Happenstance 2 (Happenstance #2)(17)
Author: Jamie McGuire

I blinked and then gritted my teeth. “Move.”

“Fine.” He stepped to the side, and I stormed out, passing Veronica on my way.

“Erin?” she said.

“Sorry, I have to go.”

When I got to my car, Weston caught up to me, breathing hard. “Don’t read them, Erin. Just don’t do it.”

“Why not? What are you afraid I’ll find?”

His jaws worked under his skin, and he swallowed. After a few seconds without an answer, I got in my car and drove home.

I parked and ran up the stairs, straight to Alder’s room.

“Erin?” Julianne called after me.

I shut the door and leaned against it, out of breath. Alder’s closet door was shut, and I glared at it, knowing now that whether it was right or wrong, I had to read them. I had to know what was so terrible that Weston didn’t want me to continue.

I marched over and swung open the door, dragged the tub out of the closet and into the middle of her room. I pulled all of them out, one by one, until I got to the plastic diary, skimming over the descriptions of dreams and boys she liked. Once I finished reading that diary, I moved on to the binders. I wanted to skip over to her journal from our fifth-grade year. That was when they’d stopped talking to me, but I forced myself to read one at a time.

Fatigue began to set in when I opened the yellow, plastic, covered binder titled 5TH GRADE. Any mention of me was like before. We were still friends. She still liked me. On a few occasions, she talked about asking her parents if Sonny and I could join them on their family vacation, and Sam and Julianne were considering it. I flipped the page to the entry I’d been searching for.

Most of the entries after that were about how much they hated me, and what mean things they did and said to me. Sonny’s parents had never gotten a divorce, so I assumed they had worked it out, but it wasn’t until I got to the binders that I fully understood. Sonny’s father and Gina had an affair. Harry had gotten Gina pregnant. I shut the binder. The Erins were half sisters.

That’s why they hated me. They thought Gina and I had nearly caused Sonny’s parents to divorce.

“Gina,” I whispered, flipping the pages.

That was what Carolyn was talking about at the restaurant. Gina’s daughter had been a reminder, an object at which Carolyn could direct her anger. After the accident Carolyn figured out that she had welcomed Harry’s illegitimate child into their home, taken her on vacations, and bought her Christmas and birthday presents. In a strange twist of fate, Harry helped raise his own daughter, even when he thought he was ignoring her to save his marriage.

My thoughts drifted to Gina. Sonny’s parents were quite a bit older than her. He was part owner of a prosperous fabrication plant just outside town. He would have to have been in his early thirties when Sonny was born—when we were all born. Gina wasn’t even old enough to buy alcohol when she got pregnant, and she never spoke about the man we both thought was my father.

A sudden sympathy weighed me down, making me feel so heavy, I felt stuck to the floor. I’d been so angry with her, but the truth was, we both knew what it felt like to be hated by everyone. To have no one. To learn early that the best defense was to shut everyone out, even those who try to help. She was too broken to be my mother; it wasn’t that she didn’t want to be.

As the dates on the entries wore on, Alder wrote less about Gina and more about how much they hated me. The older Alder was, the better she explained Sonny’s reports of Harry and Carolyn’s periodic fights about Gina—usually around our birthday—and by middle school, it was clear to Carolyn that Gina’s daughter would always be a reminder of her husband’s infidelity, and she hated me for it—and so did the Erins.

She also talked about watching me watch Weston, and catching Weston looking at me—dozens of time. My stomach began to hurt.

A knock sounded on the door.

“Erin?” Julianne said before peeking in. Her hair wasn’t soft and shiny. It was in tangles and matted in places to her head. Her face was shiny and makeup free, and her pink floral pajama set was mostly covered by a long, thin robe. “Oh, honey. It’s three in the morning. Do you think maybe you should take a break?”

It was then that I realized my eyes felt like dry, scratchy balls under my lids, and the skin around them was heavy and tight at the same time.

“I’m almost finished.”

“O-okay,” she said. “Weston called a few times earlier. He said you weren’t answering your phone.”

“It’s still in my car, I think.”

Her lips made a hard line, and she offered a sympathetic smile. “You’re a blank page, Erin. Maybe you shouldn’t fill it with Alder’s words.”

“Did you know? About Gina?”

She nodded. “I think everyone knows.”

I closed my eyes. “No wonder Gina was angry. She was alone, and blamed, and hated, and all she had was me as a reminder.”

“Not you. It wasn’t you. You were conceived of love and nothing else. You’re ours.”

“Everyone was wrong.”

“Yes, they were.”

“No. They left her with all the blame, and he still got his family and his reputation. It’s not fair.”

“No, it’s not. I’m sorry Sonny and Alder took it out on you.”

“I need to see her. I don’t know why. I’m not ready yet, but I need to talk to her about this.”

Worry sparked in Julianne’s eyes. “Oh, okay. I, um, I understand.”

My eyes fell to the binder in my lap, and Julianne shut the door. I rested my chin on my fist as I turned the pages of Alder’s high school journals. She knew I liked Weston, and that was the only reason she pursued him. She wrote about losing her virginity, but to my absolute surprise, it wasn’t with Weston. She was cheating on him with Eric Liberty. My face twisted into disgust. Eric was a gangly, pimple-faced pothead who had been held back twice, and then dropped out of high school altogether, and she was in love with him, not Weston.

The sky was changing outside Alder’s window. I looked up at Alder’s alarm clock. It was nearly six in the morning.

I turned the page, reading about the first week of our senior year. Page after page, I’d read about my misery through her eyes, and how much she enjoyed inflicting it. It was one of the only things that brought her joy. She hated Blackwell, her house, her car, and sometimes Sam and Julianne. Her aspirations included marrying Eric and moving to San Francisco.