Fangirl

“You girls don’t have to cook,” their dad would say.

But it was either cook or hope that he remembered to pick up Happy Meals on the way home from work. (There was still a toy box upstairs packed with hundreds of plastic Happy Meal toys.) Besides, if Cath made breakfast and Wren made di

“QuikTrip isn’t a gas station,” he’d say. “It’s an everything-you-really-need station. And their bathrooms are immaculate.”

Wren leaned over the pan and watched the eggs start to bubble. Cath pushed her back, away from the fire.

“This is the part I always mess up,” Wren said. “Either I burn it on the outside or it’s still raw in the middle.”

“You’re too impatient,” Cath said.

“No, I’m too hungry.” Wren picked up the can opener and spun it around her finger. “Do you think we should call Grandma?”

“Well, tomorrow’s Christmas Eve,” Cath said, “so we should probably call Grandma.”

“You know what I mean.…”

“He seems like he’s doing okay.”

“Yeah…” Wren cranked open the can of chili and handed it to Cath. “But he’s still fragile. Any little thing could throw him off. What’ll happen when we go back to school? When you’re not here to make breakfast? He needs somebody to look out for him.”

Cath watched the eggs. She was biding her time. “We still have to go shopping for Christmas di

“I won’t be here tomorrow night.” Wren cleared her throat. “That’s when … Laura’s family celebrates Christmas.”

Cath nodded and folded the omelette in half.

“You could come, you know,” Wren said.

Cath snorted. When she glanced up again, Wren looked upset.

“What?” Cath said. “I’m not arguing with you. I assumed you were doing something with her this week.”

Wren clenched her jaw so tight, her cheeks pulsed. “I can’t believe you’re making me do this alone.”

Cath held up the spatula between them. “Making you? I’m not making you do anything. I can’t believe you’re even doing this when you know how much I hate it.”

Wren shoved off the counter, shaking her head. “Oh, you hate everything. You hate change. If I didn’t drag you along behind me, you’d never get anywhere.”

“Well, you’re not dragging me anywhere tomorrow,” Cath said, turning away from the stove. “Or anywhere, from now on. You are hereby released of all responsibility, re: dragging me along.”

Wren folded her arms and tilted her head. The Sanctimonious One. “That’s not what I meant, Cath. I meant … We should be doing this together.”

“Why this? You’re the one who keeps reminding me that we’re two separate people, that we don’t have to do all the same things all the time. So, fine. You can go have a relationship with the parent who abandoned us, and I’ll stay here and take care of the one who picked up the pieces.”

“Jesus Christ”—Wren threw her hands in the air, palms out—“could you stop being so melodramatic? For just five minutes? Please?”

“No.” Cath slashed the air with her spatula. “This isn’t melodrama. This is actual drama. She left us. In the most dramatic way possible. On September eleventh.”

“After September eleventh—”

“Details. She left us. She broke Dad’s heart and maybe his brain, and she left us.”

Wren’s voice dropped. “She feels terrible about it, Cath.”

“Good!” Cath shouted. “So do I!” She took a step closer to her sister. “I’m probably going to be crazy for the rest of my life, thanks to her. I’m going to keep making fucked-up decisions and doing weird things that I don’t even realize are weird. People are going to feel sorry for me, and I won’t ever have any normal relationships—and it’s always going to be because I didn’t have a mother. Always. That’s the ultimate kind of broken. The kind of damage you never recover from. I hope she feels terrible. I hope she never forgives herself.”

“Don’t say that.” Wren’s face was red, and there were tears in her eyes. “I’m not broken.”

There weren’t any tears in Cath’s eyes. “Cracks in your foundation.” She shrugged.

“Fuck that.”

“Do you think I absorbed all the impact? That when Mom left, it hit my side of the car? Fuck that, Wren. She left you, too.”

“But it didn’t break me. Nothing can break me unless I let it.”

“Do you think Dad let it? Do you think he chose to fall apart when she left?”

“Yes!” Wren was shouting now. “And I think he keeps choosing. I think you both do. You’d rather be broken than move on.”

That did it. Now they were both crying, both shouting. Nobody wins until nobody wins, Cath thought. She turned back to the stove; the eggs were starting to smoke. “Dad’s sick, Wren,” she said as calmly as she could manage. She scraped the omelette out of the pan and dropped it onto a plate. “And your omelette’s burnt. And I’d rather be broken than wasted.” She set the plate on the counter. “You can tell Laura to go fuck herself. Like, to infinity and beyond. She doesn’t get to move on with me. Ever.”

Cath walked away before Wren could. She went upstairs and worked on Carry On.

*   *   *

There was always a Simon Snow marathon on TV on Christmas Eve. Cath and Wren always watched it, and their dad always made microwave popcorn.

They’d gone to Jacobo’s the night before for popcorn and other Christmas supplies. “If they don’t have it at the supermercado,” their dad had said happily, “you don’t really need it.” That’s how they ended up making lasagna with spaghetti noodles, and buying tamales instead of a turkey.

With the movies on, it was easy for Cath not to talk to Wren about anything important—but hard not to talk about the movies themselves.

“Baz’s hair is sick,” Wren said during Simon Snow and the Selkies Four. All the actors had longer hair in this movie. Baz’s black hair was swept up into a slick pompadour that started at his knifepoint widow’s peak.

“I know,” Cath said, “Simon keeps trying to punch him just so he can touch it.”

“Right? The last time Simon swung at Baz, I thought he was go

“Make a wish,” Cath said in her best Simon voice, “you handsome bastard.”

Their dad watched Simon Snow and the Fifth Blade with them, with a notebook on his lap. “I’ve lived with you two for too long,” he said, sketching a big bowl of Gravioli. “I went to see the new X-Men movie with Kelly, and I was convinced the whole time that Professor X and Magneto were in love.”

“Well, obviously,” Wren said.

“Sometimes I think you’re obsessed with Basilton,” Agatha said onscreen, her eyes wide and concerned.

“He’s up to something,” Simon said. “I know it.”

“That girl is worse than Liza Mi

An hour into the movie, just before Simon caught Baz rendezvousing with Agatha in the Veiled Forest, Wren got a text and got up from the couch. Cath decided to use the bathroom, just in case the doorbell was about to ring. Laura wouldn’t do that, right? She wouldn’t come to the door.

Cath stood in the bathroom near the door and heard her dad telling Wren to have a good time.

“I’ll tell Mom you said hi,” Wren said to him.

“That’s probably not necessary,” he said, cheerfully enough. Go, Dad, Cath thought.

After Wren was gone, neither of them talked about her.

They watched one more Simon movie and ate giant pieces of spaghetti-sagna, and her dad realized for the first time that they didn’t have a Christmas tree.

“How did we forget the tree?” he asked, looking at the spot by the window seat where they usually put it.

“There was a lot going on,” Cath said.

“Why couldn’t Santa get out of bed on Christmas?” her dad asked, like he was setting up a joke.