Jessica Perot, Laurel, Montana, July 4th, 2015
The compound was alive with people. The Fourth of July party was an annual Yankowski production, a tradition Olivia insisted on, Jess could hear the collective noise filtered through the many hallways and rooms of the Yankowski Compound.
She was thankful to be in Ana's room in the east wing, away from most of the party and guests she could undoubtedly embarrass herself in front of.
But this? Being alone with Ana in her room, she could manage.
Jess had never been able to explain, even to herself, why being around Jared Yankowski made the back of her neck prickle. Why she felt, whenever his hand landed on her shoulder or his eyes held hers a beat too long, like she was seconds away from a bomb detonating.
Olivia wasn't much better. But at least she wasn't so forced? so fake?
She didn't have the language for it yet. She just knew that she preferred it when Jared and Olivia were downstairs or away and she was up here, with Ana's door locked and Ana's weight warm and familiar in her lap.
“Anaaaaaaaaaa, it's too hot out. I can literally see how hot it is.” Jess was fanning herself with her hand, in a futile effort to keep herself cool while pressed right up against the girl she was falling over herself for.
“Seriously Jess what did you expect? it's been this hot all week, you know I don't have an AC in here.” Ana looked over her shoulder into Jess's eyes and shifted her weight. “If you want I can open the balcony door but… I'm not certain it'll cool you down any.”
The window was already open. The air that came through was hot and useless, stirring the gauze curtains without actually cooling anything. An oscillating fan on the dresser pushed the same warm air in a different direction every four seconds, like rearranging furniture on a sinking ship.
Ana sat in Jess's lap. The way she always sat, like Jess was a chair that just so happened to be in the vicinity. They were on the floor, backs against Ana's bed, and Ana had migrated over the course of the last hour from sitting beside Jess to leaning against her to simply climbing into her lap and settling there like she'd located her designated spot and saw no reason to negotiate.
Ana's room, though room felt like a criminal understatement for a space bigger than Jess's bedroom and the hallway outside it combined. White furniture. Pale blue walls. A canopy bed with curtains, a corkboard above the desk held a cheer schedule and a laminated wallet photo of Tyler O'Haire tacked in the corner. The room was exceptionally maintained and exceptionally expensive.
Ana was wearing jean shorts and a red tank top, her bottle-blonde hair pulled up in a messy bun that exposed the back of her neck. Her skin was warm from the heat, slightly damp at the hairline, and she smelled like the strawberry lotion she kept on her nightstand.
Jess had one arm draped loosely around Ana's waist. The byproduct of years of sleepovers and movie nights and the unspoken physical vocabulary between two girls who'd been best friends since fifth grade.
It was also slowly, methodically, ripping Jess apart from the inside.
Because Ana's bare thigh was pressing against Jess's arm. Because Ana's tank top had ridden up just slightly, and Jess's thumb was resting three inches from that sliver of skin, and she was using every scrap of willpower to keep it from drifting. Because Ana kept shifting, small adjustments that sent her weight moving in Jess's lap, and every time she moved, a jolt of heat shot through Jess's body and settled low in her stomach, and she had to breathe through it like she was managing pain.
She was in love with Ana Yankowski.
Not a simple crush. Not a maybe. She had blown past the maybe sometime around seventh grade, when Ana had worn a gorgeous green dress to the end-of-year dance and Jess had looked at her and felt the entire floor tilt beneath her feet. It was a full, realized, catastrophic love.
It was also a love that Jess could never, ever act on.
Not here. Not in this house, where Olivia and Jared were. Not in this town, where being gay was something that happened to people on television and was discussed in church with indignation. Not with Ana, who dated boys, or at least maintained the strategic fiction of dating boys, and whose family's entire public identity was built on a platform that included, as a foundational plank, the belief that people like Jess were fundamentally broken.
"Tyler texted me again," Ana said, scrolling her phone with one hand, her head resting against Jess's chest. "He wants to know if I'm 'thinking about him.'" She held up the phone. The text read: hey babe u thinkin about me? 😏
"Are you?" Jess asked.
"I'm thinking about how his car has working air conditioning and he has a summer job at Taco Bell, which means free food. So. In a way."
"That's not what he means. Also you are literally rich."
"Not the point, and yeah What he wants is for me to sext him." Ana typed a response, miss you babe 💕. "There. Maybe I'll send a selfie too, that'll keep him busy for a few hours.”
Jess watched her lock the screen and toss the phone onto the carpet. "Why are you even with him?"
"Because he has a car, he's not smart enough to not understand that I'm not gonna fuck him and because my parents are thrilled that their daughter is dating a nice Christian boy from a good family." Ana's voice was light, factual. "My mom was starting to ask questions. Are you going to the dance with anyone? Don't you think that Bradley boy is cute?" She mimicked Olivia's tone while also giving her a posh British accent for some indiscernible reason. "Tyler solved the problem. He's a useful idiot."
"That's awful."
"It's efficient." Ana shifted in Jess's lap. "He gets to tell his friends he's dating a hot younger girl. I get rides to the movies and my mother stops asking questions that make my skin crawl. Mutually beneficial."
"You just called yourself hot."
"I stated a fact. Don't deflect." Ana tilted her head back, looking up at Jess from the angle that made Jess's chest go tight. "Why? Does it bother you that I'm dating him?"
Yes, Jess thought.
"No," Jess said. "I just think you deserve someone who's not an idiot."
Ana smiled. Not the public smile. This was the real one. Wider, more toothy, and only visible when she was with Jess or Felisity.
"Someday," Ana said. "When I'm far away from this house and this town and my mother's donors. I'll date someone worth my time." She turned back to her phone. "Until then, Tyler O'Haire and his Taco Bell discount."
The fan oscillated. The party noise surged and receded below them. Outside, a firework arced across the sky in a streak of red before fizzling out over the foothills.
"So," Ana said, her voice shifting, animated, the Ana who came alive when the subject turned to strategy. "Tryouts are in three weeks."
"I know."
"We need a strategy.”
Called it, Jess thought to herself.
“And the point is, if we're both going to make varsity, which we will, we need to be the two strongest freshmen walking into that gym. Conditioning every day until tryouts. Tumbling twice a week. I booked us time at the gymnastics center on Tuesdays and Thursdays."
"You booked us time."
"My mom's card. She wants me to be the best.”
Jess laughed, bright and involuntary. “You're incorrigable.”
"We're going to crush it," Ana said, with the calm certainty of someone who had already decided the outcome and was merely waiting for reality to catch up. "You and me. Varsity as freshmen."
"I just don't want to embarrass myself."
"You won't. You're like, almost better than me. The only thing holding you back is your confidence, which I am personally going to fix by screaming at you until you believe in yourself."
"Inspirational."
"I'm a leader, Jessica. Be a good girl and follow my lead.”
Another firework outside. Jess could smell the cookout drifting up, charcoal and meat and corn on the cob, and underneath it, the ever-present strawberry scent of Ana's skin.
"Hey," Jess said, quieter. "Can I tell you something weird?"
"You tell me weird things constantly. It's part of your charm."
"Your mom cornered me downstairs earlier."
Ana went still. The shift was instantaneous, a tightening of her shoulders, the micro-calibrations of a girl who'd spent her life reading the emotional weather inside this house and adjusting accordingly. "What did she say?"
"Nothing, really. That's what made it weird. She just stopped me on my way to the bathroom. Asked how my mom was. Normal stuff, except she was looking at me like she was scanning me. Like she was running me through some internal database and the results were… um… unfavorable?"
