The Project

by Courtney Summers

This one’s for me.

Having a sister, Mom says, is a place only the two of them will share, made of secrets they never have to say aloud—but if they did, it would be in a language only the two of them could speak.

Having a sister is a promise no one but the two of you can make—and no one but the two of you can break.

Bea wonders for a long time if she wants to when suddenly, a name finds her like lightning, in a voice that isn’t her own—as if it came from that place her mother just told her about, spun of secrets yet to be shared. The beginning of a language only the two of them can speak. A promise.

Lo wants to be a writer. Bea is tormented by all the stories her sister will never get the chance to tell.

I woke to the promise of a storm. It wasn’t in the air but I felt it in my bones.

ALL GOOD STORIES SERVE A PURPOSE. I realized mine served none.

Lauren and I aren’t friends, but Paul talks to her about me as though he needs a female perspective to help shape his approach. It’s vaguely insulting.

Arthur’s sadness is confronting, brings the gravity of carrying his son’s last moments to the fore.

Jeremy doesn’t look happy, but he doesn’t look sad. There’s an absence of intensity. I could believe a smile on his mouth goes all the way up to his eyes.

The edges of the storm have found their way inside and the air thickens with the musty, almost metal-tinged scent of rain and pavement. That musty, metal-tinged scent of rain and station.

“It’s a fucking cult, Paul.” “So is the Catholic Church,” he replies without looking at me.

“There are a lot of ways you can push somebody.”

Belief required proof, proof of God was absent and religion struck her as a sort of magic show, the success of which was entirely dependent on an audience’s willingness to pretend a trick could be so much more than it really was.

Bea loves Lo, no matter who she’s become, even if she seems like a stranger wearing her sister’s body. And it doesn’t matter if the accident stole their secret language or leveled their secret place because these things, by their very nature, have to change because nothing can ever stay exactly the same—isn’t that just how life is?

He’s just a man. As soon as I think it, anger courses through my veins, alighting my blood. It’s a wrath strong enough to make me want to disappear the space between us just to break him into pieces. That Lev Warren could do everything he’s done to me— And be only a man.

“You have my time. You have my attention,” he tells me. “I’d rather hers.” The words fracture as they leave my lips, too pathetic to be an insult. The look they inspire him to give me makes me feel impossibly bound to a body that has only shown him its weakness. I close my eyes, turning my face away.

He’s just a man. He is just. A man.

The sound of that voice. The sound of her voice. That small, broken girl clawing against the wall inside me, but now the wall’s gone and I feel its absence and a flood of need in its wake.

Lo, I need you to know something, Bea says quietly into the phone. This is where I’m supposed to be. One day, you’ll walk the same path. We’ll see each other again. But for now, you need to know that I love you so much.

“Breaking in and breaking out are two different things,” he says. “It’s hard enough to do one, let alone the other, and rarer still to do both at once. That was a lot of luck and timing and I wasn’t seeking it out as a shortcut.”

Every day is some kind of gray, the weather constantly on that tipping point between unpleasant and awful.

it’s hard to hear myself recast in a role I never envisioned for myself.

He’s commented on his own post; a single word: jeremy, as though he’d started typing something and hit enter before he was finished and walked away from the screen, leaving it for the rest of us to complete. It’s almost sadder than I can bear.

But where is the line between what circumstances have turned you into and who you choose to be?

“You’re approaching this from a place of … of finishing something. I think it’s going to make a world of difference for you if you approach this as its start. I really, truly believe you’ll get so much more out of it if you do that.”

Most people would rather hold themselves hostage than feel like they wasted their time.

It’s beautiful and its beauty is something I hate about it because it’s impossible to ignore.

This stillness between us won’t hold and I have no idea what it will turn into, but I feel its energy growing.

A byline flashes in my mind’s eye and for the first time, it doesn’t feel like a wish, it feels like it’s the future.

The closer you get to the bone, the less you can be denied …

“You wanted the truth, Lo.” “Yeah, but—” “Or are you afraid of it now?”

This place is beginning to have that inside-a-snow-globe quality, making everything seem more unreal than it already is.

To see someone be so much to so many, yet never the same person twice?

If they don’t have the numbers, they will never be a movement and if they do not become a movement, they will never be able to show people the path.

Look for people who are open. Be real. No one wants to feel like they’re being sold something—not even salvation.

She hasn’t been to New York City enough to not be overwhelmed by all this life. She loves to be where the action is, and here there’s so much, so many different bodies moving in so many different directions, so many people breathing and so many hearts beating at the exact same moment in time. It’s magical.

She stared openly at everyone. Look at all the stories, she’d said. That was how she saw them. Stories. Bea wonders if Lo still thinks of people that way. If she still wants to write.

The feeling intensifies at the hospital. She hasn’t stepped foot in one in what feels like a longer time than it’s actually been. Her body rebels; she’s instantly nauseous, overcome with sense memories. The antiseptic smell, the crude overhead lights, the almost-music of the place; the oddly respectful hustle of it interrupted by moments of chaos signaling someone’s worst nightmare, followed by the altogether surreal reconstruction of peace once the emergency has passed.

In October, the nation will blanket itself under the false security of the election and hate will take root in the gaps created by that complacency.

Life with her was her life, steady, quiet. Mine was in the distance, chaotic, a mess—but mine.

“He’s moved it to Telegram.” “What’s that?” “It’s a messaging app. Lots of journalists use it. It’s got good encryption and self-destruct options, anyway…”

I know what it feels like when what you think you know about someone has left you so far behind the reality. It feels impossible to find your way back into a narrative when it’s left you the world’s fool.

For that brief period when everything ugly is covered under the sparkle of something so new, the world almost feels like it’s living up to its potential.

I’ve brought everything I thought I’d need for an interview and everything Google told me I would. An audio recorder, my phone to play backup for it, and a legal pad playing backup for them if they should somehow both decide to fail me. A pack of pens.

And sometimes the easiest way to hurt someone is to hurt what they love the most.

So much of your profession hinges on likes, shares, retweets, click-bait. How do you maintain integrity in the face of that?”

“Do you feel defined by your trauma, Lo? Or that other people define you by your trauma?”

“Do you define yourself by your trauma?”

How much of what you do or say or want is filtered through what you’ve been through?” He moves to me, putting his finger beneath my chin, tilting my scar toward the light. “And how much of what you’ve been through determines what you do or say, whether or not it’s what you truly want?”