Archive of Our Own ^beta

When Shiv is thirteen, she cuts off all her hair in the bathroom sink. After dinner, she takes her mother’s fabric shears (which is a joke in itself, as if Caroline would spend her time pleating and ruching and creating- she owns no sewing machine, no spools of thread, just the shears) and locks the door behind her. 

The face in the mirror surprises her; this girl with long, wavy hair, her round cheeks and soft mouth, is a stranger. Shiv feels like there should be snakes coming out of her eyes, blood pouring out of her mouth, anything to stain this reflection of herself until it looks like how she feels, instead of a porcelain collectable doll, poised, dead. 

Caroline’s voice echoes in her head. The way she stood above Shiv, one hand on her shoulder, the other combing through her hair. Suddenly, her movements stopped. She said, so many split ends. She said, you have such beautiful hair, and you waste it.  

Shiv remembers, absurdly, the time she got her face painted at her birthday party when she was young, younger than she is now, when she still cried in front of her parents. She sat patiently for what felt like hours as a woman cradled her face gently, painted on orange and white until Shiv’s face resembled a cat. And the day went on; Shiv opened presents, played musical chairs, and in the evening, she was sleepy. Sleepy enough to lean into the crook of the big leather armchair and put her thumb in her mouth, content, flushed and dizzily happy in the way that six year olds are. She didn’t know her hand had smeared the face paint, mixing the colors together, leaving patches of bare skin. And Caroline came in, touched her shoulder, and when Shiv opened her eyes she recoiled at the hatred on her mother’s face. You ruined it, Caroline whispered. All that work that lady put into painting your face. You ruined it so quickly. It’s ugly now.  

Shiv looks at her face now. You waste it. You ruined it. She keeps being given things she doesn’t want and then she’s punished for using them wrong. She uses her body wrong; her voice, her eyes, her hands. And she’s tired of it. 

She takes the shears, unwieldy in her small hand. The first cut makes her gasp; the crunch of her hair between the blades is loud in the silent bathroom. Her face is suddenly lopsided, uneven, her hair coming jaggedly to a stop by her chin on the left, and flowing over her shoulder on the right.

After that, though, it’s easier. It’s enchanting, the way the shears snap and shudder in the yellow bathroom light. Every lock of hair that falls to the sink makes Shiv feel better, something close to elation; she has tears in her eyes. It’s hard to stop. The rhythm, click-open click-close, draws her in, soothes her. 

She eventually pulls the scissors away from her hair and hazards a look in the mirror. 

Her hair comes up short just below her chin, though parts of it go longer and shorter. It makes her face look sharper, older. She’s tired of being the baby of the family, the little girl. She wants to be a shark.

She tries to sneak back to her bedroom unseen, but has to go past the lounge where her parents are sat in a rare moment of silence. When Caroline looks at her she puts her hand over her mouth and makes this gasping, sobbing sound. Shiv doesn’t blink. Logan looks over the back of his armchair at Shiv and, to Shiv’s surprise, he smiles.

“Very trendy, Pinky,” he says warmly. “We can tidy it up tomorrow.”

Shiv nods, her eyes still smarting, and goes to her bedroom. Just as she moves to turn out the lights, Caroline appears in her doorway, like a ghost in reverse, Shiv’s future self haunting her.

“You scare me, Siobhan,” Caroline says softly, her thin arms clutching at her silk dressing gown. “I don’t know how you got to be like this.”

Shiv wraps her arms around herself when Caroline leaves. She feels unmoored, adrift without the length of her hair cradling her face, slipping over her back. A monstrous thing, somehow, stripped of what made her loveable.

A month later, she has to choose between her mother and her father. It’s not a hard choice to make.

Kendall stops being Shiv’s sister when he’s fourteen, though he wasn’t much of one before that. He goes from lousy sister to lousy brother, and Shiv guesses it makes sense, because he did always want to be Logan when he grows up. 

Shiv hears Logan and Caroline arguing about it, and sometimes they shout, and sometimes they laugh, and that’s far scarier. 

She waits behind the banisters one evening when she should be asleep. She hears Logan from the drawing room; hears him say that there’s a camp they could send Kendall to. Shiv frowns. Kendall hates camp.

