The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [135]
“I’m not asking about potential. I’m asking what you’ll do when you’re faced with that temptation again.”
Bean looked up at him boldly. “I’m not becoming a born-again virgin.”
Aidan laughed, leaning back in his chair to match her posture. “That’s not what I mean. I’m supposed to tell you premarital sex is strictly forbidden, but I can operate on the level of the prescriptive and the probable at the same time. But what I’m worried about is what all these things mean. The stealing, the promiscuity, the lying”—and oh, how it hurt to hear him say those words, to apply them to her—“they’re all part of a bigger pattern. What’s the pattern, Bean?”
“That I’m an idiot?”
He said nothing. She looked at him, looked away. Her eyes were red and raw, and she felt bone-achingly tired. Her ankle throbbed, her stomach hurt. “Can I have another glass of water?”
He nodded, took the glass, and walked through the archway leading to the dining room. Bean leaned her head against the back of the chair and exhaled, long and slow. When he came back, she sipped carefully at the glass of water he put in front of her. He still said nothing, waiting for her.
“Rose was always the smartest. She can do anything. She can be a total bitch, and everything always has to be perfect, but she can make it that way, so it doesn’t matter. She’s got a Ph.D. She’s got this perfect fiancé. She can speak in public and talk about all these things I couldn’t understand in a million years, and she makes me feel stupid all the time. And Cordy . . . everyone loves her. You know, she flits around and drops out of college and goes and lives like a backpacker for years, and everyone’s like, ‘Wow, that’s so adventurous.’ She comes home pregnant, and she doesn’t even know who the father is, and Dan falls in love with her and everyone’s lining up to throw her a baby shower. She’s everyone’s favorite.”
Aidan looked puzzled for a minute. “But we’re talking about you, Bean. We’re not talking about Rose and Cordy.”
“But don’t you get it?” Bean threw her hands up in the air and leaned forward. “There is no me. There’s only Rose and Cordy. I’m just like this speed bump in the middle, slowing everyone down because I keep fucking up. And I’m not smart like Rose or cute like Cordy, so I don’t get that free pass. No one’s throwing me a parade.”
Aidan mulled this for a moment. “So if Rose is the smart one, and Cordy is the cute one, what are you?”
“I’m nothing.”
Aidan frowned at her. Bean met his gaze, belligerent. He leaned back in his chair and looked out the window, where the barest edge showed the dark of the night beside their reflections. When he spoke again, he did not turn his head, but continued staring into the window as if reading a crystal ball.
“We all have stories we tell ourselves. We tell ourselves we are too fat, or too ugly, or too old, or too foolish. We tell ourselves these stories because they allow us to excuse our actions, and they allow us to pass off the responsibility for things we have done—maybe to something within our control, but anything other than the decisions we have made.”
He leaned forward, and Bean, who had turned away, felt pulled back into his eyes. “Your story, Bean, is the story of your sisters. And it is past time, I think, for you to stop telling that particular story, and tell the story of yourself. Stop defining yourself in terms of them. You don’t just have to exist in the empty spaces they leave. There are times in our lives when we have to realize our past is precisely what it is, and we cannot change it. But we can change the story we tell ourselves about it, and by doing that, we can change the future.”
On the sofa, Bean knotted her hands in her lap and began to cry again.
“You wouldn’t have asked to talk to me tonight if you hadn