Blood Sugar(3)

Duncan swore it was an accident. He got off with a casual warning to play more gently, especially with girls. Victim-blaming starts young. It somehow became my sister’s fault for being too delicate. Too breakable.

After that, I started to worry. She was not just my sister; she was also my best friend, my safe place, my idol, and my god. She was my prize possession. Ellie was, and still is, my favorite thing in the whole wide world. I feared Duncan would break her to the point of no repair. Ruin her forever. Because of Duncan, she was ashamed of her fiery hair, she rarely smiled, and she stopped playing dress-up and pretend with me altogether. She started to hate school, looked over her shoulder constantly, refused to use public bathrooms, and now had nightmares. Duncan was infecting even her most private moments. Her dreams. I could hear her through the walls, yelping in her sleep. Our bedrooms were connected by a bathroom that we shared, and her pitiful cries echoed across the black and white Art Deco tiles. Our parents’ bedroom was far away, on the other side of the kitchen. So no one but me could hear Ellie’s whimpering.

Years of therapy have taught me not to use the word should. It’s empty and pointless. But fuck it. My parents should have taken more action against the bullying. The teachers should have protected Ellie and stopped it. The principal should have kicked Duncan out of school long before things got so bad. But none of them really saw it the way I did. Like Duncan’s parents on the shore, they were all too wrapped up in their own lives to notice Ellie’s confidence and sparkle fading away. Because to a great degree Ellie was my life, I was the one to clearly notice her descent into wishing to be invisible.

Before Duncan accelerated his engine of persecution, Ellie was vivacious, effervescent, kind, and giving. But not cloyingly sweet or desperate to make friends. She had her own strong opinions, one being that poems should have to rhyme. But she was open to listening to others, and if anyone needed a fourth for box ball, even if she wasn’t totally in the mood, she would jump in. She made any room she was in more appealing, always fun yet never frantic. Like a perfectly balanced scented candle. The opposite of Duncan, she believed joy was limitless, not a commodity to be stolen. The more others felt happiness, the more she felt it. So she tried to spread it around, multiply it until it filled the whole world. She smiled at the elderly who were so often ignored; she made nondenominational holiday cards for everyone on our block, including the grumpy divorced lady on the corner. She chatted with the school bus driver so he wouldn’t feel left out of the conversations going on in the back.

And unlike most big sisters, she let me play in her room. I had a swing set in the backyard, toys of my own, a box of arts and crafts supplies, and plenty of colored pencils and construction paper to keep me occupied. But despite these distractions, I couldn’t keep my hands off Ellie’s perfume bottle collection. Each with a different magical shape and hue and smell. The mini crystal sculptures were so pretty all lined up on their little shelf. And, shockingly, even prettier all smashed on the floor.

I didn’t mean to knock the biggest one over, causing a catastrophic crash. But once I did, I was mesmerized by the droplets of broken colored glass that smelled like flowers and candy. I reveled in the beauty of the destruction. I was so immersed, I didn’t hear Ellie come home and into her room. She found me happily playing in the glassy potpourri. I looked up, embarrassed. I saw the betrayal and fury on her face and she burst into tears. “How could you?!” she screamed at me. I too burst into tears. I explained it was a horrible accident, but it all looked so pretty that I couldn’t resist in making the best of it and playing in the aftermath of her perfume bottle massacre.

Ellie noticed my hand was bleeding. A shard of pink perfume bottle glass was lodged in the fleshy heel of my left palm. She removed the sliver and held a towel to the wound to stop the bleeding. She forgave me because she loved me more than she loved the glass bottles. She loved me as much as I loved her. And together we carefully cleaned up the sharp, sweet-smelling, colorful mess.

Unlike Duncan, I would never intentionally destroy anything that brought her joy. And she saw me sobbing, and she knew that. So she grieved for her broken bottles, but didn’t hold on to any anger toward me. That’s how amazing she was. She could let go of resentment and see the best in people, if they had any best in them. And I did. I had a lot of best in me.

My parents knew Duncan Reese was rotten, and my mother happily predicted that he would end up working at a gas station one day, while my sister would be successful and fabulous. To my mother, it seemed, working at a gas station was the lowest of the low. But that prediction didn’t help the situation at the moment. That didn’t stop Ellie’s scalp from bleeding. It didn’t quicken the months and months it took for her curl to grow back and reach a length that suited the other curls. By the time Duncan would be working at said gas station, Ellie would be so beaten down and haunted that she would never bloom into being successful and fabulous. And she would never be happy, a quality my mother left out of the equation.

Both my mother and father, who were contentedly married and more often on the same page than not, believed children were little individuals, capable of making their own decisions. In a new world of “helicopter moms,” they could have been best described as “submarine parents.” Always there, a giant lumbering presence, but often unseen and too deep to be accessible. They felt more like helpful landlords than parental figures. Each raised in a controlling, unpleasant household, they allowed the pendulum to swing perhaps too far the other way when raising their own offspring. They wanted us kids to work it out on our own. Learn to interact with all kinds, fill our toolboxes with skills, like being social, using negotiation tactics, and problem-solving with guile. They would, however, pop up from the depths from time to time to give advice and guidance. They actually wanted us to talk to strangers. My mother would point out a guy in the park.