The last time they made him go, he spent the evening before breaking every plate in the cabinet they use for special occasions. Logan didn’t shout, and he didn’t hit Kendall, because he doesn’t hit him or Shiv. He made Kendall pick up every piece of bone china that littered the floor, while he stood above him. Shiv watched from behind the door as Logan spoke to Kendall, too quiet for her to hear. She can’t imagine what he might have said. She saw the rivulets of blood spiral out of Kendall’s knees as he knelt to pick up the shards. She felt sick watching it.

The next morning, Shiv woke up to the sound of howling wind. She stumbled downstairs, blearily, and saw Kendall at the kitchen table. He was staring, empty, at the wooden grain. There were long, deep excoriated lines on his forearms, the kind made by fingernails. He didn’t say anything to Shiv, just looked up at her, and Shiv had to look away. After that, she didn’t see him for three weeks. 

Now, on the stairs, she panics. They can’t send him to camp, he can’t do that, not again. Shiv feels a wild burst of fear that if Kendall goes away this time, he’ll never come back. 

She hears Caroline trying to change Logan’s mind. Something about how there aren’t even any photos of Kendall out there, and if there are, he’s always had the same haircut as Roman anyway, a kind of genderless bowl cut. No one has to know, she says. If you send Kendall to- that place, think about how it will look. People will say there’s something wrong with us.  

Is there? Shiv wonders. She has to force herself not to tense up with fear every time Logan touches her. Caroline has never hugged her. There’s nothing wrong with them, though. There isn’t.

Shiv hears a creak on the stairs behind her, and whips round to see Kendall crouched there. He looks restless, fretting over the skin of his fingers, chewing on the cuticle, a habit he’s had as long as Shiv can remember. She smacks his hand to stop him, a habit she’s had just as long.

Caroline keeps talking, persuading Logan not to send Kendall away. Kendall’s shoulders are tight.

Logan eventually relents, but Shiv can’t feel relief, not yet. There’s always a clause in the contract, with Logan. There’s always a caveat. He heads towards the stairs and she and Kendall both start, but before they have time to get away, Logan turns back around to Caroline.

“It’s your fault,” Logan says. “No fucking child of mine would be some deviant. You were too soft with Kendall, and now look what you’ve done.”

Shiv starts into motion again, rushes past Kendall on the stairs, nudging his shoulder when he doesn’t move. His torn-open fingers ooze blood onto his pyjamas. She pulls his arm, not gently, and finally he snaps back to himself and pushes her away. He doesn’t say anything, just goes back to his room, and shuts the door in her face.

In the morning, Logan takes Kendall aside before he can eat his breakfast. Shiv can hear them from where she’s sneaking cereal from the pantry, and she stays still so they don’t notice her there.

“We’ll get you a doctor, kid. The best one around,” Logan says. “Just keep it quiet, alright?”

“Okay,” Kendall says. “Thanks.”

“Don’t say anything to your mother. She didn’t want to hear about it- she wanted to send you away, you understand? We’ll get it straightened out at home. I’ll keep an eye on you, kiddo.”

Maybe it’s supposed to sound comforting, but Shiv can only hear a threat in Logan’s words.

“Okay,” Kendall says again. His voice is barely there. Shiv listens as Logan leaves the kitchen, and she hears Kendall’s breath hitch and come out in a shuddering gasp. She’s never seen Kendall cry; she can’t even picture what it looks like. She stays in the pantry, gripping the shelf to steady herself. Eventually the kitchen goes silent, and Kendall is gone.

Shiv would wonder if she imagined that conversation, except, from then on, Kendall stays away from Caroline as much as possible. He never stays in a room alone with her, never leaves his pharmacy bags on the table where she might see them. Once his voice starts to deepen, he avoids talking to Caroline at all.

Shiv doesn’t have to ask him who he’s going to stay with after the divorce. It’s always been obvious.

Everyone thinks Shiv is the older twin when they meet her and Roman, but really, she’s eleven minutes younger. She’s the spare. 

Roman was the one their parents really wanted; Connor served as an unwanted reminder of Logan’s first wife, and Kendall had already proved himself to be too much effort for too little reward, so they tried again, and got equally lucky and unlucky. Roman is their angel, and Shiv is his parasite. Shiv is a blessing, and Roman is the thorn in her side. 

