CHAPTER 1 "WOULD THE defendant please rise." This wasn''t an actual question, even though it sounded like one. I''d noticed that the first time we''d all been assembled here, in this way. Instead, it was a command, an order. The "please" was just for show. My brother stood up. Beside me, my mom tensed, sucking in a breath. Like the way they tell you to inhale before an X-ray so they can see more, get it all.
My father stared straight forward, as always, his face impossible to read. The judge was talking again, but I couldn''t seem to listen. Instead, I looked over to the tall windows, the trees blowing back and forth outside. It was early August; school started in three weeks. It felt like I had spent the entire summer in this very room, maybe in this same seat, but I knew that wasn''t the case. Time just seemed to stop here. But maybe, for people like Peyton, that was exactly the point. It was only when my mother gasped, bending forward to grab the bench in front of us, that I realized the sentence had been announced.
I looked up at my brother. He''d been known for his fearlessness all the way back to when we were kids playing in the woods behind our house. But the day those older boys had challenged him to walk across that wide, gaping sinkhole on a skinny branch and he did it, his ears had been bright red. He was scared. Then and now. There was a bang of the gavel, and we were dismissed. The attorneys turned to my brother, one leaning in close to speak while the other put a hand on his back. People were getting up, filing out, and I could feel their eyes on us as I swallowed hard and focused on my hands in my lap.
Beside me, my mother was sobbing. "Sydney?" Ames said. "You okay?" I couldn''t answer, so I just nodded. "Let''s go," my father said, getting to his feet. He took my mom''s arm, then gestured for me to walk ahead of them, up to where the lawyers and Peyton were. "I have to go to the ladies'' room," I said. My mom, her eyes red, just looked at me. As if this, after all that had happened, was the thing that she simply could not bear.
"It''s okay," Ames said. "I''ll take her." My father nodded, clapping him on the shoulder as we passed. Out in the courthouse lobby, I could see people pushing the doors open, out into the light outside, and I wished more than anything that I was among them. Ames put his arm around me as we walked. "I''ll wait for you here," he said when we reached the ladies'' room. "Okay?" Inside, the light was bright, unforgiving, as I walked to the sinks and looked at myself in the mirror there. My face was pale, my eyes dark, flat, and empty.
A stall door behind me opened and a girl came out. She was about my height, but smaller, slighter. As she stepped up beside me, I saw she had blonde hair, plaited in a messy braid that hung over one shoulder, a few wisps framing her face, and she wore a summer dress, cowboy boots, and a denim jacket. I felt her look at me as I washed my hands once, then twice, before grabbing a towel and turning to the door. I pushed it open, and there was Ames, directly across the hallway, leaning against the wall with his arms folded over his chest. When he saw me, he stood up taller, taking a step forward. I hesitated, stopping, and the girl, also leaving, bumped into my back. "Oh! Sorry!" she said.
"No," I told her, turning around. "It was . my fault." She looked at me for a second, then past my shoulder, at Ames. I watched her green eyes take him in, this stranger, for a long moment before turning her attention back to me. I had never seen her before. But with a single look at her face, I knew exactly what she was thinking. You okay? I was used to being invisible.
People rarely saw me, and if they did, they never looked close. I wasn''t shiny and charming like my brother, stunning and graceful like my mother, or smart and dynamic like my friends. That''s the thing, though. You always think you want to be noticed. Until you are. The girl was still watching me, waiting for an answer to the question she hadn''t even said aloud. And maybe I would have answered it. But then I felt a hand on my elbow.
Ames. "Sydney? You ready?" I didn''t reply to this, either. Somehow we were heading toward the lobby, where my parents were now standing with the lawyers. As we walked, I kept glancing behind me, trying to see that girl, but could not in the shifting crowd of people pressing into the courtroom. Once we were clear of them, though, I looked back one last time and was surprised to find her right where I''d left her. Her eyes were still on me, like she''d never lost sight of me at all. CHAPTER 2 THE FIRST thing you saw when you walked into our house was a portrait of my brother. It hung directly across from the huge glass door, right above a wood credenza and the Chinese vase where my father stored his umbrellas.