"That's just how she looks at people."
"It's not, though. She looks at other people like she's filing them away. She looked at me like she was checking for something." Jess exhaled. "I swear to God, Ana, your mother doesn't like me.”
"Jess," Ana said, careful, measured, choosing each word like stepping stones. "My mother is… She's suspicious of everything because she's a politician. She looked at you weird because she looks at everyone weird."
"It felt personal."
"That's what she wants. She wants people to feel observed so they police themselves." Ana turned slightly, enough to look up at Jess directly. Her brown eyes were steady, analytical. "You're fine. And even if she didn't, she wouldn't say it. Not about my best friend. It would reflect on me. And she needs me to be the perfect daughter to compare Felicity to.”
The logic was airtight. But the feeling in Jess's chest, the low hum of terror that had settled there the moment Olivia's pale eyes locked onto hers in the hallway, didn't care about logic.
"Okay," Jess said.
Ana watched her for another moment, then turned back around, settled her weight more firmly against Jess's chest, and picked up her phone.
"Besides," Ana said, returning to the cheer roster, "if my mother thought you were a bad influence or something, she wouldn't corner you in a hallway. She'd launch a community awareness campaign. With pamphlets with our faces on it."
Jess shook her head and exhaled through her nose. The tension cracked. Ana smiled, smug and satisfied, and the fan swept left and the fan swept right and the heat kept pressing down, and Jess sat there with the girl she loved in her lap and thought, I could stay like this forever.
It wouldn't be enough. She knew that. But the lie was sweet, and the afternoon was long, and the alternative was thinking about what would happen when it ended.
The door banged open without so much as a knock. And the two girls flinched before realizing who was entering the room.
"Okay, losers," Felisity Yankowski announced, shouldering her way in with the kinetic energy of a person who had been vibrating with restless defiance all day. "I come bearing gifts."
She held up a bottle of vodka in one hand and a two-liter of Sprite in the other, grinning like she'd just pulled off a bank heist. Where Ana calculated, Felisity detonated. Where Ana moved through the world like a human chess player, Felisity moved through it like a forest fire.
She was fifteen and looked it, her bottle-blonde hair was the same platinum blonde as Ana's, the roots grown out a solid inch and a half. She was wearing black skinny jeans despite the ninety-seven-degree heat and a hoodie with the sleeves pushed past her elbows. No makeup. No jewelry except a fraying friendship bracelet on her left wrist.
"Where did you get that?" Ana asked, eyeing the vodka.
"Dad's bar cart. He's got like forty bottles and half of them are for show." Felisity kicked the door shut with her heel. "I topped the bottle off with water last time, they haven't noticed. Besides, Mom's on her third glass of wine and Dad's out back doing his man-of-the-people routine. Neither of them are coming upstairs."
She spat the word Dad out like she was bitter and Jess noticed.
"Come on," Felisity said, already heading for the door. "My room. I've got the AC unit and you two look like you're melting."
"We're fine," Ana started.
"You're not fine. You're sweating through your tank top, A, and your girlfriend looks like she's about to pass out."
Jess's stomach dropped through the floor. The word hung in the air, girlfriend, casual, offhand, tossed out like a passing observation.
Ana was off Jess's lap in an instant, standing, brushing off her shorts. "She's not—we're not—"
"Relax, A. I'm kidding. Kinda. Come on."
Felisity's room was at the end of the hallway, past the guest bathroom with the fluffy towels no one was allowed to use. The door had a BEWARE OF DOG sign despite a dog never having lived here and beside it, a bumper sticker that read Honk if You Hate Fascists in red block letters.
Inside, the temperature dropped by at least fifteen degrees. The window unit rattled in the corner, working overtime. The room was a different country from Ana's. A Sublime poster hung above the unmade bed. Next to it, a poster of Lil Wayne, shirtless on stage. And PlayStation 4 sat on the dresser, controller resting on top. Incense burning with the scent filling the room.
Where Ana's space was curated, Felisity's room looked like it had been decorated by someone who grabbed everything they loved and nailed it to the walls in the order they found it. It was, Jess thought, the most lived in room in the house.
Felisity dropped onto the bed, cross-legged, and started mixing drinks in two coffee mugs she'd pre-positioned. She poured vodka into each with the casual confidence of a bartender, too much, then topped them with Sprite.
"I only have two mugs," she said, holding one out to each of them. "I'll drink from the bottle."
"That's disgusting," Ana said, grabbing the bottle from Felicity and taking a swig directly from it before Felicity swiped it back.
"I'm a disgusting person. Ask Mom." Felisity took a swig directly from the neck of the bottle, her eyes steady on Ana over the label. It was a dare. Everything Felisity did lately had the energy of a dare, daring Olivia to notice, daring Jared to react, daring the house and its carefully maintained fiction of normality to crack.
Ana and Jess settled on the floor. The drink was mostly vodka. It burned, and Jess coughed.
"Lightweight," Felisity said through a fake cough.
Ana sipped hers with the composure of someone drinking tea at a garden party. She didn't cough.
"So," Felisity said, stretching out on her stomach. "Cheer tryouts. Break it down for me."
Ana launched in. The roster, the members she saw as threats. She talked with her hands when she was passionate about something, emphatic gestures punctuating her arguments like bullet points, her eyes lit up in a way they never were at school.
"The point is," Ana concluded, "we control what we can control. We show up in the best shape of our lives."
"And if they say no anyway?" Felisity asked.
"They won't."
"But if they do?"
"They won't."
Felisity smiled. She rolled onto her back, staring at the ceiling. "You know what I love about you, A? You're absolutely terrifying and you don't even know it."
"I know it. It's intentional."
"See? Terrifying." Felisity turned toward Jess. "How do you deal with her?"
"I let her think she's in charge. It's easier."
"I am in charge," Ana said.
"Sure, babe," Jess said, and then immediately wanted to die, because it had just come out of her mouth directed at Ana like it was the most natural thing in the world, and Felisity was looking at her with an amused expression.
Jess drank. The vodka helped with the blush and the persistent, humming awareness of Ana's body two feet away, the strap of her tank top sliding off her shoulder in a way that was probably accidental and was definitely going to be the subject of Jess's dreams for the next week.
"Lis," Ana said, changing the subject, "what's been going on with you and Jake?"
Felisity's expression shifted. A slight tightening around her eyes. "Nothing's going on with me and Jake. We're friends."
"You're always at his house."
"He has a pool and a dog. Two things this compound, somehow, does not have."
"We have a pool?"
"Mom's decorative pool doesn't count if you get yelled at for splashing, which is most of what swimming is."
Ana let the deflection pass, but her eyes stayed on her sister with the particular focus she reserved for people who were lying.
"He's nice," Felisity said quietly. Different voice now. Smaller. "He listens. And he doesn't look at me like I'm a project or a problem. He just sits there. We listen to music. He lets me smoke. His apartment's a mess but it feels real. You know? Like a place where a person actually lives."
Unlike this house.
"How old is he again?" Ana asked.
"He's twenty...two."
"Lis."
"Almost twenty-three."
"That's—"
"I know." Felisity's jaw set, an expression identical to Ana's. "I know how it looks. But he's not like that. He doesn't push anything. We literally just hang out. I'm not going to date him or anything, I told him that and he said okay, and he meant it."
"You believe that."
"Yeah, A. I believe that." Her eyes were fierce, defensive. "He's not Dad. He's not— He's nothing like—"
She stopped. Looked over to Jess then took another sip from the bottle.
