Chapter Text
Nothing may ever be normal again. And that was becoming normal.
Sterling was learning to breathe again. She wasn’t exactly great, but she was okay. She was okay , which was a long way from where she’d been three weeks ago. Everything about her life three weeks ago was completely foreign to her. Her family was a lie. Her twin was her cousin. Her entire existence was in question. Every new thought was a new question. How did this happen? How did she not know? Was her birthday even her birthday? Why all the secrets? What else was being kept from her? Who was her father? Where is he? Does he know? Does he care? Was God mad about the whole sex thing? The lying thing? The possibly gay thing? What was April doing?
Okay, maybe that last one was slightly out of place.
For the first week, she lived on a self-imposed island. Well, she lived in Bowser’s office for two days until he got wise to the fact that she wasn’t leaving at night. Then she slept on his couch for a while. His complete discomfort with her emotional state would have been hilarious if she wouldn’t have been in a downward spiral. Bowser was top notch, though. He introduced her to solid comfort food: Hot Cheetos and Vanilla Dr. Pepper. He also had a tendency to ramble when he was nervous, so she had all kinds of factoids about FSU football memorized. Strangely, he kept buying her bulk office supplies from Amazon so she could do her schoolwork from home. It was odd, but sweet. She had collected four staplers, a pocket calendar from 2014, seven reams of paper, and a three-hole punch before her so-called parents showed up and cried and begged and insisted it was time to go home.
She did.
That week was the longest she’d ever gone without seeing Blair. It was an eye-opening experience. She was always so sure her heart wouldn’t beat without Blair. It turns out, she could live without her. She existed. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t preferable. She just couldn’t get past the fact that she didn’t really belong where she had always belonged before. That was Blair’s life. It wasn’t hers. Not really. Had she stolen it from her sister? Ugh. Her cousin. Blair was her cousin now. No, not now . Always had been. She’d always been in the wrong place. After a lifetime of trying so hard to do the right thing, she’d still been wrong.
It was exhausting.
It was lonely.
It seemed to be a given that she wouldn’t go back to school until she was ready. Debbie arranged for her to talk to a therapist, which she appreciated and utilized. She spent a couple of afternoons catching movies by herself, which was weird. She meandered around the house staring at framed childhood photos until the tears wouldn’t come anymore. She searched her memories for a clue, a mention, anything that could have foreshadowed the unthinkable.
There was nothing.
Sterling eventually went to Bowser to ask for a job. Not bounty hunting, she just wanted to scoop froyo and not think about anything else. He’d obliged, thank goodness, so she went to work every night. On the third night, Blair showed up. She’d gotten her own frozen yogurt and parked herself on a stool. She’d stayed all night. Blair did the same the next night. Finally, nearly two weeks after the silence had started, Sterling had had enough.
“You don’t have to do this,” she told Blair as she adjusted her Yogurtopia visor.
Blair shrugged and poked at the sprinkles she had dumped in her yogurt. “I kinda do.”
“Are you babysitting?” Sterling asked. “Did Mom and Dad send you to watch me or something? Because I don’t need you-”
“No,” Blair answered. “I’m not talking to them any more than you are.”
“Oh.” Sterling didn’t know that. She had extracted herself from the family as much as she could while still living under their roof. “Okay.”
“What they did is so far from okay, Sterl,” Blair replied. “They lied to us. Our whole lives, they lied to us. I mean, sure, I was totally expecting a whopper from Mom. She obviously has the stench of impropriety, but that was some next level type shit. Dad?! I’m just disappointed in that guy.”
“I’m sure they’ve got their reasons-”
“Fuck their reasons!” Blair said, slamming a fist into the counter.
Cathy jumped at the disruption and dropped her mop. “Damn kids,” she muttered as she retrieved it.
“Sorry,” the girls said simultaneously.
“I really don’t care about their reasons,” Blair continued. “It doesn’t matter what their intentions were. They’re liars.”
Sterling nodded. She agreed, but she was still much too numb to tread those waters.
“We can’t let them ruin us,” Blair said quietly.
“What? No.” Sterling shook her head. “Ruin us ? They won’t, they can’t.”
“We haven’t spoken for two weeks, Sterl.” Blair pushed her uneaten yogurt aside. “Two whole weeks. That hasn’t happened since we were in utero.”
Blair realized too late what she had said and sighed, shoulders slumping.
“I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it,” Sterling said after a few moments. “You and me, we’re you and me. It’s hard to unlearn that.”
“No, there’s nothing to unlearn,” Blair contested.
“Yeah, I’m sorry.”
“No!” Blair was adamant. “No, you have nothing to apologize for. I’m sorry, I’m the one who is sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize either.”
