Because of Him

by Jessica Roe

  “He won't notice.” He chuckles. “Love the guy, but he doesn't notice a thing unless it's shoved right under his nose. I'd have to get in his face and tell him I wanted to date his sister before he'd ever realize something going on between us.” I hate the little thrill that shoots through me at his words; it's not like that's actually going to happen. “Besides, he's back at his place now, and it's just for a few months, then you're headed out to college, right?”

  “Hopefully.” My college applications have all been sent off and now I'm waiting like everybody else. I've been working my ass off, but I'm still worried.

  “You'll get in,” he assures me, no doubt in his voice, like he knows what I'm thinking. Either I've become super transparent or he just gets me.

  “Maybe we really should try dating other people,” he suggests, though he sours even as he says it. “Not Seanna, though. And not Kip or Gage—you're way too good for them. But...someone.”

  Suddenly I feel very, very tired. “I don't know if I can.”

  “Me neither. You're the only one I can even think of...” Silver closes his eyes and decides against finishing that thought. “But we should. Also, you need to start spending time with Grams again. She misses you.”

  “I miss her too, but...”

  “I know, I know. We'll just have to...work out a schedule or something so we don't bump into each other.”

  After that depressing conclusion, we have nothing left to say.

  I DIG DEEP into my locker, searching for a notebook I fear I'm doomed never to find. My whole body sags at the mess; I'm never going to find it in here.

  Ibbie, who seems to have the strength of the Hulk, somehow managed to break her lock and I quite foolishly allowed her to share my locker while they get her a new one. It's been less than a day and already our locker has been taken over by her terrifying clutter. For a neat freak like me, it's kind of unbearable.

  I'm so busy searching that it takes me almost a full minute to realize I'm not alone. I pop my head out when someone clears their throat loudly and obnoxiously beside me to see Jemma stood with her arms folded across her chest, looking highly uncomfortable. I know something is up immediately because Jemma never talks to me at school—Halloween prank aside.

  “'Sup?” I ask, going back to the pile of junk. I need to clear this thing out, stat. I make a mental note to never ever share an apartment with Ibbie when we're older. It would kill me. Or more likely, I would kill her.

  “I need you to get me something,” she replies, her voice barely above a whisper. I glance at her again. Her nervous eyes are darting from student to student like she's afraid of being overheard.

  “Tampon?” I guess.

  “No!” Yeah, because someone as pretty and perfect as Jemma could never get something as gross as a period. “I need you to get me...” She leans in for privacy. Or for dramatic effect. “...drugs. Nothing too crazy, maybe just pills or something?”

  I freeze, clinging to the locker door so tightly my fingers start to ache. It really stings that after all this time there are still people, my family, who think I do that, that I've ever done that. Haven't I proven myself yet? “No,” I reply curtly, slamming the locker shut so hard she takes an uneasy step back. The notebook is long forgotten. “I don't do that.”

  “Ugh, whatever.” She gives an exaggerated huff and flounces away.

  I lean back and breathe in deep, trying to calm myself. I'm so pissed right now I'm not sure I can even deal with it. In fact, I don't think I've ever been this pissed at Jemma.

  I seriously consider just leaving the whole thing be and letting Jemma make her own stupid mistakes. What the hell do I care what happens to her?

  Except...damn it, I do care. I don't want to see Jemma get hurt. So I chase after her.

  “What?” she demands harshly when I catch up, and I'm impressed despite myself by how much bitch she manages to fit into that one small word. Don't know why she thinks she's the one that gets to be annoyed, but whatever.

  “What's the deal, anyway?” I ask, trying to sound casual and not at all judgemental. “What do you want drugs for?”

  “Omg, Blair, will you shush already!” We pause a few feet away from her classroom door. “You're so lame.”

  “Jemma!”