The room went quiet. Outside, fireworks erupted, rapid pops like gunfire, and the sound seemed to come from very far away.
Ana moved from the floor to the bed, sitting beside her sister, and took Felisity's hand. No words. Just contact. Felisity's fingers curled around Ana's, and her jaw worked, and for a moment her eyes were wet.
"Anyway," Felisity said, steady again. "Jake's fine. I'm fine. Everything's fine." She raised the bottle in a mock toast. "To being fine."
"To being fine," Jess echoed awkwardly.
Ana squeezed her sister's hand one more time, then let go. She held out her own mug.
"To making varsity," Ana said. "And to surviving this house."
They drank. The AC hummed. Outside, the fireworks were starting for real, the big ones Jared had ordered from out of state, cascades of red and gold and blue, each detonation sending shockwaves Jess could feel in her teeth.
Felisity reached for the PlayStation controller. "Okay. Enough feelings. Who wants to watch me play The Last of Us?"
"You've beaten it, like four times," Ana said.
"And I'll beat it four more." She powered on the console. "Jess, have you played this?"
"I have a Wii."
"Okay, nevermind just sit."
Jess climbed onto the bed. Ana followed, wedging herself between them, her shoulder warm against Jess's. On screen, the opening sequence began, and Felisity narrated with equal parts analysis, testimony, and profanity.
Jess watched. She didn't understand half of what was happening, but she understood the way Felisity's voice went rough when the emotional beats landed. She understood that this game meant something to Felisity and that's what mattered.
They stayed like that. Three girls on a bed in a room at the end of a hallway, drinking stolen vodka from coffee mugs while fireworks detonated over a party hosted by people who would destroy them if they knew the truth. Ana's head drifted to Jess's shoulder. Felisity's bare foot hooked over Ana's ankle.
Jess closed her eyes. The vodka had softened everything. She could feel Ana's breathing, slow and steady, and if she focused, she could feel her heartbeat through the places where their bodies touched.
I love you, Jess thought. I love you and I'm terrified and I will never say it and you will never know and someday this is going to break me in half.
But not tonight.
"Jess," Felisity said.
"Yeah?"
"You're staring at my sister."
"I'm not."
"You are. You've been staring at her for like three straight hours. I could set off a firework in this room and your eyes wouldn't move."
"Lis," Ana murmured, a warning, through her half closed eyes.
"What? I'm stating a fact." Felisity's voice was gentle. Not teasing. Gentle, in the way of someone who recognized a wound and chose to touch it again regardless. "It's fine, Jess. Whatever it is. It's fine."
Jess's throat closed. She looked at the TV, where two characters were moving through a ruined city, searching for something worth saving in the wreckage.
The fireworks boomed outside, painting the walls in shifting color. Red. Gold. Blue. Inside the room, three girls sat in the cool dark and held on to each other and pretended, for as long as the night would let them, that this was enough.
Laurel Melody Parker, November 3rd 2018, Missoula, Montana
Ana drives with the seat pushed all the way forward because her legs don't reach the pedals otherwise, and something about that, something about Ana Yankowski adjusting the rearview mirror of her pearl-white Mercedes so she can see over the steering wheel, deflates the tension Laurel has been carrying since she climbed into the passenger seat at eight o'clock this morning.
It's hard to be intimidated by someone who would drive better with a booster seat.
They've been on I-90 for forty minutes. The landscape is the usual Montana spread of brown grass and distant mountains under a cloudy sky. Laurel has her knees drawn up, the heater is cranked. Ana's phone is connected to the stereo, playing a playlist that has been the single most confusing thirty minutes of audio Laurel has ever experienced.
It started with Carly Rae Jepsen. Fine. Expected. Then Mitski. Then St. Vincent. Then, inexplicably, a deep cut from The Cure.
"You listen to The Cure?" Laurel says.
"I like music." Ana's eyes don't leave the road. "Is that a problem?"
"It's just surprising."
"My sister got me into them. Lis had a whole phase in eighth grade. She used to play Disintegration on loop until my mother threatened to take the door off the hinges."
The mention of Felisity does something to Ana's face; a softening of her features, quick, almost invisible.
"You have a sister?"
"Yeah." The word is clean and curt. "She's fine, she's with Jake. She's always with Jake."
The finality closes the subject. Laurel turns toward the window and watches a billboard for a casino slide past, then one for a personal injury lawyer, then one for Jesus.
Montana in three billboards.
"So," Ana says, clicking into her operational voice, the one that means she's about to make something happen. "Ground rules. Rule one: you don't get to say 'I can't afford that.' I have my mother's Amex and a grudge against her politics, and I intend to use both. Rule two: you try everything I hand you. No arguing, no pre-rejection. You put it on, you look in the mirror, and then you can say no. I'm not doing this to torture you."
"And rule three?"
Ana glances at her. "Rule three is you try to have fun. I know that's a radical concept for you. I know your default setting is misery and punk music and staring out windows like a emo bitch. But today, for six hours, you are going to let someone do something nice for you without treating it like a crime."
"Fine," she says.
"Fine." Ana turns up the stereo. Mitski sings about wanting something she can never have, which feels on the nose, and the Mercedes eats up the highway toward Missoula.
Ana parallel parks with infuriating precision on the first attempt, then produces a reusable shopping bag from the back seat like she'd been planning this invasion for days.
The first store is a vintage shop, exposed brick, curated chaos of racks organized by color, old band tees pinned to the walls, the smell of cedar and old fabric.
"Okay," Ana says, scanning the space. "Here's the concept. You can't go from Nirvana hoodies to full Montana ranch boy overnight. It's not believable. So we're going for something in between."
"In between what?"
"Between what you are and what people expect you to be." She pulls a hanger off the rack. A corduroy jacket, deep olive, slim cut. She holds it up against Laurel's chest, brow furrowed. "Think less 'small town Montana' and more 'transfer student from somewhere with culture.' Someone who reads. Someone who listens to vinyl."
"I do listen to vinyl."
"Then we're already mostly there, California girl." She pushes the jacket into Laurel's hands. "Try it."
Laurel shrugs it on over her hoodie. The fabric is soft and worn in. She catches her reflection in the mirror propped against the wall and pauses.
It doesn't look wrong, not something she'd usually wear but it looks… fine? she thinks.
That's the revelation. The jacket doesn't scream boy. It doesn't scream girl either. It just looks like a jacket on a person, and the person in the mirror looks like someone who chose this deliberately, who has taste, who has money, who exists in the world with intention.
"Good," Ana says, already moving to the next rack. "Keep it on."
Over the next hour, Ana builds a wardrobe with surgical efficiency. Slim-cut dark jeans that sit at the waist. Fitted henleys in black and burgundy. A grey crewneck sweater, cashmere blend, soft enough that Laurel runs her thumb across the fabric three times before she realizes she's doing it. A navy peacoat, vintage, double-breasted, the kind of coat that looks good on anyone regardless of what body is underneath it.
Nothing she chooses is aggressively masculine. Nothing is obviously feminine. Every piece lives in a deliberate middle ground, the androgynous overlap where context determines perception, where a slim black turtleneck on "Montana" at school reads as artsy and a slim black turtleneck on Laurel in Jess's bedroom reads as something else entirely.
Laurel doesn't realize what Ana is doing until the third store.
Ana hands her a pair of black Chelsea boots. "These run small. Try a size up." And Laurel takes them into the back, past the curtained changing area, and sits on the bench, and looks at the pile of clothing Ana has chosen for her, and it clicks.
