The Temptation of Lila and Ethan Read Free Page A

subdued, addicted to drugs, and barely acted like the sister I remembered. This was the only place she could afford and I’ll admit it’s disgusting. Most of the windows on the outside of the three-story brick building are either broken or boarded up and there are people sleeping on the stairway. My mother calls it a crack house where trashy, unwanted people live, and she tells me she’ll never, ever visit my sister. I manage to make it to Abby’s floor without any confrontation from the people sleeping on the stairs or the woman shouting obscene things to a man who lives across the hall from her. It takes five knocks to get my sister to answer the door and as soon as I see her, I can tell she’s blissfully high.
    “Hey, Lila,” she says dazedly as she blinks her blue eyes. “To what do I owe the honor of your being here?” She’s wearing an overly large gray sweatshirt and cutoffs, something my mom would disown her for wearing, although I guess my mother already kind of has so it doesn’t really matter.
    “Hey.” I wave idiotically, feeling uneasy.
    She opens the door wider so I can step inside. “I bet it was Dad, right?” she jokes disdainfully as she shuts the door behind me. “He must have sent you here to check up on meand make sure that his dear daughter is doing okay and isn’t dead in a ditch somewhere.”
    “I just needed some place to go to clear my head,” I tell her, drawing a deep breath as I turn in a circle, taking in her living room that’s the size of the foyer in my house. The air smells smoky and kind of like garbage and there are all these eccentric glass vases everywhere and a lot of alcohol bottles. “Mom and Dad don’t know I’m here,” I say, facing her. I think about giving her a hug, because I really need one right now, but she looks so fragile, like if I hug her too tight, she might crumble.
    She looks so much different from the last time I saw her and it’s been only six months. Her blonde hair looks greasy and thin and her pores are huge and she has a few sores on her skin that look like pimples she’s been picking at. Her lips are really dry and she has a couple of cold sores. She’s lost a lot of weight, which isn’t good since she was already too skinny to begin with.
    She blinks her eyes at me and then motions to a tattered plaid sofa that fills up the narrow living room. “You can have a seat if you want,” she says, flopping down in the sofa herself.
    I brush some crumbs off the cushion and take a seat. There’s this weird-looking lightbulb on the coffee table, sketched with colorful art, and I reach for it. “What is this? Art?”
    “Don’t touch that,” she snaps, slapping my hand away. “That’s not art, Lila.”
    “Oh, sorry.” I’m starting to regret coming here, since she seems unhappy to see me and is completely out of it. “Maybe I should go.” I start to rise to my feet, but she grabs my arm and pulls me back down.
    “No, don’t go.” She sighs. “It’s just that…” She scratches her head and then picks at her face. “I don’t know why you’re here, especially since Mom made it pretty clear that the family was going to disown me.”
    “I would never disown you,” I tell her, remembering how we once used to have a good relationship, before boarding school came along and then her drug addiction. “I just… it’s just that… Dad’s sending me off to boarding school,” I blurt out. “The same one that you went to.”
    She stays quiet for quite a while, staring at the lightbulb on the coffee table. “Why? What happened?”
    I pull a guilty face. “I got caught ditching school.”
    She shakes her head and hatred flashes across her face. “Dad is such a fucking asshole. It’s like you can never screw up. Not once, even if it’s something small. And if you do… if you do, then you no longer exist to him.”
    I don’t disagree with her. In fact, I’ve felt pretty nonexistent for most of my life. “What should I