“I’m not pressing charges, Maggie,” she asserted. “I know that’s probably something you’d want me to do, but I’m not. He’s over eighteen. He’d be charged as an adult, and I can’t ruin his life like that…”
I kept cleaning her face, not reacting to her words at all.
“I mean, it’s my fault. I shouldn’t have left with him on prom night. I sent confusing signals.”
I tapped her leg once. No.
She was blaming herself. I’d been there before, too. Sometimes my mind still put fault on me. I shouldn’t have been in those woods. Mama told me not to wander off. I put myself in a dangerous situation. It was my fault.
But when I took a bath and slipped beneath the water, I cleared all of those thoughts.
Sometimes our minds acted as a form of kryptonite, and we had a responsibility to our own self-worth to aggressively tell it to fuck off with its lies.
I was not to blame.
And neither was Cheryl.
A tear fell down her cheek and she wiped it away. “What’s your deal, anyway? Why are you helping me? I trashed your room. I said some shitty things to you, and still you’re helping me. Why?”
My shoulders rose and fell.
She reached over, cringing from the pain in her back, and grabbed a pencil and paper. “Why, Maggie?”
You’re my family.
More tears fell from her eyes, and she didn’t even try to hide them. “I really am sorry, ya know, for what I did to your room, to you. I just…” She tossed her hands up in frustration. Her voice filled with deep shame and loud remorse. “I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.”
I doubted most people did. Anyone who claimed to have their life figured out was a liar. Sometimes I wondered if there was anything to truly figure out, or if we were all walking around looking for a reason when no reason truly existed.
“I want to tell Mom and Dad what he did,” she whispered, her eyes filled with sadness. “But I know they’ll just freak out. They are already pissed at me for all of the other shitty mistakes I’ve made. I’ve fucked up too much for them to really care.”
I tapped her leg once more. No.
“How do you know?”
I held up the family piece of paper one more time. After that, she built up the courage to tell our parents. The moment they hugged her and told her none of it was her fault was the moment Cheryl released the breath she’d been holding for what seemed like years.
“I miss him,” Cheryl said, plopping down on my bed a few weeks after her ‘official’ breakup with Jordan. The cut on her face was healing pretty well, but I knew the damage to her mind wouldn’t be healed as quickly. “I mean, I don’t miss him. I miss the idea of him. I miss the idea of someone being by my side. Today I sat and tried to think of the last time I’d been single and I couldn’t come up with an answer.”
I grimaced, and she continued to speak. “What if I’m one of those girls who can’t be
alone? What if I’m supposed to always be with a guy? What the hell am I supposed to do with my time if there’s no guy for me to talk about? I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m not really the best at making friends with girls. No females ever come over to hang out with me, probably because I’ve stolen most of their boyfriends. What the heck am I supposed to do?”
Standing from my desk chair, I moved over to my wall of books, searching for a certain read for my sister. Grabbing The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, I held it out to her.
She knit her brow as a gloomy expression overtook her face. “What am I supposed to do with this?” I cocked an eyebrow, and she raised one back. “Maggie, I don’t read.” The combination of those four words created the saddest sentence I’d ever heard. I pushed the book out toward her again, and this time she took it warily. “Fine. I’ll try it, just because I’m so fucking bored, but I doubt I’ll like it.”
It took her three days to finish the book, and when she did, she came back quoting it, her eyes wide with emotion I’d never seen from her. “You want to know my favorite line? ’Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’ God. So. Fucking. Good. Margaret Atwood is my spirit animal.” She held the book out toward me and narrowed her eyes. “You got any more like that?”
I passed her a new book every three days. After a while, we started having Friday night girls’ nights where we ate Doritos, drank too much soda, and lay on my floor with our feet propped up on my bed frame. “Freakin’ A, Maggie. All this time I thought you were reading to escape the world, but now I know, you didn’t read to escape it; you read to discover it.”
The best night by far was when Cheryl finished The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Throughout her read, she had tears that sometimes turned into laughter, and vice versa. “THOSE FUCKING BITCHES!” she’d holler every now and then. “No, really, THOSE FUCKING BITCHES!”
One night as two a.m. rolled around, I was sleeping in my bed when Cheryl began poking me in the side to wake me. “Maggie,” she whispered. “Sis!” When my eyes opened, she was holding the novel to her chest and had the biggest smile on her face, the kind of smile kids have when they hear the sound of an ice cream truck coming down their road and they have just enough coins in their pockets for a Bombpop. “Maggie. I think I’m that thing. I think I’m it.”
I raised a tired eyebrow, waiting for her to explain what thing she was.
“I think I’m finally it.” Her smile grew bigger somehow, which made me smile, too. “I think I’m a reader.”