None of this is for Montana.
The olive corduroy jacket. The cashmere sweater. The slim jeans. The peacoat. They're not to masculinize her. They're not armor for a fake boyfriend. They're clothes that would make Laurel look good, clothes that could shift from one identity to the other with nothing but a change in posture, makeup, and some styling. Ana hasn't been building a disguise. She's been building a bridge.
Laurel sits there with the boots in her hands and feels something loosen behind her ribs.
She thought about this. She actually thought about this.
"Are you alive in there?" Ana's voice comes from outside the curtain.
"Yeah. Yeah, I'm coming."
She pulls the boots on. They fit.
Lunch is at a café with a waterfall wall. Ana orders a salad with modifications that were increasingly specific. Laurel gets a grilled cheese and tomato soup because the simple comfort of melted cheese feels like a blessing.
They sit across from each other in a window booth, and for the first time all day the operational energy drops. Ana sips her iced tea and looks out the window, and in the grey November light her face is different. Softer. The cheerleader polish is still there but thinner, like a coat of paint that's been translucent.
"Can I say something?" Laurel asks.
"You're going to regardless."
"The clothes you picked. They're not really for Montana."
Ana holds Laurel's gaze with the steadiness of someone deciding how much truth she can afford.
"They're for whoever you need to be on any given day," Ana says. "The jacket works with the other clothes we bought, or your normal hoodies. It also works with the turtleneck and the boots if you're going somewhere you can breathe. The point is flexibility."
"You could have just said that."
"I could have. But then you would've argued with me about how you don't need flexible clothing, you need to survive until January, and I would've had to explain my entire strategic framework for dressing a closeted trans girl who's five-six and has incredible cheekbones, and that would've taken the fun out of it."
The compliment lands before Laurel can prepare for it. She feels the heat rise in her face and looks down at her soup.
"That," Ana says, pointing at Laurel's blush with her fork, "is exactly why we need to work on your poker face."
Laurel looks up. Ana is leaning forward on her elbows, her dark eyes bright with something that isn't calculation for once but genuine curiosity, genuine engagement.
"I'm thinking," Laurel says, "that you kissed me three times without asking and I still got in a car with you this morning, and I'm not sure what that says about me."
Ana sets her fork down. "I know. And I know that was wrong. The first time on the bleachers was wrong because I was spiraling and you were kind and I was selfish. The second time was for Derrick. The third time was for Hunter."
"And what's the excuse for the fourth time?"
"There's not going to be a fourth time." She picks up her tea, takes a sip, puts it down. "Not unless you want there to be."
The sentence hangs. Laurel stares at Ana across the table, across the shopping bags and the half-eaten salad and the distance between them, and she doesn't know what to say. So she lets the silence end the conversation.
They finish lunch. Ana pays without looking at the total, and they step back into the cold November street, and Ana says, "Two more stops," with the forced casualness of someone who's been planning this part all day.
The first store is called Rogue & Bloom, tucked between a used bookshop and a tattoo parlor. Indie cosmetics and vintage jewelry, sandalwood and ambition. Lipsticks in gradient rows, eyeshadow palettes open like books, a whole wall of nail polish in every color Laurel has ever imagined.
"Okay," Ana says, steering Laurel toward the makeup counter with a hand on the small of her back, the touch light and warm and gone before Laurel can decide how she feels about it. "This part is for you."
"I'm not going to let you buy me a whole makeup collection."
"You're not going to let me do anything. I'm doing it because I want to, and because your current beauty routine appears to consist of Jess's cheapass concealer and prayers." Ana picks up a tube of primer. "I've been doing my own makeup since I was ten. Let me be good at it for you."
There's something in her voice that makes Laurel stop arguing. Not the command. The undercurrent beneath it, the quiet want. Let me do this. Let me be close to you. Let me be useful for something that isn't strategy.
Laurel sits on the stool.
Ana moves in front of her. They're nearly the same height like this, and Ana's face is close enough that Laurel can see the faint freckles she conceals every morning, the thin line of darker roots at her hairline.
"Close your eyes," Ana says.
Laurel closes her eyes.
Ana's fingers touch her face. Light. Careful. Nothing like the grab-and-kiss energy of the hallway or the porch. Slow, methodical, the touch of someone paying attention to the landscape before they start to paint. Ana's thumb sweeps across Laurel's cheekbone, testing the skin, feeling the bone structure, and the contact sends a low, warm pulse through Laurel's body.
"You have really good bone structure," Ana murmurs. "High cheekbones, strong jaw but it's softening. The hormones are already doing something."
"I'm going to do a full face," Ana says. "Not performance makeup. Just you. What you'd look like if you got to be you every day."
Laurel keeps her eyes closed. She can feel Ana selecting products, hear the soft clicks of compacts, feel the brush make first contact, featherlight, sweeping foundation in smooth, even strokes.
Laurel keeps her eyes closed. She can feel Ana selecting products, feel the brush make first contact with her skin, featherlight, sweeping foundation across her forehead in smooth, even strokes. Ana works in silence for a while, and the intimacy of it is overwhelming, someone else's hands on your face, someone else deciding how you look, someone else seeing you from three inches away with nowhere to hide.
Ana's fingers blend something along Laurel's jawline. "Your skin is so much softer than it was a week ago," she says, and there's genuine wonder in it, the voice of a girl who is seeing something change in real time and is fascinated by it.
"The estradiol," Laurel says.
"I know what it is." A brush sweeps across Laurel's eyelid. "Hold still. I'm doing a soft brown. Nothing dramatic. You don't need dramatic unless you want it."
Minutes pass. Ana works with the focused precision she brings to everything, but the energy is different from the clothing stores, different from the kisses, different from every interaction they've had up to this point. The urgency is gone. The calculation is gone. Ana is just here, present, doing something she's genuinely good at for someone she genuinely wants to help, and the absence of agenda is so stark that Laurel can feel it like a change in air pressure.
"Lips," Ana says, and Laurel feels the soft press of a pencil tracing the outline of her mouth, then the glide of color being applied. Ana's free hand cups Laurel's chin, holding her steady, and her thumb rests just below Laurel's lower lip, and the warmth of that single point of contact radiates through Laurel's entire face.
"Okay." Ana steps back. "Open."
Laurel opens her eyes.
Ana is holding up a mirror, a small handheld one from the counter display, and the girl looking back from the glass is not Montana. She's not the stage version of Laurel either, not the gold glitter guard performer or the California girl in the yellow sundress. She's someone in between, someone new, and she's pretty. Brown eyes made warm and deep by the shadow, cheekbones catching the store's soft lighting, lips a muted rose that makes her face look like it belongs exactly where it is.
"That's you," Ana says. She's standing two feet away with her arms crossed and her chin tilted and her expression is unguarded in a way Laurel has never seen it, not at school, not at the party, not on the porch. Ana is looking at her with naked, uncomplicated admiration, the look of a girl seeing something beautiful and not having the presence of mind to pretend she isn't seeing it.
Laurel stares at herself in the mirror. Her eyes are burning. "Ana."
"Don't you dare cry, girl."
A laugh breaks out of Laurel's chest, wet and unexpected, and she presses the heel of her hand against her eye and feels the sting of wanting to cry and not wanting to ruin what Ana just gave her.
"Thank you," she says. The words feeling inadequate.
Ana takes the mirror from her and puts it down. Her composure is back, mostly, but there's a flush high on her cheeks that wasn't there five minutes ago, and she's not quite meeting Laurel's eyes.
