Beautiful Lies Read Free Page B

wearing open-toed high-heeled sandals, her toenails painted a creamy shade of pink. She raises her arms, making spirit fingers in the air, and I get a whiff of her perfume. The smell turns my stomach again. I could almost throw up.
    “Alice.” My voice is louder, but Holly still doesn’t hear me. She stands up a little in her seat, the metal bar pressing against her thighs, to blow kisses at Nicholas.
    From high above the crowd, I can spot Uncle Sam on his stilts. I can see strands of customers, their bodies woven into ropes of flesh as they line up for food. I can see the candy-apple stand, its neon light glowing red against the crowd. But I don’t see my sister anywhere.
    Long before our births, we shared the same space in our mother’s body. We are what’s known as “monochorionic monoamniotic twins,” which means we are identical twins who grew in the same amniotic sac and shared one placenta. It’s a pretty rare phenomenon; when it does happen, both twins don’t always survive, let alone thrive as we have—especially back when we were born. The chance of our simple existence is a marvel of nature. No matter where I am, no matter where she is, I have always felt her presence from somewhere within myself.
    Until this moment. It is as though the thread connecting us has snapped, like something deep inside me has been severed. She is simply gone.

Chapter Two
    My friends won’t listen. They don’t understand.
    “Call her phone,” Holly says, sipping her lemonade, uninterested in my panic.
    We have to shout just to hear each other. The band is playing a Tom Petty song now; notes of “American Girl” bounce off the crowd that has gathered around the stage. Kids are perched on their parents’ shoulders, up way past their bedtimes, their faces flushed with exhausted glee. Lots of them wear neon glow-in-the-dark necklaces that are being sold for five bucks apiece at a nearby booth. The booth is also offering snow globes with tiny replicas of Greensburg contained inside them. For a moment, I want to grab one, to stare at it until I see my sister somewhere within the miniature world, maybe only walking home early or hanging out with a friend she ran into. Except, like I said, my sister doesn’t really have many friends lately. Maybe she’s by herself, on theoutside of the field somewhere, happily eating her apple. Maybe she went to Oktoberfest.
    “Alice doesn’t have a phone,” I tell them.
    Kimber frowns. “Who doesn’t have a
phone
?”
    “My aunt and uncle took it away.” We live with our aunt Sharon and uncle Jeff. Aunt Sharon was my mom’s twin sister. Twins run in our family; we’ve had three sets in four generations. But my mom and Aunt Sharon didn’t get along; my sister and I had never met our aunt or uncle until they showed up to claim us nine years ago, even though we’d lived less than thirty miles away from them our entire lives.
    My mom and aunt were fraternal, not identical. This fact is an act of mercy on the part of the universe—I cannot imagine how it would feel to be living with a woman who looked exactly like my mother, knowing every moment that it wasn’t truly her.
    “What did she do?” Nicholas asks.
    “What did who do?” I can barely think. I feel a light trembling in my chest, almost no worse than a tickle. I’m wheezing. I never wheeze.
    “What did Alice do to have her phone taken away?”
    “Oh. She … uh … she got drunk.”
    Nicholas frowns. “That’s all? She got drunk, and they took away her phone?”
    “Um … it was worse than that,” I say. The ground feels soft and unsteady beneath my feet. “Alice drank a fifth of my uncle’s coconut rum. Then around three in the morning, she decided to go swimming in our neighbors’ pool.”
    Holly, Nicholas, and Kimber stare at me, expectant. “So? What’s the big deal, then?” Holly asks.
    “She thought they were on vacation. They weren’t.” I take a step backward. My breath quickens. I need