You''d be forgiven if you never noticed either of these things, though. Once you saw Peyton, you couldn''t take your eyes off him. Though we shared the same looks (dark hair, olive skin, brown, almost black, eyes) he somehow carried them totally differently. I was average, kind of cute. But Peyton--the second in our house, with my father Peyton the first--was gorgeous. I''d heard him compared to everything from movie idols of long before my time to fictional characters tromping across Scottish moors. I was pretty sure my brother was unaware as a child of the attention he received in supermarkets or post office lines. I wondered how it had felt when he''d suddenly understood the effect his looks had on people, women especially.
Like discovering a superpower, both thrilling and daunting, all at once. Before all that, though, he was just my brother. Three years older, blue King Combat sheets on his bed in contrast to my pink Fairy Foo ones. I basically worshipped him. How could I not? He was the king of Truth or Dare (he always went with the latter, naturally), the fastest runner in the neighborhood, and the only person I''d ever seen who could stand, balanced, on the handlebars of a rolling bicycle. But his greatest talent, to me, was disappearing. We played a lot of hide-and-seek as kids, and Peyton took it seriously . Ducking behind the first chair spotted in a room, or choosing the obvious broom closet? Those were for amateurs.
My brother would fold himself beneath the cabinet under the bathroom sink, flatten completely under a bedspread, climb up the shower stall to spread across the ceiling, somehow holding himself there. Whenever I asked him for his secrets, he''d just smile. "You just have to find the invisible place," he told me. Only he could see it, though. We practiced wrestling moves in front of cartoons on weekend mornings, fought over whom the dog loved more (just guess), and spent the hours after school we weren''t in activities (soccer for him, gymnastics for me) exploring the undeveloped green space behind our neighborhood. This is how my brother still appears to me whenever I think of him: walking ahead of me on a crisp day, a stick in his hand, through the dappled fall colors of the woods. Even when I was nervous we''d get lost, Peyton never was. That fearlessness again.
A flat landscape never appealed to him. He always needed something to push up against. When things got bad with Peyton, I always wished we were back there, still walking. Like we hadn''t reached where we were going yet, and there was still a chance it might be somewhere else. I was in sixth grade when things began to change. Until then, we had both been on the lower campus of Perkins Day, the private school we''d attended since kindergarten. That year, though, he moved to Upper School. Within a couple of weeks, he''d started hanging out with a bunch of juniors and seniors.
They treated him like a mascot, daring him to do stupid stuff like lifting Popsicles from the cafeteria line or climbing into a car trunk to sneak off campus for lunch. This was when Peyton''s legend began in earnest. He was bigger than life, bigger than our lives. Meanwhile, when I didn''t have gymnastics, I was now riding the bus home solo, then eating my snack alone at the kitchen island. I had my own friends, of course, but most of them were highly scheduled, never around on weekday afternoons due to various activities. This was typical of our neighborhood, the Arbors, where the average household could support any extracurricular activity from Mandarin lessons to Irish dancing and everything in between. Financially, my family was about average for the area. My father, who started his career in the military before going to law school, had made his money in corporate conflict resolution.
He was the guy called when a company had a problem--threat of a lawsuit, serious issues between employees, questionable practices about to be brought to light--and needed it worked out. It was no wonder I grew up believing there was no problem my father couldn''t solve. For much of my life, I''d never seen any proof otherwise. If Dad was the general, my mom was the chief operating officer. Unlike some parents, who approached parenting as a tag-team sport, in our family the duties were very clearly divided. My father handled the bills, house, and yard upkeep, and my mom dealt with everything else. Julie Stanford was That Mother, the one who read every parenting book and stocked her minivan with enough snacks and sports equipment for every kid in the neighborhood. Like my dad, if my mom did something, she did it right.
Which was why it was all the more surprising when, eventually, things went wrong anyway. The trouble with Peyton started in the winter of his tenth grade year. One afternoon I was.