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Lindsay bursts out of the front door as Dad and I are climbing out of his truck. Her hair is tucked under an old Tar Heels baseball cap and there's a whitish smear of...

"It's paint," she says, when she's close enough for me to touch the spot on her cheek. "Mom is in the garage washing out the brushes," she adds, glancing at Dad. Then she takes a hesitant step toward me, arms hovering, like she wants to hug me but she's not sure it's allowed.

I answer by wrapping her in a tight squeeze. "What were you painting?" I ask. Sort of wishing I had X-ray vision so I could see Mom through the garage door. Because the question I really want to ask is how can she be like, redecorating the house or whatever at a time like this—when our entire family is falling apart?

My sister wiggles out of my arms. "Come with me and I'll show you," she says, grabbing my hand. Her spark of enthusiasm stalls when she focuses on Dad—and her vulnerability is obvious. She's not just asking if it's okay to take me inside. She wants to know if he still loves her, now that he knows what Mom knows.

But Dad only gets the first part of her unspoken question. He gives her a solemn nod, and points to the garage. Meaning he's going to find Mom. Lindsay straightens her spine, resurrects her zombie mask and tugs my arm, practically dragging me up the sidewalk and into our house.

The almost sweet, chemical smell lingering in the foyer is paint. Obviously. It gets stronger as we climb the staircase. "Mom started on your room as soon as you left this morning," she says, hanging back to let me go in first.

The purple is gone. Mostly. There are still shadows of it peeking through the white paint. Especially on the wall adjacent to the bookshelves. Which are empty. So is the closet. And all the clutter has been cleared off the dresser. There's nothing left of the Allyson I was.

"This is just primer," Lindsay says. She's still standing the doorway and her voice is quivery. I'm pretty sure she didn't bring me up here to show me a room covered in ghostly paint—not really. But there are so many things we need to talk about, and I'm just...so...overwhelmed. I don't know how or where to start.

"You get to pick the new color," she says. Because apparently she doesn't either. "Mom thought it would be nice for you to have a blank canvas."

"But there were things in here I liked." An uncomfortable flutter grows in my chest as I check each of the window alcoves. "There was something in here I really want."

"It's all out there," she says, pointing to the hallway. Which is lined with open boxes.

I walked right past them.

My three-legged stool is sitting on top of the biggest one. I give Lindsay a sideways glance on my way to retrieve it.

"Oh my god, Ally. Do you even know where that thing came from?"

She's pointing—with a definite smirk—at my favorite artifact. Which I am now hugging. "I don't care," I say, defensive. "I like it."

"Yeah, I can tell."

"I like the books, too," I say, embarrassed now. "And the twinkle lights that were on the headboard."

"Ally, Dodge gave that to you," she says. Meaning the stool. "He actually made it himself. Specifically for you."

I know it's true. Instantly, because Noah told me he was drawing a stool that day in French after I made the first move. It was something he was going to build in his dad's workshop. That part—the fact that Noah is the kind of guy who can make some amazing thing out of scraps of wood—didn't register when he told me his side of the day-we-met story.

And I wish I didn't know it now, because it only makes me want him more.

"Have you heard from him since..." Lindsay clamps down on the rest of the question. Her lips press together; her arms cross over her stomach.

I shake my head, putting the stool back on the box. Because all of a sudden, I can't bear the sight of it. If I let myself think about Noah, I'll start obsessing about what I did or didn't do with Drew—and I'll never get through all the "sorting out" Dad promised me.

I go back in my room, to the closest alcove window. The garage door must be open now, because there's yellow light spilling onto the driveway. Dad is leaning against his truck, nodding and nodding while Mom paces, her hands in constant motion: grasping at her hair, reaching for the sky, then dropping dramatically to her sides. I hope she's being a little more reasonable than she was this morning.

Was it really only this morning that I overheard her yelling at Dad on the phone?

Lindsay rests a hand on my shoulder as she leans in to see what's got me so fixated. "We should probably get our story straight," she says.

"There is no story, Linds. I already told Dad the truth."

My sister sighs as she slumps over to my bed and collapses onto her back—on top of an old sheet that's splattered with every paint color that can be found on the walls in this house. "What happened after you and Mom left the hospital?" I ask. "Did you talk at all, or did you just come up here and paint?"

"We started talking in the car on the way home."

She hugs her knees against her chest and sighs again, louder and longer.

"Lindsay, talk to me. Did you tell Mom how much it was bothering you to keep that secret from me?"

"She already knew. She figured it out the day you moved home. When Noah called your phone and I overreacted, she realized the secret was bothering me more than I'd let on. She tried to talk to me about it the next day, and the day after that, but I kept putting her off."

"Why?"

"Because I was pissed off!" Lindsay drops both legs to the carpet with an angry thud. "I told Mom about the phone call because I was freaking out," she says, sitting up. "We were in the car, driving home from Faircrest after I'd showed you the IM app. I made this huge confession that I'd been wanting to make for months and months—and Mom acted like it was nothing. She just thanked me calmly for the information and said we should keep it from you until you had more time to adjust."

"She put me first," I say. "She thought she was protecting the child who needed it most."

"Yep. That's exactly what she told me an hour ago—while she was rolling paint on the walls like a mad woman."

"Did she apologize?" I ask.

"Yeah." 

