Free We Won't Feel a Thing by J.C. Lillis

around in like you’re better than everyone!” A crash interrupted Mr. Woodlawn’s rant. “I want to hack them up every time you wear them!”
    “Your denim shorts fill me with rage,” Mrs. Woodlawn shot back, adding two tinny clangs and a clunk. “You have the wardrobe of someone proud of mediocrity.”
    “What does that even mean?”
    “It means I’m disappointed in you.”
    “Yeah, well, so am I!”
    “I’m disappointed you have an interesting profession but aren’t actually interesting.”
    “I’m disappointed I married a classy lady who turned out to be mean.”
    “You made me mean, Ed! You turned me. When I’m by myself I am a very kind person!”
    “Well, you make me boring! ‘Cause I’m afraid to talk. There’s lots of stuff in my head, all the time. You have no clue.” Some knickknack bonked the painted wood paneling. “You think you’re a writer but you’re not even interested in the inside of people!”
    Rachel hugged the laptop. She had never heard them speak like this; she hadn’t thought either of them capable of such dazzling honesty. What would it be like if she and Riley had stuck with DERT? She flashed on herself in a robe of a thousand pelts, pulling him close and saying anything and everything. Riley, I want to pretend we just met…I want to forget your life story so I can hear it again for the first time, and I want to make out with you desperately on the couch until—
    The bird clock in the kitchen sounded, the loud dry rattle of a kingfisher. Rachel startled. Eleven o’clock.
    Their results would be in any minute.
    She thumped up the steps and into their room. Riley sat in front of the sandcastle dollhouse, his back to her.
    Something was wrong. She could tell by his shoulders.
    “Ri.”
    He leapt to his feet. He held out both tablets, a flame of panic in his eyes.
    She backed away. “Results?”
    “No.” He waved the two screens. “Our essays . Look.”
    Rachel paled. “You didn’t.”
    “I had to.”
    “RILEY EDWARD WOODLAWN.”
    “Just read!”
    Rachel tossed the laptop on her bed and hunkered down in the pillow nest. Riley scooted in next to her. She placed the tablets side by side and glanced back and forth at their essays, scanning the bold font she had chosen, his silly lowercasing she always teased him about.
    From sentence one, she knew they were in trouble.
    ***
    It started in California.
     
    it started in california.
     
    We were nine years old, and we’d known each other for six months. We were staying for a week at the Mermaid’s Mirror Inn, which belonged to Riley’s Aunt Jerrie. The fruit basket she’d left in our adjoining suites came with a pink card that said “WELCOME WOODLAWN FAMILY!”
    We were anything but a family.
     
    rachel was with us because my mom’s old friend arthur seton died. i never met him because he lived in chicago and he never visited, only sent letters. my mother cried for two days and then she and dad sat me down and announced that arthur’s granddaughter would be coming to live with us. and i would have a “new sister.”
     
    “Don’t ever get attached to people,” Arthur Seton would always say. After my mother took off and left three-year-old me with him, he treated me with remote affection, as if I were a stray cat with six months to live. I liked the jobs he gave me as I got older: mixing his vodka gimlets while he wrote, helping him correct English quizzes, cleaning our cluttered apartment and his pipes that smelled like burning vanilla. When he died and his will routed me to his old teacher friend instead of my blackjack-dealer uncle in New Orleans, I was less than thrilled. Anne and Ed Woodlawn’s mutual dislike hung in every room, like a stinky fog. And their son was too tragic to be any fun.
     
    i was a neurotic kid. by the time i was six i had about seventeen phobias and eight bizarre habits and i tugged my hair so much it had started falling out in spots. i think i weirded my parents out, like i