Then I Met My Sister (2 page)

Two

“Whatcha doin’?”

Catch the cadence:
Whatcha doin’
. It’s Mom trying to sound casual. I guess she figures it’s less off-putting than
Why in God’s name are you frittering your life away on that computer?

What I’m
doin’
is what I always do when Mom walks in when I’m on the computer: X-ing out the screen. I usually don’t have any particularly compelling reason to do this; it’s just a habit. The fact that it drives Mom crazy is a bonus. She insists that we keep the computer in “a central location” (our den), so I have no privacy when I’m IM-ing or playing solitaire or doing other computer-related things that constitute frittering my life away. Dad went to bat for me once, a few years ago, saying I should have my own laptop or we should at least put the computer in a more private place, but Mom stopped him cold by saying, “Hello?
Child molesters
?!?” Which, let’s face it, tends to have a chilling effect on any conversation.

“Hmmm?” Mom persists when I don’t answer her
whatcha doin’
question, which I naively assumed was rhetorical. She bends down to gaze at a blank computer screen.

“Nothing.” I mindlessly tap a key, waiting for her to walk away so I can finish my conversation with Gibs.

She clucks her tongue, which usually means she’s about to walk out, only to jerk her head back in my direction after a few steps to let me know I’m putting nothing past her, she’s always watching, she’s ever vigilant about the centrally located computer, she’s on to those child molesters, she’s a
good
parent. But instead, she sits down in the recliner by the computer. The chair faces the television set, not the computer, but she swivels to face the back of my head and the blank computer screen.

I tilt my head slightly in her direction, giving her a sideways glance.

“Ya need something, Mom?”

“I need your attention,” she snaps. The whole
watcha doin’
folksiness is apparently history.

I roll my eyes while I have the chance, then turn around to face her.

“Yep,” I volunteer tersely.

“Your friend, Gibson, certainly distinguished himself in the Honors Day ceremony,” Mom says.

I nod. “Yeah. He’s great. Actually, he’s coming over after dinner to help me study for my history final. Hope that’s okay.”

Mom’s face brightens. “Well, of course. That’s a wonderful idea. Summer, that’s the kind of thing you should be doing more of. Maybe if you’d started that earlier in the school year … I mean, here it is, the middle of May, with the school year almost over, and …”

“But better late than never, right?” A tight smile is glued to my face.

“Summer, I won’t lie,” Mom says archly. “I know school has never been your strong suit, but it was a little difficult sitting through another Honors Day ceremony with such … disappointing results.”

My smile fades. “I told you not to come. You knew I wasn’t winning anything.”

Anger flashes in Mom’s steel-blue eyes. “You’ll be a senior next year,” she says in a frosty tone. “Everything you’re doing now is paving the way for your future. You should be making A’s, and logging volunteer hours, and doing extra-credit projects in school, and …” She sighs aggrievedly. “You know, by the time Shannon was your age, she …”

My withering stare stops her cold. Mom’s not the only one who can pull off frosty.

“Oh, stop being so sensitive,” Mom snaps. “It’s not like I’m comparing the two of you, I’m just …”

I give her a minute to squirm. She’s got nothing.

“I’m just pointing out,” she soldiers on, “that your sister was … she was very …”

She can’t come up with the next word, which is apt. The superlative says it all. Shannon was Very. I am Not.

“I don’t know what you want me to do, Mom,” I say. “Like you said, the school year is almost over.”

Mom folds her arms and nods briskly. “I want you to turn over a new leaf,” she replies. “I want you to ask your teachers for some extra-credit assignments this summer. I want you to buckle down next year and be the straight-A student we both know you can be. I want you to do some volunteer work. I want you to think about your
future
, Summer.”

Which is ironic, because as far as I can tell, all Shannon ever did was think about her future. And she ended up not having one.

Whatever look I’m giving Mom is frustrating the hell out of her. She leaps out of her seat with a burst of adrenaline. “And if you
don’t
,” she says, pointing a manicured finger at me like a dagger, “don’t think you’re going to sit around here all summer doing nothing. If you can’t find anything constructive to do, I’ll find something
for
you.”

She strides out of the room, leaving a Shalimar-scented
whoosh
in her wake. I sit there for a second, chilled by the breeze she leaves behind, then turn back to the computer.

I see real potential in sitting around here all summer doing nothing.

Three

“You have a sister?”