"You're welcome," Ana says. Then, quieter: "You should look like that all the time."
They buy everything Ana used. Foundation, concealer, eyeshadow palette, brushes, mascara, the lip color. Ana adds a setting spray, a cleanser, and a moisturizer that costs more than Laurel's entire current wardrobe. Laurel doesn't argue. She watches the total climb on the register and feels something complicated about being the recipient of generosity from someone she's supposed to distrust.
The bell above the door of Rogue & Bloom chimes a bright, cheerful note as they step back out into the fading Missoula afternoon. The temperature has dropped a few degrees, but Laurel barely feels the cold. She's been trying not to touch her face.
She's carrying two sleek paper bags filled with cosmetics she never could have afforded, paid for by the mother of the girl walking next to her. Who, if she knew the truth, would be bringing hellfire and brimstone onto both Ana and Laurel so quickly. The cognitive dissonance of it is staggering.
"Okay," Ana says, pulling her coat a little tighter around herself and checking the time on her phone. "We have an hour before we really need to get back on the highway. One more stop."
"Ana, you've bought enough. Seriously. The cover story wardrobe is done, the makeup is—"
"I told you," Ana interrupts, her voice carrying that sharp, unyielding edge that means the debate is over before it begins. "Rule one. And I promised you clothes for you. Not for Montana. For Laurel, for you."
Ana doesn't wait for a response. She turns on her heel and marches down the sidewalk, her boots clicking a sharp rhythm against the concrete. Laurel sighs, the white plume of her breath vanishing into the cold air, and follows her.
They walk two blocks off the main strip, away from the curated vintage boutiques and high-end cafes, stopping in front of a shop called Neon Ghost.
The exterior is painted matte black, the windows packed with a chaotic, glorious mix of punk hardware, velvet, distressed denim, and band merchandise. It looks like the kind of place Dani would spend three hours in just to complain about the prices.
Ana pushes the heavy glass door open. The air inside smells like incense and old leather.
"Start pulling," Ana commands, grabbing a plastic basket from near the register. "Whatever you want. Whatever you've looked at online and thought you couldn't pull off. Skirts, dresses, tops. Don't look at the tags."
Laurel stands frozen near a rack of studded leather jackets. She's spent so many years actively repressing the want for expensive things, the years living frugally in Marisol Heights will make frivolous spending an impossible luxury. That being explicitly told to indulge feels wrong somehow.
Ana notices the hesitation. Her cheerleader polish softens, dropping away to reveal the observant, fierce girl underneath. She steps close, taking the heavy paper bags from Laurel's hands and setting them on the floor.
"I'll pull," Ana says gently. "You just tell me yes or no."
For the next twenty minutes, Ana moves through the store like a heat-seeking missile. She operates on instinct, pulling items off the racks and holding them up against Laurel’s frame. A pleated, dark-plaid skirt. A sheer, black, long-sleeve top meant to be worn over a bralette. A heavy, oversized distressed denim jacket covered in pins.
Ana dives into a rack of vintage sports apparel in the back and emerges holding a faded, distressed black Seattle Supersonics t-shirt. She smooths the worn cotton between her manicured fingers.
"This," Ana dictates, tossing it into the basket. "Tucked into the skirt, or tied at the waist. The green will pull the color out of your eyes, and the fit will make your waist look smaller when you cinch it. Plus, it’s just cool."
"I don't know if I can wear a skirt,"
Laurel whispers, the dysphoria suddenly rearing its head, an ugly, familiar panic tight in her chest. "My legs... I mean…”
"Your legs are cute," Ana says firmly. "Go to the dressing room. Put it on. If you hate it, we take it off, put it back and never speak of it again. But you have to try."
Laurel takes the basket, her hands shaking slightly, and steps into the small, curtained cubicle at the back of the store.
She strips off her oversized hoodie and the rigid, baggy jeans she wore from Laurel. Standing in the dim lighting of the dressing room in just her underwear, she forces herself to look in the mirror.
Usually, this is the moment the self-loathing hits her like a physical blow. But today, the face looking back is the one Ana created. Soft brown shadow, muted rose lips. The makeup bridges the terrible gap between her body and her brain. Thank god.
She picks up the plaid skirt and steps into it, zipping it up at her waist. It falls perfectly to mid-thigh. She pulls the vintage Supersonics tee over her head, grabbing the excess fabric at the hem and tying it into a tight knot at her side, just like Ana suggested. She layers the heavy, distressed denim jacket over her shoulders. Finally, she pulls on a pair of sheer black tights she found in the basket, and laces up the combat boots Ana had forced her to buy at the second store.
Laurel turns back to the mirror.
Her breath catches in her throat.
It works. The heavy jacket softens her broad shoulders, making them look like a deliberate stylistic choice rather than a biological betrayal. The cinched vintage tee creates the illusion of a waist. The skirt flares over her hips, and the combat boots ground the entire outfit in a punk-femme reality that feels so aggressively, authentically her that she feels a sudden, violent urge to cry.
She doesn't look like a boy in a costume. She looks like the girl she was always supposed to be. She looks like the girl she can still be.
"Laurel?" Ana's voice floats through the curtain, unusually quiet. "Are you okay in there?"
Laurel swallows the lump in her throat. She pushes the heavy velvet curtain aside and steps out.
Ana is leaning against a rack of studded belts, checking her phone. She looks up.
The phone slips from Ana's hand, clattering against the scuffed wooden floorboards of the shop. Neither of them moves to pick it up.
Ana's dark eyes go wide, her lips parting slightly. She stares at Laurel with an intensity that makes the air in the small shop feel entirely too thin. It isn't the calculated, appraising look she gave the "Montana" clothes. It isn't the clinical focus of the makeup counter. This is raw, unfiltered, and hungry. It is the look of a girl who has spent her entire life surrounded by beautiful, polished things, suddenly realizing she has never actually seen anything beautiful until this exact second.
"Oh shit," Ana breathes.
Jessica Perot, Laurel, Montana, November 3rd, 2018
The Yankowski compound looked different at night.
At night, with the floodlights off and only a few windows lit against the dark bulk of the foothills, it lost its magazine-spread polish and became what it actually was. A very large house on a very dark hill, isolated by a long gravel driveway lined with bare trees. At night, the Yankowski house looked like a house where things happened that nobody talked about. It looked kind of haunted.
Dani's Saturn idled at the foot of the driveway, the engine making the wet, consumptive sound it always made. The headlights cratering two cones of yellow into the pitch black atmosphere.
"You sure about this?" Dani asked, hunched over the wheel in her leather jacket and Francesca's teal beanie. "Because I can come in."
"And what? Run into the mother of the girl you hooked up with in a car? In the home of a senator whose entire political brand is hating people like us?" Jess unclipped her seatbelt. "Yeah, no. You stay here."
"What if she tries something?"
"She's five-two, Dani."
"Napoleon was five-six and he conquered Europe."
"He actually didn't. Never mind." Jess gripped the door handle. "She said it would be quick. I grab the bags, I come back."
"Then why couldn't she drop them at Laurel's?"
Good question. The exact question Jess had been turning over since Ana's text: Come to my house. Pick up Laurel's stuff. Side entrance. 8:30.
Not I'll bring it to you. Come to my house. As if Jess had been there anytime in the last three years. As if the last time she'd walked through that door she hadn't been a fourteen-year-old girl whose entire life was about to be dismantled.
"I don't know," Jess said. "But the stuff is for Laurel, and I'm not going to let my feelings about Ana get in the way of that."
