Page 78 of The Identicals
“Forced you?” Ainsley says.
“I had to make amends,” Candace says. “I’ve gone way off the rails this summer, according to my parents.”
Ainsley shrugs. “You hang out with Emma. Emma invented off the rails.”
“Did you hear she’s going to boarding school?”
“I did,” Ainsley says. “Teddy told me.” She says this as a jab, but Candace remains unfazed.
“Teddy and I broke up,” Candace says. “It was never that serious.”
“Well,” Ainsley says. “It seriously hurt my feelings.”
“I know,” Candace says. She wanders over to a rack holding several Roxie dresses in a rainbow of colors and fingers the obi of the one in peach. “I came in to apologize to you. I should never have gotten mixed up with Teddy or with Emma. I guess…” Her voice trails off, and Ainsley sees her eyes shining with tears. “I was hurt back when you… when we stopped being friends. I didn’t understand it. You dropped me because I wasn’t cool enough. And now I understand that Iwasn’tcool enough. I matured more slowly than you did. I couldn’t have kept up with you and Emma.”
Ainsley blinks. “I was cruel to you. I’m the one who should be apologizing.”
“No,” Candace says. She shakes her head, and her short hair shimmies. “Let me finish. I wanted to be friends with Emma, and I wanted to date Teddy… not because they were suited for me but because you had them.”
“It’s okay, Candace.”
“I egged your house with Emma.”
“I know.”
“I get sick when I think about it,” Candace says.
Ainsley gives her a sad smile. “Me, too.”
“Part of me believes that with Emma leaving, you and I can be friends again.”
Ainsley thinks about this. “Maybe we can,” she says. “But I’m holding off on having a boyfriend for a while, and I’m also holding off on having a best friend.”
“Fair enough,” Candace says. She stuffs her hands into the front pockets of her shorts and tilts her head. “Is it true that your mother left for a while and her twin sister came to take her place?”
“Yeah,” Ainsley says. “But that’s not as crazy as it sounds.”
Or maybe itisas crazy as it sounds, Ainsley thinks later. When she’s finished at work, she checks her phone. She has been so absorbed in her own drama that she’s lost track of her mother. The last time Tabitha called was… five days earlier. Is that possible?
Ainsley sits on a bench on Main Street near the place where she has chained her bike and does the unthinkable: she voluntarily calls her mother.
“Darling!” Tabitha says. She sounds happy—giddy, even—and Ainsley reels for a second. Xanax, maybe?
“Hi, Mama,” she says.
“I was just thinking about you,” Tabitha says. “You should see what we’re doing to Gramps’s house. It was a total disaster area, but we’re redoing everything, and it’s going to be gorgeous, like one of the houses inDomino.”
Who iswe?Ainsley wonders. She says, “I thought you and Aunt Harper had agreed to tear it down.”
“Harper wanted to tear it down. She didn’t see the potential. Do you know what we found under the wall-to-wall carpeting?”
Ainsley tries to guess what would be exciting to someone like her mother. “Savings bonds?” she says.
“Basically,” Tabitha says. “There are random-width heart-pine floors under the carpet.”
“Sick,” Ainsley says, then she remembers that her mother dislikes this response.
“So tell me,” Tabitha says. “How’s the store?”
