Page 2 of Doubling Down

“And I’m yet again outnumbered by girls,” Dad jokes.

I’m about to step through the front door when both Abigail and Hazel work up the courage to tackle me with desperate hugs.

“We missed you, Sarah!” Abby cries. “You were gone forever.”

“I know. And I’m sorry,” I say, crouching before I realize I don’t need to crouch as far as before to meet the girls’ eyes. “My god, you two got big.”

A lump forms in my throat as I take them in. They’re eight and nine now, about the age I was when Casey moved to the neighborhood and I found my first true friend.

We all head in together and I bring my things up to my old room. My stomach does a flip when I pass the door opposite mine, but when I peek in, it’s no longer decked out in bunkbeds with the detritus of two athletic teenage boys strewn around. Abby brushes past into the room, bouncing on her toes, excited about showing me her new digs.

I hang with my sisters for a few minutes, trying to banish the memories. Then I head down for dinner.

Halfway through the meal, Mom offhandedly says, “Oh, Sarah, Casey called a few weeks ago asking for your number. Did she ever get in touch with you?”

My heart leaps. Casey was looking for me? I shake my head. “No. Why would she need my number? It’d be easier to just message me on social media.”

“Not sure. She didn’t say why she was calling. I guess she’s close to graduating from Columbia. I still don’t understand why you didn’t choose the same school. You two were so close.”

I give a noncommittal shrug. “Friends grow apart. It happens.” And I really needed to just get away from New York, so I chose a college in California instead—about as far from New York as I could get.

But when I get to my room and pull out my laptop, I give into the urge to look Casey up. Impulsively, I send her a friend request.

Then, with my heart in my throat, I type in two other names.

Chapter Two

The ghosts sneak into my dreams that night in the form of hands and mouths on bare flesh. Inexperienced fingers fumble inside pajamas, skin sliding against skin.

The illicit touch of two boys I was supposed to think of as brothers was my first foray into the world of sex. I’d learned to masturbate a few years earlier, but it wasn’t until those nights with Jude and Simon that I learned what true pleasure meant. How sweet it could be to share it with someone else, to know my touch drove them as wild as theirs drove me.

It started out as them comforting me over losing my best friend, but it evolved into so much more, until it was too big to contain. It wasn’t always sex, of course; some nights we just talked, sharing our hopes for the future, making plans for after they graduated the following year. They promised to take me on that trip Casey had flaked on. They were into art, so we planned to tour all the biggest museums on the east coast, starting with MoMA, where they could see Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, Simon’s favorite painting. Jude was more interested in the George Bellows collection at the National Gallery in DC.

I’d heard of Starry Night, of course—who hasn’t?—but I had to look up George Bellows to see the hauntingly potent and violent imagery of his paintings of boxers in the ring. It made sense, since both twins were on the wrestling team and spent afternoons sparring at a local gym when they didn’t have football practice.

I was looking forward to that trip so much, I started considering taking a gap year just to stay and spend time with them until they graduated. But we were reckless, and everything ended before we really had a chance to see where it would go.

We kept our trysts secret from my parents until they took a camping trip with the younger kids. The twins had summer school, so Mom and Dad left us behind, putting me in charge with the missive to not throw any parties. I obeyed that rule easily, but only because the twins and I chose to spend that week exploring our darker fantasies instead of socializing.

Suffice to say, we were so wrapped up in each other, we lost track of time and let down our guard, not realizing Sunday morning had arrived—and with it, my family.

In our defense, they were early. Hazel got stung by a bee and turned out to be allergic, so they’d spent the previous night in urgent care before heading home at the crack of dawn.

We were in the twins’ room, having laid both their bunkbed mattresses on the floor to give us more room to play. So when Dad came in, he discovered us still asleep, tangled in the sheets with me sandwiched between Jude and Simon.

It had to have been a comical sight, in retrospect. We’d been doing a little football player/cheerleader roleplaying after I found a couple of my old cheer uniforms. But the twins were in the miniskirts with their long hair in pigtails, and I was in the pads and helmet. We’d drifted off still half-dressed, my old uniforms stretched to oblivion from having two athletic young men stuffed into them. The football gear I wore smelled like Jude, and I claimed to never want to take it off. Gross, I know, but I was far less concerned about hygiene than about immersing myself in everything them that summer.

The rest of that day was a blur of anger and shame, my parents lamenting over what they did wrong, my little sisters hiding in their room. Sometime that night, Jude and Simon packed up and ran away.

They left a note, at least, but I kept it to myself out of spite, choosing to let my parents steep in worry over not being openminded enough to encourage them to stay, at least until they turned eighteen.

I didn’t search for them. I think it was partly out of shame, but also due to being under house arrest without phone or internet privileges for the remainder of the summer.

I hoped they’d return, climb through my window, and steal me away—a truly absurd wish, since my room was on the third floor of our old Victorian and there were no trees or trellises for climbing. Trust me, I did a detailed survey of the house for ways to escape, but there were none.

I spent the last two weeks of summer vacation letting Mom take me to the library to check out as many romance novels as I could carry. At least someone was getting a happily ever after, even if it couldn’t be me.

When I left for college, the seismic shift in my world was so drastic, I managed to avoid thinking about that glorious week with the twins. But the deep-seated shame clung to me, so I used the three time zones between us as an excuse to avoid my family entirely. I made friends, and even embarked on some tepid romances that never lasted, but mostly I immersed myself in school.

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