Dani looked at her for a long beat. Then she leaned across the console and kissed Jess on the temple.
"Fifteen minutes. After that, I'm coming in."
"Twenty."
"Seventeen."
"Fine."
She walked up the driveway alone, gravel crunching, her breath forming misty clouds around her. The trees on either side were skeletal, their branches interlocking overhead. The front of the house was dark. Jess veered left, following the stone path toward the side door.
She knew this path. Her feet remembered it the way her hands remembered the weight of a flag. She had walked this route hundreds of times, cutting through the side yard to reach Ana's window. She'd stood under that window and tossed pebbles at the glass, and Ana would lean out and whisper Back door's unlocked, idiot.
That was another life.
Ana was waiting at the side entrance, standing in the doorframe with her arms crossed, warm light spilling past her. She'd changed into oversized grey sweatpants and a cream cable-knit sweater that fell past her wrists, blonde hair down, face scrubbed of makeup. Without the armor, she looked small. She looked young. She looked like the Ana from her memories.
"You came," Ana said.
"You texted. Where's the stuff?"
"Inside. Come in. Shoes off."
The command was so automatic, so wired into the household protocol, that Jess had her boots off before she registered the absurdity, unlacing her shoes in the mudroom of a girl who'd tried to ruin her life.
"Where's your mom?" Jess asked, keeping her voice low out of instinct.
"Skype call. She's been on it for two hours." Ana led her through the mudroom into the kitchen, marble countertops and stainless steel, the lights dimmed to warm amber. "She won't come down."
"And your dad?"
Something moved across Ana's face. "Out. Elks Lodge around seven. Won't be back until late."
They passed through the kitchen and up the stairs. The staircase curved upward, past the landing with the window seat where she'd read novels with Ana during Olivia's dinner parties.
Ana's bedroom door was open. The light inside was soft. And as Jess followed Ana through the doorway, the room hit her with a force she hadn't prepared for.
It was the same. White furniture. Pale blue walls. The canopy bed. The desk with the textbooks and the planner and the highlighters. The oscillating fan on the dresser, off now, but still there, same spot. Even the corkboard, though the cheer schedule was updated and Tyler's photo was gone, replaced by a card that read YANKOWSKI FOR MONTANA, RE-ELECT OLIVIA.
The bags were on the bed.
"Everything's in there," Ana said. "Makeup in the Rogue & Bloom bags. Clothes in the other two."
Jess stared at the bags.
She'd known Ana was buying things for Laurel. She'd been briefed on the shopping trip, obviously.
But standing here, in this room, looking at four bags of carefully chosen gifts that Ana had spent an entire day selecting, something old and raw and fourteen years old reared up inside Jess's chest and sank its teeth in.
It wasn't the money. It was the attention. The care. The deliberateness of it. Every item had been chosen with thought and tenderness, the kind of fierce, protective generosity that Jess recognized because she'd been providing it for months with her drugstore concealer and her borrowed clothes and her lilac bedroom.
Except Jess had done it with seventeen dollars and a prayer, and Ana had swooped in and done it with an Amex and a day and the kind of effortless competence that came from growing up in a world where generosity was just another tool.
But why couldn't you try this hard for me?
The thought arrived unbidden, and with it, the girl. The fourteen-year-old who was still sitting on a bedroom floor with Ana in her lap and love lodged in her throat like a bone. That girl looked at the bags and felt the old ache flare with a viciousness that took Jess's breath away, her heart lurched angrily in her chest.
"You okay?" Ana asked.
Jess turned. Ana was leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed, watching with an expression between concern and calculation.
"Why didn't you just drop these off? You drove right past my street."
"I could have."
"So why didn't you?"
Ana crossed to her desk and sat in the chair backwards, straddling the seat, arms folded across the backrest. "Because I wanted to talk to you. Not in a school bathroom with thirty seconds before someone walks in. Here, where we have time."
"Time for what?"
"For a conversation that's three years overdue." Her dark eyes held Jess's. "My mother's on a call for at least another hour. My father is drunk at the Elks Lodge. We have the house."
"I'm not here to talk, Ana. I'm here for Laurel's things."
"Then take them." Ana didn't move. "She looked incredible today, by the way."
Jess's hand stopped on the bag handle.
"The makeup especially. Full face, natural. Brown shadow, rose lip. She looked like herself." A genuine warmth flickered behind Ana's composure. "She nearly cried when she saw her reflection."
"Good for you," Jess said, and the words came out harder than she intended. Ana took notice. She always took notice.
"That bothers you," Ana observed.
"Nothing about you bothers me. I stopped caring a long time ago."
"Liar. You care about everything. It's like your defining characteristic. It's the reason you stepped in front of Sarah's fist for a girl you hate. It's the reason you're standing in my bedroom right now instead of sending Dani up. You care so much it's eating you alive, and it's the thing about you that makes me—"
She stopped.
"That makes you what?" Jess demanded.
Ana picked at a thread on the chair's upholstery. The silence that filled the space had texture, years of unsaid things compressed into the air.
"You spent a whole day with her," Jess said, and she heard her own voice cracking, the fourteen-year-old bleeding through. "You drove two hours. You picked out clothes. You bought her a wardrobe that probably cost more than my mom makes in a week. For Laurel."
"For Laurel," Ana confirmed.
"And what did I get?"
The words escaped before she could stop them. Ugly and naked, and Jess wanted to shove them back in, because asking meant admitting the wound was still open, that underneath the strong captain, she was still the fourteen-year-old begging to be loved by someone who would never love her back.
"What did I get, Ana?" Her voice was shaking now. "I was your best friend for four years. I was the person who let you sit in my lap and stayed up until three AM. I was the one who kept your secrets and did your bidding. And what was my reward for four years of loving you? Getting thrown under the bus the first time it became convenient for you?”
The word loving landed like a slap. Something behind Ana's composure shifted, tectonic, deep.
"You outed me. You took the most vulnerable part of me and handed it to the entire school like gossip. You let them think I was the predator. You let them think I kissed you, that I forced it. And you stood there and watched them destroy me, and you didn't say a goddamn word."
"Jess—"
"No. You don't get to 'Jess' me. Not in this room where I used to sit on your floor and think maybe, if I'm good enough, she'll see me." Her throat was raw, the tears coming. "And now you see Laurel. Now you buy her all this shit, and it takes you one afternoon to give her what I spent years begging for, your fucking attention."
"It's not the same thing—"
"You're right. It's not. Because you're not in love with Laurel. You have distance. Objectivity. You can be generous with her because she doesn't cost you anything. But I cost you something, didn't I? I cost you your perfect image. So you threw me away."
Ana stood up. The chair scraped against the floor, and she was on her feet with coiled energy.
"You don't know what it cost me," Ana said, lower, rougher, stripped of polish. "You think you were the only one who lost something?"
"Wasn't it?"
"Are you serious? Look around you, Jess. Does any of this look fine to you?"
"It looks like a palace."
"It's a prison." The word cracked out of her. "It's a set my mother built so she could perform Family Values for cameras, and every person in it is playing a role, and my role since I was old enough to understand the rules has been the perfect daughter. The straight daughter. The one who dates boys and smiles for photos and never does anything that could end up in an opposition ad. I had to be the daughter that mom could point at and tell Lis to be like."
"So you sacrificed me. That's not a defense, that's a confession."