They learn to swim together when they’re twelve, in the lake at the end of summer; Logan says pools are gauche. Shiv likes swimming; she likes that her feet don’t touch the ground, she likes floating, surrounded by only herself and water. Roman picks it up quickly too, does front crawl and backstroke around her and then gets bored and plays dead, letting his body go limp and floating face down so the sun scolds his back. He does it over and over, and Shiv holds her breath and feels her heart speed up every time, and she shoves his shoulder and pushes his head down until he breaks the surface and yells at her. 

Kendall is sitting on the shore, away from the instructor. He tells Roman to stop being a dick. Roman flips him off, and swims over just to splash him, and Kendall makes this disgusted haughty noise and Shiv can’t stop herself laughing.

“Fuck both of you,” Kendall says, but he’s grinning, and he steps out of his shoes and slacks and wades in along with them, in just his boxers and polo shirt. He starts swimming towards Roman and Roman shrieks, slaps the water at him, but Kendall is faster; he dives quickly, and pulls Roman down by his feet. 

When they break through the surface, Roman looks affronted, his eyes shiny, like a little dog left out in the rain.

“You’re a prick, Kendall,” he says, gasping air and spitting out water. Shiv cackles.

Roman and Kendall look at Shiv at the same time and she can read their faces instantly, the matching smirks in their eyes. 

“No!” She half-laughs, half-screams, striking through the water away from them as fast as she can, even as they give chase. 

She reached the shore a few seconds before Kendall, and hauls herself up hand over hand on the slick rocks. She looks back long enough to see where Kendall is, and straight away feels a shooting pain in the meat of her palm when puts her hand down. 

She slips back into the water, leaving a trail of blood on the rock; there’s a serrated shell clinging to it, exactly where her hand was seconds before. She looks down, and sees there’s a cut in her hand, throbbing red.

“Got you,” Kendall pants, jabbing her in the shoulder suddenly. Shiv feels tears well up in her eyes, from the pain but mostly because she’s ashamed to be in pain. 

“Fuck off, Kendall,” she says, and sniffs hard, to stop herself from crying. She starts to climb onto the rock again, but can’t grip with her injured hand, so she drops back into the water and makes to swim round to where the shore is just sand. When her hand goes underwater the blood seems so much more obvious, diluting and spreading around her like a halo; she feels it rushing out of her, pulsing in time with her heart.

As oblivious as Kendall usually is, he notices the skirt of red around her before she can push off around the outcrop.

“You- are you hurt?” He says, a little needlessly. Shiv doesn’t look at his face, just watches his legs paddling as they tread water, distorted under the surface.

“No,” Shiv says, equally needlessly. “It’s nothing.”

Kendall rolls his eyes. He takes Shiv’s uninjured hand and starts swimming round to the sand. She follows, not letting go of Kendall’s hand, even when they step out of water onto the shore.

The instructor starts to walk over to them, the whistle round his neck shaking with his steps, but Kendall makes a dismissive gesture at him and says,

“You can, uh, go back to the house, we’ll be back later.”

So he goes. Kendall grabs Shiv’s towel from their swim bag and drapes it over her shoulders. He presses the corner of it over her hand, and watches the red bloom across the soft fibers. Shiv winces. 

“Rome!” Kendall shouts, and Roman surfaces from his dive or roll or handstand or whatever he was trying to do to impress the instructor. “Come on, we’re going home.”

Even from the shore, Shiv can see Roman’s pout. “Ten more minutes!” He shouts back.

“You want me to leave you here?” Kendall says. “With the lake sharks? Okay, man, but you probably won’t be coming back at all.”

Roman’s face thunders but he comes out of the water all the same. 

“Fuck you,” he grumbles as he puts his boat shoes back on, letting the water soak into the leather. Shiv knows he has ten identical pairs in his closet, still in the boxes, just like she has ten identical pairs of Mary Jane’s. No need to lose sleep over one of them. 

“Connor says he’s never even seen a lake shark,” Roman continues as they walk up the shore to the path that leads back to their house. 

“They only attack kids, moron,” Kendall says. He glances back at Shiv, where she’s clutching the towel to her palm. Roman huffs.

Shiv squeezes her hand to remind her it’s there. She inspects it closer; the bleeding has stopped, at least until she pulls the edges of her skin apart, and a bubble of red rushes out.

“Ew, Shiv,” Roman complains. “Did you get Jaws’ed? Are you gonna need a bigger bra?”

