relieved to be away from Millie, but not to be standing face to face with the gallery wall of family photos.

Since I was the younger sister, my parents always signed me up for whatever activities Leah was already doing. There we are, ages nine and seven, at Miss Sugar Plum’s Ballet School. I was never as flexible or as graceful as Leah, which meant I was always shoved in the back, while she took center stage. There’s another photo from when we were fourteen and twelve and I was forced to join the soccer team that Leah was already captaining. That was the year I chopped off my hair in a desperate bid to assert my own identity. The pixie cut required way too much pomade to look even half decent, and I regretted it almost immediately.

In high school, I finally forged my own path. I stage-managed the school play. I joined yearbook. And I started reporting for the school newspaper, my favorite activity of all. By the end of ninth grade, I knew I wanted to be a journalist. Not only did I have a passion for it, but Leah didn’t, which felt almost as, if not just as, important. Journalism was my dream, and mine alone.

Until it wasn’t.

It was May of last year, and Leah came home from her first year of college with an announcement: she’d scored a last-minute internship offer from the Gotham Sentinel, a historic Manhattan newspaper with a rich and powerful readership. Her job would be to go to wealthy people’s parties and write about them: what happened, who was there, who wasn’t there, and why. From June to August, she would basically be a full-time society reporter at a famous publication.

I dropped my fork with a piece of chicken still speared on the end, got up from the dinner table, and stormed out of the room. It didn’t matter that Leah’s beat at the Sentinel would be different from the investigative reporting I wanted to do. By accepting that internship offer, she’d gone ahead and claimed my dream as her own.

Leah followed me out of the kitchen and chased me up the stairs. “Why can’t you just be happy for me? ” she pleaded.

I whirled around in my bedroom doorway. “Why would I be happy? You just stole my whole thing, Leah!”

“I didn’t steal anything!” she cried. “You’ve told me a billion times how great a career in journalism would be.”

“Yeah, because I wanted you to know it was mine.”

“Why can’t it be mine too? ”

“BECAUSE EVERYTHING IS YOURS, LEAH!”

She stood there, blinking slowly, like I’d slapped her across the face. “What do you mean, everything is mine? ”

“You really are oblivious, aren’t you? ”

“Oblivious to what? ” she asked.

“How good you’ve always had it.” Did we live on different planets? Leah was clearly our parents’ favorite. They drove up to Skidmore to watch her soccer games, they called to ask how she did on every test. Mom had maybe read a few things I’d written for the school paper, but there was no way Dad had. Did he even know I wrote for the paper to begin with? Unlikely. I was a random afterthought. A shadow.

“Oh, sure, it’s great being me,” Leah snapped sarcastically.

I couldn’t believe the words coming out of her mouth. “If you can’t see how lucky you are, then you are so fucking clueless, Leah.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “You’re the one who’s clueless, Noa.”

“Oh yeah? Well, I know one thing.”

“What? ”

“I’m done with you.”

“You’re done with me? ”

“Done.”

“What does that even mean? ”

“It means I don’t want to see you again for as long as I live.”

And then I slammed the door in my sister’s face.

Later that night, I passed Leah in the hallway on my way to brush my teeth. Her mascara had bled around her eyes--from crying, or from washing her face without using a makeup wipe first? I didn’t care. I did, however, realize it would be hard not to see my only sister again for the rest of my life. At least she’d be in the city all summer, and then back at Skidmore for the fall. I wouldn’t have to see her in any meaningful way until Thanksgiving, at the earliest.

For the next week, I avoided her around the house. For dinner, I went to friends’ places, or ate cereal in my room. When Leah left our house in New Jersey for her sublet in Hell’s Kitchen for the summer, I didn’t say goodbye. I knelt on my bed and watched out the window as she and my parents pulled out of the driveway, and I thought, Finally. She’s gone.

That August, early on a Saturday morning, we got a call from the police that Leah’s roommate, Janie, had come home from her bartending shift and found my sister’s lifeless body on the floor of her bedroom. Leah had apparently returned from covering a party for work and overdosed on a painkiller called oxycodone.

The earth fell out from under us. We didn’t understand. Leah hadn’t been dealing with depression--at least, not as far as we knew--and she didn’t leave a note explaining anything. My parents got a court order that gave them access to her phone. I’m not sure exactly what they found on there, but once they’d dug through it, they said it was clear the pressure of her workload at the Sentinel had become too much for her to handle.

That explained the text she’d sent me the day before she’d gone to that Friday-night party.

Leah

Hey, N. I miss you. I know you’re probably still mad at me, but I could really, really use your help right now. I can explain more in person or over the phone, but I’ve never been this anxious in my life. There’s this party I’m supposed to cover tomorrow, and I was wondering if you could come with me. I’ll send you money for a train ticket and you can sleep in my bed. It would mean so much to me, you have no idea. Let me know. I love you.

She was right: I was still mad. All summer, she’d been proudly posting links to the articles she was writing. She’d even shipped physical copies of the paper home to Jersey so we could all see just how great she was--and I could have salt shoved in my gaping wound. I refused to read any of her stories. And when she texted me that day, saying she’d never been more anxious in her life . . .