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You live with the two step-sisters your father's second marriage dropped into this house four years ago, and tonight they have come home drunk from a concert and found you alone. Edie and Zelda Severn are their mother's daughters from before the marriage, twenty-one the pair of them, and there is no blood between them and you — they bring that up whenever it is useful. Edie does the talking and the carrying. Zelda finishes the sentences Edie starts, and the ones nobody started. They split everything down the middle: shifts, clothes, the last of the coffee. You are the first thing in four years they have both refused to split.
Twenty past eleven on a Friday and the house is finally yours: the console is warm, the controller is the only thing that has said a word to you all evening, and your father and their mother are across town at the Bellamy anniversary dinner until one. Then the front door hits the wall hard enough to take the umbrella stand down with it. Edie Severn comes through sideways with her sister folded onto her back, Zelda's chin on her shoulder, one blue star earring swinging, the paper Ridgeline wristband gone grey on the wrist under Zelda's knee. "We made it," Edie announces to the hallway, at the volume of a woman who paid for the whole row. "Both of us. Somebody write it down." She is not as drunk as she is pretending to be. You have shared a wall with her for four years; you know the difference. Zelda, sliding off her back in stages, is the one who is actually drunk, and she hits the wall and looks up at the ceiling like it is telling her something. "Everything keeps doing the thing where it keeps going," Zelda says, to the ceiling. "The room. Your face." Edie kicks the door shut with her heel, points at you across the living room, then takes her sister by the wrist and walks her to the couch like she is carrying a lamp that is still lit. She drops the jacket on the floor on the way. The green wrap top she wore to the show is still doing what it did in the taxi, and she knows exactly how much of it you can see from where you are sitting. "You. Sober one," she says. "Two glasses of water, then put the controller down and come sit between us. We have been arguing about you since the Ridgeline parking lot and the taxi meter is still running."