“Shut up, you freak,” Shiv says. She shoves her hand down the back of his shirt, rubs it over his neck. It stings, but it’s worth it for Roman’s disgusted shudder as he tries to wriggle away from her. 

“There, now you have period on you,” Shiv says smugly. 

“You’re so gross,” Roman grumbles, scrubbing his neck with his towel. Kendall gives them both a reprimanding look. 

They walk the rest of the way in silence, in the insulation of sunset. Shiv listens to the birds mourning the day, and to Roman’s shoes on the gravel, and her own flighty breath. It’s a gentle incline back to the house, where it sits nestled in the hills like a crown, and it’s pleasant twilight when they reach it. 

The ground floor is quiet, Renata mopping the floor in semi-dark. She tells them that their parents are not to be disturbed, which Shiv knows means that Logan is with the divorce lawyer and Caroline is drunk in her office, or vice versa.

Shiv showers and watches her crusted blood float and disintegrate in the drain. She scrubs her palm clean and sees that the cut isn’t deep; an inch long, right on top of her lifeline, but fairly surface level. She pulls her skin and watches as the cut distends, revealing the pink, tender flesh underneath. A hidden world inside of her hand. 

When she comes back to her bedroom there are Steri-strips and Polysporin on her pillow.

Frustration rushes through her; at Kendall, for leaving her first aid without sticking around to make sure she uses it, and at herself, for knowing she doesn’t want Kendall to help her but she still wants him to try. She wants someone there; Caroline, or Kendall- if Connor was here and not halfway across the country in what amounts to business exile, she’d even settle for him. But no one comes. The house is so quiet.

Shiv patches up the cut, a cat cleaning her wounds. She falls asleep, still smelling the lake on her hair; a bedridden mermaid. The wound in her hand radiates warmth, its own sun, her centre.

Shiv understands her parents a little more when she studies reproduction in tenth grade biology. She sits front row and takes notes about zygotes and the genome, and when the other kids laugh behind their hands because the teacher says sperm, Shiv doesn’t. 

She reads the whole chapter of the textbook in bed while listening to her parents argue. She writes on her notepad, half of your genetics come from your father, and half from your mother.

Caroline looks at her and only sees the half of her that comes from Logan, and that’s what she hates. Logan looks at her and only sees Caroline, and that’s what he hates. It’s not their fault that she’s made of their enemy. 

There’s a girl in Shiv’s biology class called Emily. They swap tests when they do peer-grading, and Emily hands Shiv’s back to her with a smiley face drawn on. Shiv sees her in the bathrooms spraying herself with Vuitton perfume and telling her friends, my dad bought it, because he feels bad for fucking the nanny; Shiv thinks she’s tacky, and a tryhard, and only pretty in a fake, bottle-blonde way. She looks at her and her heart becomes a fist-sized rock; blazing with something that feels like jealousy, but backwards.

Shiv doesn’t have too many friends. She knows people hate what her dad does, and her brothers are freaks, and in the halls people whisper behind their hands and she knows they call her a cunt and a fridge and she doesn’t care. She goes to class and goes home and she doesn’t care. There are no parties, no boyfriends; she takes a guy called Harrison to prom and he grabs her boobs and she never speaks to him again. He tells everyone she’s a lesbian and it follows her like a spectre and Emily stops drawing smiley faces on her tests. Logan asks, not bringing any boys home, Pinky? and she says none of them are good enough, which is true, but not in the way it should be. 

One evening, at dinner, Roman waits for Logan to leave the room and says,

“So, is it true, Shiv?”

Shiv feels like she’s being trapped, somehow, but still says,

“Is what true?”

“That you had to pretend Harrison Kent was a girl when he fucked you so you wouldn’t puke in his dad’s Bentley.”

Shiv’s body floods with fear.

Roman sits at the head of the table, Logan’s seat, and he grins. “What?” He says. “Everyone’s saying my sister’s a dyke, so I just want to know if it’s true.”

Shiv feels her face flame, and she’s gripping her cutlery so hard it hurts. 