There are tears on Lindsay's cheeks. She doesn't try to stop them or wipe them away like she usually does. She lets them drip onto her paint-splattered T-shirt, and I get the feeling Mom's apology wasn't good enough. 

"I had her convinced I got caught trying to steal weed out of Drew's car," Lindsay says. "And that you and Samantha were there to rescue me. You should've let me take the blame. I deserve it after what I did to you and Noah."

"What about the things I did to you?" I ask. "It seems to me like you had a good reason to want me to suffer."

Lindsay shakes her head. "The whole thing started with a stupid impulse. You were in the shower and your phone was ringing. I regretted it the second I picked it up and said hello, because I was so sure Noah would recognize my voice and tell you. But he didn't. He asked—thinking I was you—if I wanted to meet him at the mall for a movie when he got back into town. I blurted out something about meeting someone else and hung up. But I promise you it wasn't premeditated."

She pinches the end of her nose, collecting a bubble of snot, and smears it on her shirt. I'm sure there's a box of tissue out in the hallway. I should go find it and bring it back. Or at the very least, I should sit on the bed and comfort my sister. But my feet don't agree. Because every bad thing that happened between Noah and me can be traced back to that freaking phone call.

No, that's not true. If I could've mustered the courage to talk to Noah after I kissed the boy from New Jersey, then Lindsay's lie wouldn't have had so much power over us.

"I know what you're thinking," she says. "I could've told you what I'd done. I wanted to, but...at first, I was afraid of the retaliation. And then, after Noah cussed you out in the lunchroom..."

Lindsay uses her cupped hand to scrape away the tears still clinging to her jaw. And then she swallows, hard. "I didn't say this to Mom because it makes me sound horrible, but after you and Noah stopped talking, you were so lost and needy you didn't complain when I tried to hang out with you. It was almost like you wanted me around. But that changed after he didn't acknowledge your sixteenth birthday. I tried to sit beside you on the front porch—trying to comfort you while you watched the movers take away his grandparent's furniture—but you wanted to be alone. And then that's all you ever wanted."

I try to imagine myself, sitting on the front steps of this house looking at the green real estate sign planted in the Dodge's front yard. But instead, I get a conjured image of Noah's devastated face—as he listens to Drew tell me it "wasn't like that." While his disgusting scrubby face says, so obviously, that it was.

"I really did want to tell you what I'd done," Lindsay says. "I came close one night a few weeks before your accident. We were out on one of our walks and you told me that you and Noah were talking again, but things were still a little weird. I knew that if I could find the courage to confess, all the weirdness would go away. But I also knew you'd stop talking to me—or something worse—and I didn't want our friendship to end."

"You mean the friendship that started after I corrupted you with drugs? God, Linds." I let the weight of my guilt take me down to floor. "I was so stupid and condescending the day you smoked weed in front of me. I scolded you for doing something you learned from me. You must have wanted to slap me."

"Yeah, I sort of did, but I also liked the idea that you wanted to protect me. I guess we both needed you to be the big sister you thought you were when we lived in North Carolina."

"Speaking of me being stupid," I say. "I remembered something real about Kara today. I'm sorry I blocked that out, or reinvented my past or whatever. I must've hated myself for being such a..." My phone vibrates. "Crap. Somebody's calling me."

"See who it is."

I shimmy the phone out of my pocket. And my heart yo-yos. I show Lindsay the caller ID: Noah Dodge.

"Go ahead and answer it," she says, shifting her weight forward. "I'll give you some privacy."

"No."

"You don't want to talk to him?"

"I don't know."

"Why wouldn't you?" she asks. Obviously disappointed.

"Because I...um...kissed Drew—my own personal drug dealer. Noah's not going to want me when he finds out. If he doesn't already know."

"He will, Ally. He has to. If you and Noah don't end up together, how will you ever be able to forgive me?"

"I do forgive you. I mean, yeah. I'm hurt and angry about what you did, but those feeling are all mixed up with...other feelings that are..."

Ugh. I push myself up from the floor. I need to move.

"I have all this...resentment," I say, pacing. "But it's aimed at me—if that makes sense. It's like my coma lasted three years instead of two days. I woke up to find that an impostor has been living my life all that time—and doing a screwy job of it. But I can't blame screwy Allyson for everything that went wrong, because I'm making the same kinds of mistakes she made."

Lindsay scrunches her nose. Meaning she doesn't understand. And I guess no one can.

Except for maybe the people at the support group meeting I missed while I was trying to fix my broken family.

My phone buzzes and I hold it up to show Lindsay the Missed Call notification. Then I walk it over to the built-in bookshelf and leave it there. "I can't deal with Noah right now," I say. "But I know that when I do, it's not going to change the way I feel about you and me. We've got some work to do—this conversation with Mom and Dad, and probably family sessions with Dr. Greene—but we both want the same thing, right?"

"You mean the friendship without the drugs?"

"That's a good place to start," I say. And then a door slams somewhere downstairs.

I head toward the window to check on Mom and Dad. "Family meeting downstairs in five minutes," Dad calls before I get there.

"Family meeting," I say, grimacing. "That sounds official. Is this one of those things we've been doing that I can't remember?"

"No," Lindsay says, looking a little pale. "But I'd bet large sums of money that it's something we'll be doing from now on."