“I’m sorry about the last two weeks. It’s just as much on me. I didn’t know what to say,” Blair admitted. “You obviously needed your space and...I just feel...so...I don’t know...hurt and lost and...”
“Guilty?”
“Yeah.” Blair ducked her head. “For everything. For that fight that we had in Nine-dina-”
“Nandina.”
“Whatever!” Blair screeched before taking a deep breath. “I mean, you and Mom are so close. It doesn’t make any sense. Why is it you? Why not me?”
“You have Dad’s nose,” Sterling answered like it was the end of whatever existential argument that could have ever been spawned. “It couldn’t have been you.”
“Thanks, Sterl.” Blair immediately reached up to her own nose. “Dad has a schnoz.”
“I am sorry for everything,” Sterling admitted. “For shutting down recently and before...putting you in that spot with Miles. And abandoning you and Bowser-”
“For April fucking Stevens-ugh.”
Sterling went back to mindlessly scooping gummies. “Yeah, that’s over now.”
“I know, I heard,” Blair reached across the counter and patted her arm. “I’m sorry that it didn’t work out. I know you liked her. I don’t know why or what kind of devil magic she cast upon you, but I know it must have ended badly.”
“Everything ended badly.”
“Can we just ignore the last few weeks and just go back to being us?” Blair asked. “I don’t mean live in denial, just not let it change who we are to each other. We can sort it all out, but I need my sister. Can we say fuck biology and still be sisters?”
Sterling smiled, “I’ve wanted to say fuck biology since that skeleton fell on me in Ms. Clancy’s Freshmen Bio.”
Blair collected her in a relieved hug. “Then we’re sisters. And that’s that.”
After that, Sterling felt little pieces of her soul snap back into place. Her Blair was still her Blair, would always be. They could still communicate in glances and gestures and expressions. That knowledge helped her grow stronger. The subtle fears about her life changing started to fade. Nobody came to throw all her belongings into a garbage bag and haul her back to the trailer park. Her parents still loved her, still doted on her. Her house still smelled like flowers and breakfast. Constants remained constants.
Soon enough, she found herself walking arm in arm with Blair back into Willingham Academy. It had been three weeks. Everything was exactly the same and different all at the same time. She got several looks, but no questions. Blair must have put the fear of God into these people.
She made it through half the day before seeing her . It was a miracle provided by either Jesus himself or some careful navigating from Blair. Lunchtime was a school wide affair, though. There was no way around it. Seeing April would have stung no matter what. Sterling would have felt the grip on her heart and the uneasiness in her stomach however that first sighting went down. It was inevitable. She had wished so many times in the last few weeks that she had April to cling to when she felt like she was completely anchorless. But, April was not with her.
Not at all.
In fact, Sterling watched as April leaned into Luke, scanning the lunch crowd. When their eyes met, April quickly looked away. It only took a second for her to look again. She didn’t look away that time. She stared. It was almost like she had seen a Sterling shaped ghost and didn’t have the number for a paranormal investigator.
“Those two are palling around quite a bit,” Blair informed her when she followed Sterling’s gaze. “Which is weird considering he’s still got a cardboard cutout of you from that time you ran for Student Council and she’s...well, probably borrowed the cutout for reasons . Did you know about that?”
“It’s what prompted me to leave the lock-in,” Sterling told her. “And get kidnapped, etcetera.”
“Fuck ‘em, then.” Blair said. “They can burn.”
“It’s not Luke-”
“ Luke spent the first week you were gone telling people you were probably getting back together,” Blair said. “I had to threaten to cut off his dumbass man bun to shut that shit down.”
“Yeah,” Sterling sighed. “That’s my fault.”
“You encouraged that? He looked like an alpaca for a week.”
“Not that,” Sterling said. “I led him to believe that we might...”
“Might...start a really terrible emo band?”
“Might get back together.”
Blair blinked several times before responding, “You haven’t mentioned him once this whole time. You didn’t ask about him. Didn’t want to call him to catch up. Nothing.”
“It wasn’t my finest moment,” Sterling said. “April and I had just-”
“Yeah, yeah,” Blair realized where this was going. “On the other hand, I had to write down everything April was wearing last week so you could make sure the dress code hasn’t changed.”
“Never hurts to make sure,” Sterling acted offended. “I was being proactive about coming back.”
“I also go to school here, Sterl.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Sterling dismissed the conversation. “I drove them together.”
“Something like that,” Blair replied. “They’re practically Yoda and Daisy Ridley.”
“Who?”
“I have no idea,” Blair said. “I had to sit behind them at a Bible and Guns rally last week and that’s all I remember about their stupid conversation.”