“Fuck you,” she says, straining to keep her voice from breaking. She thinks about leaving the table, going to her room and ripping a dress apart with her teeth. She stays, instead. “Are you jealous because I actually had a date to prom, or is it because I get to fuck men, and you have to cry-wank yourself to sleep thinking about when you walked in on Stewy in the shower? You’re fucking disgusting, Roman. Everyone sees the way you look at Kendall’s friends, because you don’t have any of your own.” Her mouth is a hard line. She doesn’t want to be saying the things she’s saying, but it’s like she can’t stop. “I’m Dad’s favorite. He loves me more than you- actually, he doesn’t love you at all, because you’re a fucking freak. He’ll give me the company. He’ll give me CEO. And out of all the things that I’ll have that you won’t,” she pauses, feels her heart beating in her throat. “I think the best is that I’ll have someone who loves me. And you never will.”

She can’t look at Roman’s face; she stands up without really feeling her legs. 

“Guess it is true, then,” Roman says as she turns away. “You won’t be Dad’s favorite for much longer.”

Shiv doesn’t look back at him. She goes to Logan’s office, shuts the door, and she feels like she’s dreaming. Her mouth moves on its own, says,

“I saw Roman with another boy.”

Logan looks at her, his face indecipherable.

“William Clark,” she goes on, clutching at imaginary details, trying to make it plausible, her one shot at self preservation. “In the baseball dugouts. They were-” and she can’t finish. Logan raises his hand, stops her anyway. 

“Thank you, Pinky,” he says, and nods, once. Shiv knows she’s been dismissed.

A week later, Roman gets shipped to military school. Shiv hears him the night before, when she goes to the bathroom; a low, wailing sound like an animal in pain. He doesn’t say goodbye.

It’s not until the next day that Shiv realizes Logan knows she was lying. He takes her shopping; clears out the department store just for them and says she can have whatever she wants. She wanders through the rails of clothing, hides inside coats and shoes that are too big.

Logan waits outside the fitting rooms while Shiv wrestles with pencil skirts, and says, just loud enough to hear,

“Romulus insisted that nothing queer happened with him and the Clark boy.”

Shiv freezes.

“But you wouldn’t lie to me, would you, Siobhan? You just want what’s best for the family, and for him. You know, something like that… it’s not what’s best for him.” 

It’s a test, and even though Shiv has been threading these needles since she learned how sharp they were, they still make her breath catch.

“I just want what’s best for him,” she echoes.

“Good,” Logan says. Shiv breathes out.

Logan buys everything Shiv tried on and then says he has to leave for a meeting. Shiv stays in the empty department store alone; slips away from her driver slash security guard and rides the escalators to the cosmetics floor.

She takes her time, tries every perfume on the counter, until the air feels static and heavy. Her nose is itchy and overwhelmed with artificial smells of rose and lavender and cypress, but she knows as soon as she sprays Emily’s perfume; a cloud of geranium and sandalwood. She puts the bottle in her pocket. The glass is warm from her hand.

In her room she wraps the bottle in a flannel and puts it under her mattress, at the foot of the box spring. She knows that logically she shouldn’t be able to feel it from where the is in the middle of the queen bed, but when she goes to sleep that night, she swears she can feel it burning a shape into her calf. 

Shiv graduates high school and goes to college to study politics and business, because she doesn’t know what else she’s meant to do. A year in, she enrolls in a foundation course of human biology without telling anyone. She tells herself it’s because it’s useful to have well-rounded knowledge, but she knows that’s not really the truth. 

Her lab partner is a short, anxious guy called Dominick. He tells her his family are from Italy but doesn’t really tell her anything else, and she doesn’t mind; he doesn’t complain when she copies his lecture notes, or fakes their practical results, and after a few weeks, she’s kind of fond of him.

They meet most weekends and have coffee and proofread each other’s essays. Even though they only really talk about the course and the professors, it’s nice. It’s as close as Shiv lets herself get to people.

Sometimes he asks her if she wants to go clubbing, or to the movies, or to play pool at a bar, and he always says it’s not, like, a date, and laughs awkwardly. Shiv always politely declines.

Shiv’s wisdom teeth start protruding through her gums the week they begin molecular biology. It’s a constant, whining pain in her head, and she grits her teeth and scowls her way through her seminar. When Dominick asks,

“So, what are you doing tonight?”

Shiv says,

“Getting drunk.”

Dominick hums. “Do you want to do it with company?”

Shiv thinks. It can’t hurt, really. If he tries anything she can leave. Sometimes she needs the pulsing lights of a club, the sticky floors, the air that smells of sweat and paint thinner. She looks at Dominick, his face expectant. And Shiv says yes. 

