A World Without You(67)

“It was so scary,” I mused. “I mean, the mountain’s edge on one side and trees on the other. The whole time, I kept thinking, ‘If I go just a little bit to the left or the right, I’ll crash the car and kill us all. I am going to kill my whole family.’”

Bo snorts. “You were going, like, two miles an hour.”

“I was not!”

“You were. I could have walked faster.”

“Whatever. And Dad was yelling—”

“He was telling you to speed up—”

“And Mom was telling me to use the brake—”

“Because she’s a scaredy-cat—”

“And I was swerving all over the road—”

“Again, you were barely moving at all—”

“And do you remember what you said?”

I want him to know that this moment was really important to me. I remember it so vividly. I had been leaning forward, half my body over the steering wheel, trying to look as closely at the road as I could, squinting at the little bit of gravel just in front of the car. “You have to look further out,” Bo had said from the backseat. “You can’t look right in front of the car.” And then, I don’t know, I just got it. I understood. I needed to focus on the distance; I needed to see where I was going.

But Bo just shrugs now. He doesn’t remember.

“Anyway . . . thanks,” I say. I step out of his room, my foot landing on the gouge in the hardwood floor.

? ? ?

I take Bo’s plate back to the kitchen. On the stairs as I head back to my room, I get a text from Jenny. I keep my eyes on the screen as I pass Bo’s room again, not willing to make eye contact and conversation a second time.

What’s up? Jenny texts.

Nothing. I step into my room and close the door firmly. Bo’s here.

I’ve always been jealous, Jenny types, that you have a brother.

LOL, not this one.

No, you don’t understand. The words come fast and furious across my screen. You just don’t get how weird it is to be an only child. It would be so much better to have a brother or a sister or something. You have no idea how good you have it.

I turn off my phone, ignoring the buzzes as more texts arrive. Jenny is the one with no idea. Because the reality is? She may want a brother, but she doesn’t want Bo. She just doesn’t understand. I mean, I know she’s heard me complain about him, but she thinks it’s like the movies when two siblings fight and then eventually bond and become besties. But that sort of thing is just as fake as the idea that taking off your glasses and putting on some eyeliner is all it takes to change from the class freak to a hottie. The truth is, sometimes siblings have nothing in common but blood. Sometimes you just know that the concept of a BFF brother is not applicable to your family.

Sometimes you stay up late at night, thinking things that make you feel like a heartless monster, wishing for something different and then feeling sick with guilt because you know what the cost of “different” would be.

Jenny doesn’t want this life. There’s a difference between having no siblings and having a broken one.

? ? ?

An hour later, my door opens without warning, and I jump from my bed, expecting to shout at Mom. That’s our silent rule—I will be the daughter they need, but I get my privacy.

But it’s not Mom, it’s Bo. He glances at me, then quickly away, avoiding my eyes and sticking closely to the wall as he creeps around my furniture. He makes his way to my desk and unplugs my laptop, tucking it under his arm.

“You could have asked!” I shout after him.

But he walks out of the room as if he hasn’t even heard me.





CHAPTER 44




Sometimes they notice me, sometimes they don’t. I wonder if I’m fading in and out of existence, or if they are.

? ? ?

Sofía once told me that she found a red Moleskine notebook among her mother’s possessions after she died. The first twenty or so pages were filled with her chicken scratch, but the rest were blank.

Sofía had sat there, in the middle of the bedroom her mother retreated to when her father drank too much, surrounded by her clothes and the smell of her perfume, and she read every single page.

Her mother had started the book the day she took a pregnancy test and realized she was going to have another child. More than half the written pages were about her hopes and her fears for Sofía while she was growing in her belly. She poured her heart into those pages, whispering in writing that was barely legible her wish that Sofía would be another girl, that she would grow up strong and courageous, far more so than her mother had ever been.

The rest of the written pages were from after Sofía was born. More and more time passes between each entry. Some of the entries were angry—at Sofía, at her father, at the life her mother struggled with. But some of them were far kinder. These entries were written in pencil, hardly leaving a mark on the page, as if her mother was so certain the good days would not last that she left herself an easy way to erase the marks should they prove untrue.

Sofía said that when she found the notebook, she cried—for the first time since the accident, she cried. And she held that book close to her heart, upset not just because of what the pages held, but because of all the pages that held nothing at all. Most of the book was blank. Although Sofía’s mother started writing in the notebook before Sofía was born, somewhere between giving birth to her little sister, raising three daughters, living with Sofía’s father, and everything else life threw at her, she just . . . quit. Maybe she forgot. Maybe she ran out of things to say. But either way, the blank pages would remain forever empty.