Gibs and I have been friends since he moved to town a few months ago; he noticed me reading Nietzsche during lunch one day at school and wondered why somebody who read Nietzsche for fun wasn’t in his honors classes. He’s pretty shy, but we bonded over stolen smirks during a particularly painful poetry reading at a school assembly (don’t get me started on Priscilla Pratt’s breathless insights regarding sunsets or Leah Rollins’ groundbreaking take on the Importance of Honesty), and Gibs started inviting me to his house occasionally for guitar sessions or indie videos.

But this is his first trip to
my
house; Mom’s tendency to make my friends feel like they’re under FBI surveillance minimizes my invites. But she’s at work now, and I really need help with my history final, so here’s Gibs.

It occurs to me that it must strike him as pretty odd that I’ve never mentioned my sister. We’ve just walked past the Shannon Wall of Fame, on into the den where Shannon’s life-sized watercolor portrait smiles down on us from the most prominent wall in the room

“
Had
,” I say in response to his question. “I
had
a sister. She’s dead.”

“Oh,” Gibs says. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I never knew her. She died before I was born. Actually, she’s the
reason
I was born.”

Gibs narrows his eyes, waiting to hear more, but that’s really all I have to say about that. I let my backpack slide off my arms onto the carpet, unzip it, and pry out my history book. I plop on the floral overstuffed couch and start flipping pages.

“I’m really rusty on the Prussians,” I say, after settling on a page.

“What do you mean, she’s the reason you were born?” Gibs persists.

I shrug. “My parents were bummed when she died, so they had me. I’m their sloppy second.”

Gibs pushes a stray lock of hair behind his ear and sits on the other end of the couch. “Their what?”

“Their sloppy second. Shannon was perfect, their lives were perfect, everything was perfect-perfect-perfect, then she died. And my mom thought if she got pregnant again, she’d have another perfect baby. But she had me.”

I’m back to flipping pages, but Gibs sits on the other end of the couch and kicks off his sneakers like he’s settling in for details.

“How did she die?”

I squint to focus on the glossary. “Car accident.”

Gibs’ eyebrows knit together. “What happened?”

I look at him squarely. “Didn’t I just say? A car accident. An accident involving a car.”

He shakes his head impatiently. “But what
happened
?”

I sigh, toss my book to the side and hug my jeans-clad knees against my chest. “She was driving to school. It was the first day of her senior year. A dog ran in front of her … or a cat, or a squirrel … something … and she swerved and hit a tree.”

Gibs stares at his fingers. “Wow.” He blushes. “I’m really sorry.”

I poke his arm playfully. “I didn’t know her, remember? Telling me you’re sorry she’s dead is like telling me you’re sorry Abraham Lincoln is dead. And speaking of history …” I nod toward my book.

“It’s not like that at all,” Gibs counters, glancing at her portrait on the wall. “She was your sister. God, you two look like twins. She’s, like, a
piece
of you.”

“Well, your great-great-grandfather was, like, a piece of you. But you can’t miss someone you never knew.”

Gibs’ dark blue eyes flicker in my direction. “A sister’s not like some random ancestor. Great-great grandfathers are
supposed
to be dead. Sisters aren’t.”

I consider his point, but mostly, I’m irritated we’re talking about the subject in the first place. “I know,” I say patiently. “It’s very sad she died. On the other hand, if she hadn’t died, I wouldn’t have been born, so I wouldn’t be here to talk about why you can’t miss somebody you never knew, so …”

“How do you know that?” Gibs asks, his eyes now locked with mine.

“Know
what
?”

“That you wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t died?”

I shrug. “My parents only had me because they were so bummed about losing her.”

Gibs peers past me. “Which makes you wonder … I mean, life may be totally random … but if there’s some kind of grand plan, if you were meant to be here, it’s like Shannon had to die to make that happen.”

I huff and sit up straighter. “History. We’re supposed to be studying history.”

Gibs rests his chin on his fist. “But what’s the point, if everything’s random? Even weirder, what’s the point if everything’s predetermined? What good is learning about history if we don’t have the power to control our own fate? Maybe you’re destined to flunk history, and nothing we do can change that. Or maybe an asteroid will randomly hit the earth ten seconds from now, and none of this will matter anyway.”

I grab a throw pillow and playfully bounce it over his head.