Sterling couldn’t help looking for April again. She had put some distance between herself and Luke. Sterling appreciated it. It was the little things. And April was tiny. And compact. And really, almost freakishly strong. Especially after arms day. “So that’s really happening?”
“They want people to believe it is.” Blair passed her half a banana, then tossed the peel on a passing Hannah P's tray. “They are putting in a lot of effort for someone to believe they are, anyway.”
“Yeah...well...”
The rest of the day passed without much fanfare. She was getting back into the swing of things and feeling pretty content. School was comfortable. Comfortable in a way that she hadn’t quite fully gotten back to at home. Getting through that first day was a relief.
When she parted with Blair in the junior lot, she promised that she’d be back to pick her up from lax practice and crossed the parking lot to her car.
She was almost home free.
“Hey.”
It was an achingly familiar voice that caused her to grip the strap of her backpack tighter against her in anxiety.
“Sterling.”
“Hey,” Sterling said nonchalantly, giving a half-hearted wave but not breaking stride.
“Sterling,” April said again. It was closer, though. It was softer. It was the voice that April had only used with her and only when they were tangled together somehow. Like a lullaby. But, like, a lullaby about something really shitty like the plague.
“April, hello,” Sterling acknowledged her, but still tried to sidestep.
“C’mon Sterl,” April said as she followed. “Stop.”
“I really can’t. I’ve got to get home and-”
“Just a second.”
Sterling stopped and exhaled. She crossed her arms over her chest. “What?”
April approached slowly, giving her a subtle onceover. She glanced behind her multiple times before finally stuttering out, “Y-you’ve been gone for three weeks.”
“Have I?” Sterling feigned surprise.
“Are you okay?” April asked. She reached out to touch her, but stopped just short. “That’s a long time to miss school, Sterling. You really did become a truant.”
Sterling ran her hands through her hair still looking for an escape route. “Yeah, Ellen sent over all my assignments. So no worries.”
“What happened?”
“It was a family thing.”
“Blair said you were really sick,” April said in confusion.
“The family was sick...except her. God bless her superior immunity.”
April narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms to match Sterling’s defensive pose. “Okay...I tried to text you. Like, thirty-seven times.”
“I lost my phone,” Sterling replied quickly. “I just got a replacement a few days ago.”
“You didn’t have a phone for three weeks?” April laughed out loud, doubt evident. “That’s impressive and wholly unbelievable.”
“Yeah, I guess. Hadn’t really thought about it,” Sterling said with indifference. “Sorry, though.”
“So...” April looked over her shoulder and lowered her voice. “You weren’t gone because of me, were you? I mean, your parents didn’t send you away to some conversion camp or something? I’ve seen pamphlets about places where they send you deep into the Applachians with nothing but a lunchbox and ink blots.”
“What?” Sterling’s eyes grew wide. “No, of course not.”
“You didn’t tell anybody-”
“No, April,” Sterling pushed past her. “Your secret is still safe.”
April grabbed for her arm. “Sterling.”
“Listen,” Sterling said, while shrugging out of April’s grasp. “Whatever was happening with us is over now. You made that pretty clear. And, honestly, it’s a good thing. I mean, it would have been...”
"Fun?” April supplied, apparently to her own surprise. “Or...”
“I was going to say it would have been a real mess, but maybe that, too. For a while, it could have been fun. Yeah.” Sterling swallowed hard as the thoughts of just how much fun they’d had together came rushing back. “But you’re with Luke.”
“I’m not with Luke.”
“I think he thinks you are,” Sterling said pointedly. “Seems like he’s into you like he used to be into me. Like I used to be into you.”
“I know,” April had the good sense to look embarrassed.
Sterling continued, “This is so screwed up. Everything is just so royally effed.”
“Are you really okay?” April asked. “I didn’t buy Blair’s story. It was pretty ridiculous, actually. She said you had leprosy.”
“April, I’m fine. Just let it go, okay.”
April pulled at her orange Willingham sweater nervously and checked her surroundings again. “Regardless of what may or may not have happened in the past, I care about you, Sterl. And you disappeared without a good explanation. Now, you’re just back...still without an explanation.”
“Yep,” Sterling nodded. “That’s the way it goes.”
“You can tell me.”
“I can’t,” Sterling reminded her. “You don’t have to care if I’m a leper or not.”
“So, that’s that,” April uttered. “We can be friends, can’t we? Now that we’re not, you know, otherwise engaged. We can be friends now.”
Sterling sighed. “I’m not so sure I want to be.”
“Oh.”
“Maybe someday, right?” Sterling said with a shrug and walked away. “Bye, April.”