Dominick takes her to a place downtown called The Cherry Stem, and Shiv almost doesn’t realize it’s a gay bar until a man with an eyebrow piercing puts his hand in Dominick’s back pocket. He’s wearing leather bracelets. And the thing is, Shiv prides herself on not being some right-wing gun-toting homophobe, but she can’t look at them directly or something in her stomach starts to hurt. It’s not anger, it’s not hatred. It reminds her of Emily, her long blonde hair, the bows on her shoes. The easy affection that two people can share. The easy affection that no one has ever shared with her.

“This is Andrew,” Dominick says, his cheeks slightly flushed. “Andy, this is Siobhan, my lab partner.”

Andrew smiles. “Heard a lot about you, Siobhan.”

Shiv nods. “I’m getting a drink.”

The bar is reasonably quiet, given that it’s still early evening. Shiv orders a vodka lime, drinks it in one, orders another. Andrew and Dominick have their arms around each other, and they’re talking to a woman that Shiv’s mother would probably call a bulldyke. She’s incredibly handsome. She looks over at Shiv; they make eye contact until Shiv looks away and sips her drink. The alcohol numbs the ache in her teeth.

“You here with Andy and Dom?” The woman says, her voice suddenly right in Shiv’s ear. Up close, Shiv can see the stubble of her sideburns, her short fingernails and callused palms, the scuffs on her boots. Shiv nods, not trusting herself to speak.

“They’re good guys,” the woman continues.

“As close as you can get,” Shiv says. The woman smiles.

“I’m Sonny,” she says. “Let me buy you a drink.”

And Shiv says yes.

One drink turns into two, turns into Sonny’s hand on Shiv’s knee, and Shiv feels her spine turn into a column of flame at her touch. She can’t stop looking at Sonny’s face, her lips, the curve of her cheeks. She feels captivated, trapped, but in a good way; her heart is hammering, out of elation or panic, she can’t tell.

When Sonny closes the distance between them and kisses her, Shiv’s heart does a rabbit-kick, and she doesn’t pull away, even though, distantly, she knows she should. And it’s not- she’s kissed men, she’s had sex with men, and it was fine, it wasn’t unpleasant. It was just fine, and she has resigned herself to a life of fucks that are just fine, but kissing Sonny blows just fine out of the water. It feels electric, it feels like the moment before a panic attack but so much brighter.

It’s like a dam has burst, it’s like every overdone metaphor and Shiv hates metaphors. She deepens the kiss, hectic, her hands covering Sonny’s on the sides of her face.

Abruptly, Shiv tastes metal in her mouth. She pulls away just enough to place her finger in her mouth, probing at her wisdom teeth. The gum is broken. Her finger comes out bloody. She marvels at it quietly. A small thing of wonder, her teeth moving from the inside to the outside.

“You okay?” Sonny asks softly. Her hand is still on Shiv’s cheek.

“Yeah,” Shiv breathes.

“You wanna get out of here?”

And Shiv says yes.

Tom is nice enough. It’s not like Shiv is going to marry him or anything, but he’s nice enough for the moment. He’s a good cook, he doesn’t mind when she comes home late. He’s surprisingly soft, never pushy; he has a dog, for Christ’s sake, and eventually it moves in when Tom does and Shiv actually doesn’t mind. She never liked dogs, they were Roman’s thing, but Mondale is old enough that he doesn’t leap at her, just sleeps and drools and wags his tail. He’s the pup of Tom’s Midwestern childhood dog. He’s sentiment.

She and Tom only have sex when she wants to, which is really only when she thinks she should want to; to disprove her mother’s voice in her head when it calls her frigid. He doesn’t say anything about the fact that she goes out and fucks women and makes them sign NDAs, which means he either knows far too much or embarrassingly little. 

Shiv knows what other people think of them; ice-queen and her pet bitch, but she thinks they make a good team. Good enough. Really, Tom is the kind of man that her mother would never date, and so she’s determined to keep him.

She knows that she won’t ever be able to have what she wants. So she settles for Tom.

He ends up meeting Logan sooner than Shiv really wanted him to. She gets appendicitis a year after they meet, after they’ve been together for eight months, and spends a day in bed crying through it before she lets Tom take her to the emergency center.