"I know what it is!" Ana's voice broke, and the sound was so unfamiliar, Ana's voice did not break, that it stopped Jess mid-breath. "I know exactly what I did. I have known every single day for three years. I wake up and I know it and I go to school and I know it and I sit in this room and look at the spot on the floor where you used to sit and I know it. But you had somewhere to go. You had your mom. You had a house. You had a life that could absorb the hit. I had this." She gestured, a sharp sweep that took in the canopy bed, the blue walls, the whole immaculate cage. "I had my mother and my father and a future that depended on being exactly what they needed me to be, and if I wasn't that, if they found out—"
She stopped. Her breathing was ragged. Her hands were trembling.
"You're a manipulative bitch," Jess said.
The words came out flat. Not heated. Just stated, like a fact. A label she'd been carrying for three years, smooth as a river stone.
Ana absorbed it. She stood there with her trembling fists and took the hit with the practiced endurance of someone who'd been taking hits in this house for longer than three years.
"And you care too much," Ana said. Same flat delivery. "You care so much that you bleed for people who don't deserve it. You step in front of punches for girls who hurt you. You adopt broken things and pour yourself into them until there's nothing left, and then you're confused when you're empty."
"Don't make my compassion sound like a weakness—"
"It is a weakness!" Ana stepped forward, into Jess's space, and the proximity was terrible. She was so small, five-two to Jess's five-seven, but her presence filled the room. "It's the weakness I exploited. It's the weakness everyone exploits. Laurel. Dani. Me. We all know you'll show up. We all know you'll sacrifice. And it's beautiful and noble and it's going to kill you, Jess. Someday it's going to eat you alive, and you'll be the last one to notice because you'll be too busy saving everyone else."
Jess shoved her.
It wasn't planned. Reflexive, the overflow of something too big, her hands shooting forward and connecting with Ana's shoulders. Ana stumbled backward and her back hit the edge of the desk.
Ana caught herself. Her eyes went wide, fierce, and she came back at Jess, both palms flat against Jess's collarbone, shoving her in return. Jess stumbled into the foot of the canopy bed.
"Don't touch me," Ana hissed.
"Then stop talking about me like I'm a disease—"
"Stop acting like I'm the only villain here!" Ana shoved her again, lighter, but her hands stayed on Jess's jacket, fisting the denim. "You put me on a pedestal and then you were shocked when I fell off it. You decided I was worth dying for and then you were devastated when I wasn't worth living for. That's not love, Jess, and I never asked for it!"
"You never had to ask! That's the whole point!"
They were close enough that Jess could smell Ana's face wash and underneath it, strawberry. Clean skin. Ana.
Ana's fingers were still twisted in Jess's jacket. Jess's hands were wrapped around Ana's wrists, not pushing, not pulling, just holding, maintaining the contact like it was the only thing keeping both of them from flying apart.
"I can't do this," Jess said, her voice shot, ground to almost nothing. "I can't stand in this room and fight about who hurt who worse. I came for the bags. Let me take them and go."
Ana's grip loosened. Her hands dropped. She stepped back. The distance expanded.
Jess turned toward the bed. Reached for the handles.
"Why did you cover for me?"
Ana's voice was quiet. Not calculation. Not strategy. The kind of quiet that came after the storm.
Jess's hand stopped on the paper handle. She didn't turn around.
"When I outed you," Ana continued, slowly, like walking across ice. "When I told people you kissed me. You could have corrected the story. Everyone would have believed you. But you didn't. You just took it."
The room was very quiet. Somewhere downstairs the furnace ticked. Olivia's muffled voice continued its donor-meeting cadence.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Jess said.
The words came out on autopilot. Three years of practice. A reflex.
"Jess."
"You kissed me," Jess corrected, still not turning. The script ran itself. "You were the one who—" She stopped. Closed her eyes. "The story is—"
"The truth," Ana said, "is that I kissed you."
Jess turned.
Ana was standing by the desk. Her arms were at her sides, not crossed. No armor. And her face was doing something Jess had never seen it do. Not composure. Not calculation. Not the mask or any of the thousand faces Ana wore. This was the face underneath all of them. Bare. Scared. Young.
"I kissed you," Ana said again, and each word sounded like it was being pulled out by a hook.
Three years of distance, three years of walls, three years of telling herself the official version until she almost believed it, collapsed. And she was there again. Fourteen, standing under the bleachers. And then Ana turning. And then Ana's mouth on hers. And the world going silent and enormous and perfect for exactly four seconds before Ana pulled away quickly and everything burned to the ground in the following days after Jess punched Tyler fucking O'Haire after he cheated on Ana.
"It was me," Ana said, barely audible. "And when I got asked about you punching Tyler, I panicked, I blamed you. I let them think you were the aggressor. And then you punched me when you came back from suspension, and I watched your entire social life collapse and I said nothing, because saying something would have meant admitting that I wanted it. That I started it. That I—"
Her voice caught. Her eyes were wet.
Jess couldn't speak. The ability to form words had been replaced by something massive, not anger, not relief, but the bone-deep exhaustion of a truth that had been carrying her for three years finally being set down.
She sank onto the edge of the bed. The bags rustled against her hip.
"I know," Jess said.
Ana blinked.
"I know you kissed me. I've always known. I was there. I remember your hand on my face. I remember you leaned in first."
"Then why. Why did you let me—"
Jess looked down at her hands. Steady. Nails bitten short.
She thought about the girl on the floor. The days after, the whispers, the cold shoulders, the meeting with their coach. Her mother driving her home in silence, Gina's hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel, pulling into the driveway and sitting there before saying, Are you okay?
“Because I loved you, stupid.”
The furnace cycled off somewhere below. The wind pressed against the windows.
"So I took it," Jess said. "I let them think what they were going to think. I had my mom. I had my house. I had a life that could absorb the hit." She looked up at Ana. "And you got to stay safe.”
Ana's composure was gone. She was crying openly, hands covering her mouth, her body curved in on itself. She slid down the side of the desk until she was on the floor, knees drawn up, and cried with the raw, ugly abandon of someone who'd been holding it for years.
"Hit me," Ana said through sobs.
Jess froze.
"Hit me. I mean it. I deserve it. After what I did, just— something. Please."
The please was what broke it. So small. So stripped of composure.
Jess slid off the bed. Crossed the two feet of carpet and sat on the floor beside Ana, back against the desk, close enough that their arms were touching.
"No," Jess said.
"Jess—"
"I'm not going to hit you. Because that's what you want. You want me to hit you again so you can file it as penance. So you can tell yourself the debt is paid. And I'm not giving you that. You don't get to be absolved by a slap, Ana. You get to sit here and deal with it."
Ana made a sound, a small, destroyed thing, and curled tighter, her forehead dropping to her knees.
Jess looked at her. This impossible girl who had taken a grenade to her life and was now begging to be punished. And she felt something shift inside her chest, slow and deep. Not forgiveness. She wasn't ready for that. But something adjacent. Something that recognized the shape of Ana's pain and found it familiar.
Three sharp knocks hit Ana's bedroom door.
The sound was like a gunshot. They both froze. Ana's head snapped up, and her body went through a transformation so fast it was almost violent: the crying girl vanished, replaced in two heartbeats by someone alert, operational. Her eyes swept the room. The bags. Jess. The evidence.
"Anastasia." Olivia Yankowski's voice. Measured. The voice of a woman who never needed to yell because every word already carried the weight of consequence. "Open this door, please."
And underneath Olivia's voice, quieter, a second person breathing. Uneven. Shaky.
"Closet," Ana whispered, already moving, grabbing Jess by the wrist. "Walk-in. Now. Don't make a sound."
