Dead to Me Read Free Page A

parents more than the last, until she finally stopped bringing them home at all. She’d say she was going to the library to
study or meeting a girlfriend for a soda, and then she’d meet her friends at the beach or go to the drive-in in Van Nuys.
    I missed spending all my time with her, but I also liked not being half of a set—the boring, tagalong half. The more Annie fought with our parents, the more I tried to be the perfect
daughter, clearing the table while they screamed at each other across it. After she stormed out, I’d sit in the living room and do my homework. I made good grades, friends they more or less
approved of—I did whatever they asked me to do. The better I was, the less attention they paid to me.
    But I wanted to have it both ways, too. When Annie snuck in through our bedroom window reeking of cigarette smoke and giggly with beer, I’d be waiting under the covers to press her for
details. Annie liked telling me these stories. I guess I was a good audience, young enough to be shocked and old enough to be impressed. Besides, she knew I’d never rat her out to a woman who
used to dress us in sailor suits for her friends’ amusement.
    She told me about the time she and her friends snuck into a drag show at a Central Avenue jazz club, and how they raced their cars up and down Highway 1. She told me about the pair of GIs who
showed up at their beach party and disappeared with one of the girls before anyone figured out they’d stolen all the beer.
    “Sandy says she’s moving to San Diego with one of them,” Annie told me. “He took her out to this spot real far away from where we were and told her a bunch of goofy
stuff, and then Sandy said they wound up exchanging marriage vows right there on the beach.”
    “That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.”
    Annie nodded. “It is very silly. Especially since he left town the next day. Without Sandy, I might add.”
    “Poor Sandy.”
    “I don’t know that she really deserves our pity,” Annie sighed. “I’ve been trying to tell her that he’s not coming back for her, but she won’t listen.
She just moons around the hallways at school, trying to look tortured and wise. Alice, promise me you’ll never marry a GI on leave.”
    “I promise,” I said.
    Nights like that were fun, but they always made me very aware that I was Annie’s kid sister. She had exciting friends who did exciting things, and a whole life that had nothing to do with
me. But as always, Annie made room for me. My favorite times with her were Sunday evenings when my parents went out for dinner and drinks with friends and left Annie and me with the house to
ourselves. Sometimes we made elaborate desserts like trifle or cherry torte that never came out right, or wrote new endings for the awful movies we’d seen the week before. But most Sunday
nights, we did puzzles.
    Not jigsaw puzzles, but real ones. Both of us were crazy about any kind of crossword, brain teaser, or jumble, and fought over those pages of the newspaper, eventually reaching an arrangement
where Annie got the morning edition and I got the evening edition. It was too good a thing to quarrel about.
    Our obsession started during the war after our mother told us about the cryptographers who worked for the government, making up all kinds of codes to transmit secret messages that couldn’t
be deciphered by the Axis. She wrote out the whole alphabet in Morse code, and Annie and I practiced sending the long and short signals across darkened rooms using flashlights and whistles. I
wondered why our mother would ever want to be something as idiotic as a movie star when she could do something like that.
    During blackouts and curfews there wasn’t much to do, so Annie and I made a game of it: the Gates sisters, cryptographer spies and crusading angels of the Allied forces. Glamorous,
elusive, and uncrackable.
    We would make up codes and ciphers and hide them around the house. First you had to find the