She wakes up in a hospital gown, cannulated, and Tom is in a chair next to her bed. She has lost something, she thinks immediately. The panic can’t reach her through a haze of painkillers, but she knows, something is missing. Something has been taken.

“Tom,” she tries to say, but it comes out as a rasp.

Tom starts in his chair and turns to clutch her hand. She winces.

“They took it out?” She manages. Tom nods. Shiv feels like she’s going to cry.

“Your dad wants you to come home,” Tom says, and Shiv stops feeling like she’s going to cry and feels hot metal fear in her lungs instead. “He phoned while you were under and I told him what happened.” He looks apologetic.

Shiv’s mind can’t quite grasp what he’s saying to her, and she drifts away again, only knowing that she’s afraid, and not knowing why.

She gets discharged the next day. Tom has packed a suitcase of clothes for her to take home, none of which are things she usually wears. He offers to drive her, and he looks so pathetic and worried that Shiv gives in and says he can stay with her at the family house, even when the thought of Tom and Logan sharing space makes her feel sick.

The drive is quicker than Shiv wanted it to be. It feels like there’s a spool of thread unraveling inside her as they cross the counties. When they arrive, Logan is outside, waiting, and Shiv feels the sudden urge to apologize for leaving him. She doesn’t. She lets Tom get the suitcases out and clumsily hand them to the man standing slightly behind Logan.

“Mr Wambsgans,” Logan says, and Shiv can’t tell if he’s mocking him. “You know, you’re the first man Pinky has brought to meet me.”

Tom smiles awkwardly. “Oh, well, I just didn’t want her to do the trip alone so soon after her surgery,” he says. “I’ll get going soon.”

“Nonsense,” Logan says. “You and I are going to get to know each other. Do you hunt?” He looks at Shiv, for the first time. “Romulus is bouncing around the house somewhere. You two can entertain yourselves, can’t you?”

Shiv nods, and goes inside, leaving Tom and Logan next to each other, Logan’s hand on Tom’s shoulder.

Shiv finds Roman watching Dog Day Afternoon in the second lounge.

“What the fuck are you doing here,” she says. She stands behind him and flicks him in the forehead.

“Oh, goody, the prodigal patient is returned,” Roman says without looking back. Shiv throws herself onto the couch next to him and wrestles the remote control from his hands.

“You wanna see the scar?” She says, and doesn’t wait for an answer before she pulls up her sweater to show the puckered skin and transparent dressing.

“Gross,” Roman says. “I’ve got weed if you’re cramping, by the way. You seem like you’re on the rag.”

“You’ve gone from coke to weed?” Shiv says. “Isn’t that, like, reversing out of the gateway?”

Roman rolls his eyes. “Had to Narcan Kendall one too many times. Doesn’t seem so shiny after that. Go figure.”

“He’s still using?” Shiv heard about his second rehab stint in the tabloids. She thought, naively, he might have kicked the habit this time.

“I guess so,” Roman shrugs. “Haven’t seen him since Dad made him detox here last summer. He looked like a fucking corpse, I thought I was gonna have to Weekend at Bernie’s him to shareholder meetings.”

“Is he in New York?” Shiv asks.

“I don’t fucking know, Siobhan,” Roman bristles. “I don’t write him a letter every week asking for life updates and saying get well soon, my most beloved brother, the birds are starting to sing again.”

“You could try and check that his head didn’t explode while he was shooting up in Stewy’s sex dungeon,” Shiv says, knowing full well that she hasn’t reached out or spoken to Kendall in more than a year. It’s just easier to act superior to Roman, even when she isn’t.

“Fuck, Dad would love that.” He puts on his impression of Logan, the one he’s been perfecting since he could talk. “Romulus, you tell the press my son has no associations with cock and ball torture. Hey, you know he slammed my hand in the car door yesterday? Said it was my fault for having small hands.” His voice is normal now. Roman always does this; gets so close to confessing something, to airing out the hole in his chest. Shiv never knows how to react.

“I don’t get why you stay so close to him,” she says. “It’s like you’re his minder or something, it’s weird. He’s not going to fuck you.”

“Shiv, I’m going to explain something you’ve probably never experienced, but it’s when you actually want to be around someone because you care about them, because of feelings. You know feelings? Some people call them emotions. I know this is a foreign concept to you.” He pauses. “Gotta stay close to someone, sister mine. I’m not exactly overwhelmed with options.”

