Chapter 2

                                    

                                          
 Wednesday March 13
25 days left
                          
When I get home from school, I see Mom seated at the kitchen table. Our kitchen is narrow and tiny, and if I were to spread my arms out, I could touch each mint-colored side wall with the palms of my hands. Mom's thumbing through bills, her neck craned in concentration, but when she hears the door, she turns to look at me. And there it is. The same facial expression she's greeted me with for the past three years. It's a cross between a wince and a frown.
                          
Until three years ago, I used to spend the weeks with my dad and the weekends with my mom. But then after my dad got locked away, Mom had no choice but to let me live with her and Steve. Before my father's crime, my mother used to look at me with a combination of love and longing, like I was a mirror into her past life, a bittersweet memory. Her dark brown eyes would glaze over, she'd tilt her head forward and her straight light brown hair would fall over her thin shoulders, and she'd squeeze my hands tightly, like if she gripped me hard enough, I'd transport her back in time. It was almost like I was her permanent bruise. Not a painful bruise, but a tender one made of melancholy memories.
I didn't mind that. I secretly relished being the vehicle to her past life, her connection my father and her youth.
That all changed three years ago. Everything did. Now I live with her, Steve, Kendall, and Rob. She'd never say it, but I am an intruder in their happy home. An infestation. I've gone from being a bruise to an open festering wound. Evolution isn't always a positive thing.
"You're home early," she finally says. 
"I don't have to work today." I don't mention that I was told not to come in because I would make the customers "uncomfortable." Mr. Lendon is nothing if not the king of euphemisms. He and my mother would probably get along splendidly, considering my mother refers to what happened with my father as "that unfortunate incident." Or used to refer to it that way. Recently, she's been pretending like it never happened. As if simply not talking about something makes it disappear. Newsflash: It doesn't.
                          
Kendall marches into the kitchen. She drops her pom-poms on the scratched wooden table. Her  hair is slicked back in a high ponytail. "You're going to be at the game tonight, right?"
She's asking Mom, not me. I'm invisible.
Kendall is my half sister. We have the same mom, but you'd never know it from looking at us.
"I'm going to try my best to make it," Mom says. Translation: Hell will freeze over before Mom isn't at the game. Kendall is only a freshman, but she's on the varsity cheer squad. Apparently, that's a big deal. Though it seems to me that unlike other sports where JV and varsity are determined by skill level, in cheerleading, JV and varsity are determined by cup size.
"It's the play-offs," Kendall reminds her. Her tone is calm, the tone of someone who is used to being in control, used to getting what she wants. Kendall is good at that. She's always been a schemer. When everything went down with my dad, some of the heat fell on her too, but she somehow managed to use it to her advantage.
                          
I remember one day, a few months after my dad was officially convicted and locked away, I saw Kencall talking with a boy in the hallway. I hid around the corner so I could spy on them. I was ready to intervene if she needed my help, but the thing about Kendall is she's never needed my help.
"Yeah," Kendall answered the boy's question, which I'd been too late to overhear. She nervously fingered the shell necklace I'd given her for her birthday two years ago. "Taylor is my sister, but he's not my dad."
"But did you ever meet him?" the boy asked Kendall, his voice eager. I stared at the back of his head, tufts of brown-colored hair, and guessed it was probably Louis Tomlinson, a boy from my grade who everyone thought resembled the leading actor in that summer's popular vampire romance movie. 
I watched Kendall wrinkle her nose as she considered his question. "Yeah, a couple of times."
"You did?" Louis pressed, clearly hopeful that Kendall had some kind of inside scoop.
"Oh yeah," she said. "He was basically cally family." Louis leaned closer to her.
"I can tell you some crazy stories if you want," she added, in a flirtatious promise.
I remember being furious that she was willing to trade our family "secrets" for popularity, but I've finally learned to let it go. Kendall is Kendall, I know what to expect. Anyway, you can't really blame someone for surviving.
The same can be said for my former friends, not that I ever had that many. Most of the ones I did have scattered as fast as they could once the news of my dad's crime traveled through the halls of school, but some of them actually tried to stick by me. Especially Selena Gomez, my former best friend. When everything happened, Selena tried her best to comfort me, but I pushed her away. I knew it would be the best thing for her to disassociate herself from me, even if she didn't. I like to think I did her a favor in the end.