“Or maybe my history teacher will morph into a Vulcan and whisk us away on the Starship Enterprise. But on the off chance that I actually have to pass my history exam, could you please help me study?”

Gibs looks at me evenly. “So you never even think about her?”

I toss my head backward and groan. “Why do we have to talk about this?”

“You
do
think about her,” Gibs deduces. “You’ve got to. She’s your sister.”

I stare at the ceiling fan and notice a strand of cobweb extending from the ceiling to one of the blades. Somehow, the strand stays intact even as the fan slowly oscillates. “I have no choice but to think about her,” I tell Gibs, still staring skyward. “Especially with friends like you.”

It’s true. Shannon has been the backdrop of my life since the moment I was born … since the moment I was
conceived,
really. My earliest memory is of my grandma getting misty-eyed when I sat at the kitchen table threading macaroni noodles onto the tines of my fork. “Just like Shannon used to do,” Grandma said in a choked voice, at which point I stopped threading the noodles and started dicing them into slivers. I thought it would make Grandma laugh, but instead she turned stern. “Eat your lunch,” she scolded.

“
I’ll eat my lunch
,” I remember thinking, “
but I’ll do it my way
.”

Our house is like a Shannon museum, featuring the Wall of Fame with its framed photos of every school picture. As you walk down the hall leading to our den, you move from toothless first-grader to stunning blonde in the course of just a few steps. The effect is like a bubble that grows larger, larger, larger until it bursts.

My
school photos are on the opposite wall. Shannon never looks directly into the camera, always past it, but my eyes stare straight ahead … straight into
Shannon
, as if indicting her for being so much more fabulous. Shannon’s sparkly eyes, gazing past me, are oblivious.

This year, the number of photos grew even. When Mom hung my eleventh-grade photo opposite Shannon’s, perfect symmetry was achieved. My senior photo will ruin the effect. And of course, I’ll have no one to bore my eyes into.

The second-story hall displays our framed certificates and plaques.
That
wall will never be symmetrical.
Shannon Elizabeth Stetson, First Place. Shannon Elizabeth Stetson, Grand Prize. Shannon Elizabeth Stetson, Perfection Personified
. Shannon outpaced me by the time she was in second grade. I don’t know how there were enough hours in the day to accommodate her dancing, her cheering, her debating, her junior-achieving, her future-business-leading, her volleyball, her school honors, her vast greatness in general. You can tell at a glance that Mom had aesthetics in mind when she first started hanging Shannon’s frames. In the earlier ones, she gave careful attention to placement, ensuring an equal amount of space between each frame. But as Shannon’s honors accumulated, Mom’s eye for decorating took a back seat to practicality, with frames squeezing ever closer together and forming cluttered new layers that eventually covered the surface like wallpaper.

The opposite wall—my wall of shame—is sad and sparse, a few honorable mentions for art or writing, a few photocopies of the same certificate every kid on the soccer team gets for showing up and having a pulse.

Having a pulse.
There’s that stab of guilt I get when I think too long or too hard about Shannon. I can be glib in short spurts. My conscience kicks in on longer intervals.

“You
do
think about her,” Gibs’ voice reverberates in my head. “You’ve got to. She’s your sister.”

But he’s wrong. I don’t think about her much, mostly because I don’t have much to think about. True, her greatness stares me in the face every second of my life, but it’s an abstract greatness, as generic and one-dimensional as the certificates on the wall. Our house may be a Shannon Museum, but my family never shares anything real about her. Did she ever adopt a stray cat? Throw a tantrum because she didn’t get a Christmas present she wanted? Damned if I know. Mom and Dad can’t go there.

All I really know is how she threaded her macaroni through the tines of her fork, or other little tidbits my relatives might share in hushed, reverent voices, the way they talk about saints.

But from Mom and Dad, I get nothing. The photos and certificates apparently say it all.

I remember going to the zoo with my parents when I was about five. Mom was holding my hand as we walked past the elephants, and I asked if they’d ever taken Shannon there. Her grasp turned into a death grip. My knuckles blanched as Mom gave my arm a yank and pulled me along faster. Dad scurried to keep up.

And I’d missed my chance to take a closer look at the elephants, my favorite animal.

They never did answer my question, or any others about Shannon that might come to mind.

And I stopped asking.

“Prussians,” I remind Gibs, sounding testier than I intended.

“Right,” Gibs agrees. “Prussians.”