No time to argue. Ana's hand propelled her across the room while Ana scooped the shopping bags off the bed with her free arm, all four in a single motion, and shoved them into the closet alongside Jess.
The walk-in was deeper than Jess remembered. Rows of clothes, Jess backed against the far wall, bags at her feet, and Ana looked at her once, a look so layered Jess couldn't parse a tenth of it, and shut the door.
Darkness. The soft click of the latch.
This metaphor is going to haunt me for the rest of my life.
She heard Ana's footsteps cross the room. The bedroom door opening.
"Mom. What's going on?"
"Your sister is here. She showed up twenty minutes ago. I was on a call."
"Is she okay?"
"She's upset. She'll be staying in the guest room tonight. I need you to settle her down."
Footsteps. Two sets entering the room, one steady, one not. And then a third voice, the voice Jess hadn't heard in three years, and the sound of it wrapped around her chest and squeezed.
"I'm fine, Mom." Felisity's voice. Lower than Jess remembered. Thinner. The girl who'd held a vodka bottle like a scepter and narrated video games with passionate profanity sounded like she'd been sanded down, the sharp edges replaced by something smaller.
"You are clearly not fine. You're shaking."
"I'm cold. It's November."
"Felisity." Not concerned. Impatient. "You show up at nine o'clock with no overnight bag and mascara running down your face. I was in the middle of a donor briefing. If you and Jake are having another one of your episodes—"
"It's not an episode, Mom."
"Then what is it?"
Silence.
"He locked me out," Felisity said. Quiet. Matter-of-fact. "We had an argument and he took my keys and locked the deadbolt from inside. I sat in the driveway for forty minutes. My phone was in the house."
"You could have gone to a neighbor."
"I don't know his neighbors, Mom. He doesn't let me—" Felisity stopped. The sentence hung, and in the closet, Jess heard the shape of what had been cut off. He doesn't let me.
"This is exactly what I told you would happen." Olivia's voice had acquired her press-release cadence. "When you moved in with a twenty—"
"Dad didn't say anything." Sharp. A flash of the old Felisity. "Dad hasn't said anything about any of this. Ever."
The silence that followed was colder. Someone had brushed against a nerve.
"Your father is not the subject of this conversation," Olivia said.
"He's never the subject. That's the whole problem."
"Felisity Marina—"
"Can you just go?" Ana's voice cut in, calm, firm, perfectly pitched. The diplomat. "I've got her, Mom. Go finish your call."
Another silence. The calculation Olivia ran on everything: how does this affect me, how does this look.
"Fine. There are fresh sheets in the linen closet. And Anastasia, don't let her go back tonight. If Jake calls, let me handle it."
"I will."
"And Felisity. In the morning, we're going to have a real conversation about your living situation."
The bedroom door closed. Olivia's footsteps receded.
Then, softly, someone sitting down on the bed. A breath released, long and shuddering.
"Lis." Ana's voice, entirely different. No composure. Raw, aching tenderness. "Come here."
The bed shifted. Two bodies finding each other. And Felisity was crying. The quiet weeping of a person who'd been holding it together for forty minutes in a driveway and twenty minutes in front of her mother and had finally found somewhere safe enough to stop.
"I'm sorry," Felisity whispered. "I know it's late, I didn't know where else—"
"Don't apologize. Don't you dare."
"He took my keys, A. He just took them out of my hand and closed the door. Like I was nothing."
"I know."
"And the fucked up part is, I don't even know what I did wrong. I asked if I could see you this weekend. That's all. I said I missed you, and he got this look, and he started in about how I always want to leave, how I'm never satisfied—and then he went through my phone. Reading everything.”
The story dissolved into crying. Ana murmured things Jess couldn't make out, the rhythmic reassurance of someone who'd done this before.
Jess stood in the dark with her hand flat against the door and her eyes burning. She bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted copper. Every instinct screamed at her to step out, to wrap her arms around the girl who'd have done the same for her, years ago.
She couldn't. Not yet. Olivia was still in the house. Her presence was a risk.
So she stood and listened and hated every square inch of this house and every person who had failed these girls.
Minutes passed. The crying eased. The rustle of tissues.
"Sorry about your bed," Felisity mumbled.
"Shut up about the bed."
A wet laugh. Small and ragged but real.
"A," Felisity said. "Have you been crying? Before I got here?"
No answer.
"Your eyes are puffy. Not just now-puffy. Before-puffy. Before I got in the room.”
Jess stopped breathing.
"It's nothing. Long day. Shopping in Missoula."
"Shopping doesn't make you cry." A pause. "Is something going on? Did something happen with Dad?"
"No! Nothing happened with Dad." Too quickly. "Lis, I promise."
More quiet. Felisity processing.
"A, are you with someone right now?"
Three seconds of silence. Jess could hear her own heartbeat, feel the fragile architecture of the evening teetering.
She heard Ana exhale. A long breath. A decision.
"In the closet," Ana said.
"What?"
"There's someone in my closet, Lis."
"What the fuck—"
Jess wrapped her hand around the handle and pushed the door open.
The light hit her like a wave, amber and warm, and she stood in the doorway of Ana Yankowski's walk-in closet with shopping bags at her feet and mascara tracks on her cheeks and looked at the two girls on the bed.
Ana was cross-legged against the headboard, a tissue balled in one fist. Felisity was beside her, eyes swollen, mascara smeared across her cheekbones, staring at Jess with an expression that moved through confusion, shock, and recognition in the space of a heartbeat.
Three years. Felisity looked older. Not in a good way. The angular sharpness of fifteen had settled into something drawn and tired. She was wearing an oversized flannel that wasn't hers, the sleeves pushed past her wrists. Her dark roots had grown out further than ever, the bottle-blonde fading into a gradient that looked less like rebellion and more like neglect. There were shadows under her eyes that went deeper than one bad night.
But her eyes. Dark and sharp and seeing everything, locked on Jess with a recognition so immediate it bypassed three years like they were nothing.
"Hey, Lis," Jess said.
Felisity's face crumpled. Not the controlled crying from before. The face of a girl seeing someone she thought she'd lost, finding them standing in her sister's closet with tears on their face.
"Oh my God. Jess?"
"Yeah. Surprise."
Felisity looked at Ana. Then at Jess. Then at the shopping bags. Then at Ana again, the calculations running behind her red-rimmed eyes.
Instead of questions, Felisity held out her hand.
The gesture was so simple, so unencumbered by strategy, that it cut through every layer of complication like a blade through gauze. Just a hand, extended, palm up.
Jess crossed the room. Took Felisity's hand. And Felisity pulled her onto the bed in a hug that was clumsy and tight and fiercely warm.
"You're here," Felisity said into Jess's shoulder.
"I'm here."
"Your face. What happened to your face?"
"Long story."
"Is my sister involved?"
"Kinda."
"Of course she is." Felisity pulled back, then turned to Ana, who was watching them with an expression so raw Jess almost looked away.
"You two," Felisity said, pointing between them. "You've been... what? Talking? Fighting?"
"Both," Ana said.
"In your closet?"
"I was in the closet because your mom knocked," Jess said.
"My sister shoved you in a closet." A beat. She actually smiled. "There's a metaphor there somewhere."
"Don't," Ana and Jess said simultaneously.
And Felisity laughed. A real one. Small and ragged and wet, but real. She laughed, and Jess laughed, and Ana, who fought it for exactly two seconds, covered her face with both hands and laughed through her fingers.