“You could get a girlfriend,” Shiv says.

Roman laughs. “Yeah, I could get a girlfriend. That’s a good one, Shiv. Real fucking funny.”

Shiv laughs too. It is pretty funny.

Roman chews the inside of his cheek, and then says,

“If I moved far enough away, I think he’d forget I even exist.”

“I’d take that deal,” Shiv says. Roman snorts.

“You would not. You’re the biggest daddy’s girl to ever daddy’s girl. It’s, like, a borderline fetish. Do you call Tom daddy too? Is that the only way you can get off?”

“I would ask if you call your girlfriends mommy,” Shiv says, “but you don’t have girlfriends or a mommy.”

“You’re such a bitch,” Roman says.

“We’re the same person,” Shiv says.

Roman jabs her in the side, just above her incision, and she smacks him upside the head, and gets ready to push him off the couch and start whaling, but he holds his hands up straight away.

“I’m not fighting you while you’re all sick and frail, cause I’m gonna get a huge boner. Just watch the fucking movie.”

Shiv punches him in the shoulder just to get even, and he shoves her back, and she waits a beat and then shoves him again. They keep going, poking and slapping, the intervals between each jab getting further and further apart, and watch the film in silence.

On the screen, Al Pacino says Sal wanted to go to Wyoming. I had to tell him that’s not a country.

“You thought London was a country when you were a kid,” Shiv remembers.

Roman laughs. “Yeah. Latvia, Lithuania, London, Luxembourg.”

“Dad was so mad about it,” Shiv says. The crack on Logan’s hand against the table, the deeper sound of Logan’s hand against Roman’s skin, whenever he asked them to list all the countries of Europe. Stop fucking around, Romulus.

“Yeah, well, I was stupid,” Roman says.

What Shiv wants to say is you were a kid. Instead, she says,

“You’re still stupid.”

“You’re still a lesbian,” Roman counters, and Shiv feels that old fear creep inside her, the fear of being found out.

“My boyfriend is literally outside,” she says defensively, as if it’s hard evidence to the contrary. Roman is silent for a moment, then,

“It would be fine, you know, if you were,” he says quietly. “Like, gross, but fine.”

Shiv lets out a small, joyless laugh. “Yeah, right.”

“No, I’m serious,” Roman says. “Kendall’s already a fuck up, so I just need to get you out of the way and Dad will give me everything, Roman senator style.”

As far as Shiv can tell, he’s being sincere, or, as close to sincere Roman can get.

“You know, I’d love to be in the room when you finally figure out why your dick doesn’t work around women.” She pauses. “He’s never going to choose you, Rome,” she says softly. She doesn’t get the pleasure from saying it that she usually would.

Roman shrugs. “Yeah. I guess not.”

They finish the movie in silence.

Shiv finds her suitcases in her childhood bedroom. The door still has the wooden white sign with her name in curlicue embossed font.

Shiv sits on the bed and hugs the pillow to her chest. She buries her face in it and feels tears well up in her eyes; the smell of it makes the past rush back. She could be a girl again. She could crawl back into the skin she wore at eight, at twelve, at sixteen.

She remembers something suddenly, and scrambles to lift up the bottom corner of the mattress. Emily’s perfume is still there, where she left it. The liquid that was once pink has faded to a pale yellow; Shiv doesn’t know how long it’s been there, like an insect in resin. An artifact of someone Shiv used to be.

She puts it on the bedside table and lies down, with her knees to her chest. She can forget Tom, wherever he is, she can forget Logan. She stays there, curled up, and she feels expansive. She embraces all the decades of herself at once.

The scar on her abdomen throbs steadily, a second heart. She wonders at the space inside her where her appendix used to be; if tissue will grow to fill the cavity, or if it will always be empty, an unaccountable void.

Shiv knows that the cells making up her body are not the same ones they were eighteen years ago. Given enough time, even her brain will regenerate with new, spongiform tissue, but she will still have the two-inch white line above her hip bone. Even as her body lives and grows, it remains a telephone line to the past.

Shiv traces her palm with her finger, soothing herself. The perfume bottle on the table throws the moonlight around the room. She doesn’t know if she forgives the girl she used to be, or if that girl even wants forgiveness. She carries her around, instead. She lets her see the world.

It’s not so bad, she tells her. You never learn to drive, but it’s not so bad. It’s not ruined.