The Engagements Read Online Free PDF Page A

and softball, though not particularly well, and was in the Girl Scouts until age eight. Her parents’ house, a normal-sized Colonial, was always in a state of near messiness that could be cleaned up for guests in thirty-five minutes or less. She had her own bedroom, and so did May.
    They were born four years apart. Far enough that they didn’t really play with one another if there was any possible alternative. They eachhad their own friends, and the only times they socialized were during boring family parties or when they went away on vacation.
    They bonded, sort of, during their parents’ divorce. Kate was a freshman in high school and May was a senior. Neither of them saw it coming. Yes, their parents fought a lot, and from time to time her mother had made threats. While driving them to school one morning, she announced that she felt she was finally ready to leave their father, as if they might congratulate her on the news. May started to cry. Kate was silent, though she worried for months. But then two years passed, and nothing changed.
    She wept when her parents told her for real. On some level she understood that they would both be happier apart. But screw their happiness: she didn’t want to be the child of divorced parents. Couldn’t they at least have waited until she went away to college? She considered high school the worst possible time for this to happen. She knew people whose parents had split before their first birthday, and she considered them lucky beyond belief. They had never known anything different.
    When her parents divorced, the court granted them joint custody. They decided that she and May would spend Sunday through Wednesday with their father in the original house, and Thursday through Saturday with their mother, in a cheap rented condo she got through campus housing. This was how Kate spent her high school days, and she hated it.
    After the divorce, May tried harder than ever to be perfect—pretty, polite, well dressed, popular, always with a boyfriend by her side. It seemed as if every choice she made was an attempt to erase the taint of the broken home. Kate went in the opposite direction. On Fridays, she stayed out late with a bunch of college kids she and her friend Brandy had met at a party and quickly latched onto. They claimed to be BU students themselves, and spent many nights in dorm rooms, drinking, smoking pot, listening to Radiohead and Ani DiFranco; discussing literatured life with the women in the group, before making out for hours with the sleepy-eyed boys, who smelled of Tide and cigarettes.
    The differences between the two sisters were only emphasized by the fact that they looked so much alike. May and Kate were both five foot five, with brown hair and olive skin. They had the same skinny legs and arms, the same flat chest, even the same tiny, hairless gap in their eyebrows, which May spent untold amounts of time and money getting waxed and plucked and lasered, so as to correct the imperfection, while Kate just left it alone. She could look at her sister and see exactly how she herself would look if she spent an hour applying makeup each morning and took great care with her outfits. But Kate’s style, if she had one, couldonly be described as unintentional. She sometimes wore a bit of lip gloss, that was all. She never learned how to apply eyeliner; the few times she had tried, her lids clamped shut as soon as they came within three inches of a pencil, making her wonder if she’d been blinded by a stick in a previous life.
    Their father remarried when Kate was a freshman in college. His wife, Jean,” Ava saidal droppedl f was a nice woman from the paper, also divorced with two kids. Kate was happy for him, and relieved—his lonesomeness was one thing she could cross off her long list of worries. But she found it odd that her father and Jean still lived in the house she grew up in. It was like he had just replaced one woman with another, keeping everything else the same. Even