Made You Up(17)

She hustled to get inside my bedroom door before I closed it. Even in the room I’d slept in for seventeen years, the place I knew better than anywhere else, I had to make sure nothing was out of the ordinary.

“What’s it like?” Charlie flung herself on my bed and pulled the covers up over her head like a cloak. The resulting gust of air made the pictures tacked to the walls flutter. The artifacts on my shelves rattled ominously.

“Be careful, Charlie. You break anything, you’re paying for it.” I opened up the top dresser drawer and pushed pairs of striped socks out of the way until I found my stash of superglue, hidden so my mother didn’t think I was huffing it. I tossed it onto the nightstand partly as a warning to Charlie and partly as a reminder to myself to pick it up for the morning. “I don’t know. It was school.” I grabbed the clothes my mother had left out on the end of the bed and tossed them on the floor. After seventeen years, she still picked out my clothes. I was a schizophrenic, not a damn invalid.

“But what was it like?”

This was understandable. Charlie had never set foot in a real school.

“It was like school. I went to class and listened to the teacher and did the work.”

“And there were other kids there?”

“Yes, Charlie, there are lots of other kids there. It’s a school.”

“Did they discriminate against you because you’re new?”

Discriminate. There it was. Charlie’s Word of the Week. Every week, Charlie had a word that she used whenever she could fit it in. This week it was discriminate. Last week it was usurp. The week before that was defenestrate, compliments of me. Just thinking about Charlie whipping that one out of her vocabulary utility belt in front of our mother made me smile.

“Has Mom been letting you watch the Disney Channel again?” I opened my closet to look for my pajamas.

“So . . . they don’t sing at lunch?”

“Nope.”

“Oh.” The blanket fell away from her head, revealing her straight, ketchup-red hair and big blue eyes. She pulled a black chess piece from her pocket and jammed it into her mouth. She’d been chewing on things since she was four years old. “Did you meet anyone cool?”

“Define cool.”

“You know. Cool.”

“Not really. I met nice people and stupid people and complete jerks, but I didn’t really meet any cool people.”

Charlie gasped, her eyes became the size of plates, and the chess piece fell out of her mouth. “Did you meet your soul mate? That always happens on the first day of school, right?”

“Oh God, Charlie, she’s letting you read again! You went straight to the paranormal section, didn’t you?”

Charlie huffed and crossed her arms. “No. But the TV doesn’t do high school very well.”

“The TV doesn’t do anything very well, Charlie.”

She looked glum after that, and I felt sorry that I’d crushed her hopes. She’d never go to high school. The only reason our mother had stopped homeschooling me was because my therapist said I’d do better around people my age. That led to my involvement in the Hillpark Gym Graffiti Incident and my senior year condemnation at East Shoal.

A familiar pang of guilt poked at my stomach whenever I looked at Charlie. I was the big sister. I was supposed to set an example and lead the way so people would say, “Hey, you’re Alex’s sister, aren’t you? You two look exactly alike!” instead of “Hey, you’re Alex’s sister, aren’t you? Are you crazy, too?”

The only example I was ever going to set for her was to always check her food before she ate it.

Relief washed over me. Relief that she wasn’t old enough yet to understand why she should hate me.

“Get out of my room. I need to change.”

Charlie whined and pouted but grabbed the chess piece, scrambled off the bed, and hurried out the door. I changed into my pajamas and slipped under the covers.

I looked around the room at all my pictures and artifacts.

The pictures had no rhyme or reason. I realized a few years back that sometimes I’d look at an old picture and something would be different in it. Something would be missing. I reached into my bag and pulled out my camera, then flipped through the pictures I’d taken today. The first one from this morning, the one of the squirrels—it was already different. It looked like I’d just taken a picture of the neighbor’s lawn. The squirrels were gone.