  “God, fine! Here's the sitch: Imelda's dating a college guy and he's throwing a party this weekend. There's gonna be a whole lotta hot older guys there and Imelda says they'll probably be doing you know what. We can't be the only ones not doing it! There'll be loads of totally sexy college girls there and if we don't bring anything we're just gonna look like stupid little kids next to them. Can you imagine how seriously lame that would be?”

  Yeah, even lamer than becoming a crack head or getting taken advantage of. Man, her priorities are way out of whack. “Jem, will you just...be smart about this, okay? Please? Don't go to that party. No guy is worth getting involved with that crap, trust me. Not even older guys.”

  Jemma doesn't even listen to me, she just shoves her palm right up in my face and enters her classroom, and I'm left standing there, pissed and frustrated.

  I try but I can't let it go, it stays at the front of my mind for the rest of the day. I'm distracted to the point of carelessness; I get detention for not paying attention in math and almost run a red light on the way home.

  At one point I even consider bringing the Jemma situation up with Oliver—that would be the sensible thing to do, right? He'd probably ground her for the rest of her life but at least then she wouldn't be able to go to the party. But in the end I dismiss that idea because I think Jemma is the kind of girl who would hold a genuine grudge forever. Besides, Oliver probably wouldn't believe me anyway and I'm sure Felicia would somehow manage to make the whole thing my fault.

  Instead I wait until night when everyone else has already gone to bed before knocking on Jemma's bedroom door. I don't wait for her to answer before letting myself in, a bad habit I guess I've picked up off my siblings.

  She's sitting on her bed in her pyjamas with a book. It always surprises me how young she looks without make-up.

  “What?” she demands, glaring at me when I pause. “I can read, you know.” She's been like this a lot lately, snapping whenever she thinks somebody might be insinuating that she's dumb. With college on the horizon for both of us, I think she's growing out of the vapid cheerleader disguise she likes to wear. I always knew it was an act, her awesome test scores are proof of that.

  Her bedroom is another sign of her changing personality and growth. It isn't as pink and frilly as it was even just a few months ago. It's still flowery and girly and all things Jemma, but it's maturing, much like she is.

  “Never said you couldn't,” I reply, sitting down cross legged next to her with a sigh, hoping she isn't going to be completely difficult.

  “What do you want?”

  “You know what.”

  She glares sullenly at me. “Don't know what you're talking about.”

  So she is going to be difficult. “I wanted to see if you'd changed your mind about the party.”

  With a groan, she tosses her book down by the side of the bed. “Seriously, Blair, why can't you get over it already?”

  Because I know this party she's going to, I've been to a hundred others just like it, but much worse. I know the kind of peer pressure Jemma will be under because I've felt it too. But being a cold hearted bitch worked for me; I always knew how to say no in a way that people believed, and more importantly, I always knew what to expect. Jemma is too sweet and innocent for that. She'll get crushed. “Will you at least promise me you won't touch any drugs? Just have one beer, dance, chill out, go home. Be safe.”

  “What's the big deal? Why do you get to do this stuff and not me?”

  “I don't do it, Jemma!” I can tell by the look in her eyes that she already knows this. She knew it even when she approached me earlier today. I'm betting Imelda pressured her into it.

  “I don't get it, I thought you of all people w
ould've been cool about this.”

  “You mean me, the girl who found her own mom dead on the floor from a drug overdose?”

  She flinches. I don't think she expected me to be so blunt with her, especially about that. We've never talked about my mom before, not once. It's a sensitive subject the whole family avoids. The only person I've really talked to about it since I moved here is Silver.

  People are never blunt with Jemma. She can be so delicate and things tend to get sugar coated for her, but I think she needs somebody to give it to her straight for once. “I have something to show you.” I pull out a photo from my jeans pocket. “Just...here. Take it.”

  She holds it between the tips of her thumb and forefinger as she studies it, like she's worried she's going to catch something. She doesn't even try to hide her horror. I really don't blame her. “I thought mom got rid of the only picture you had of her,” she breathes out eventually.

  “I like to pretend this one doesn't exist,” I admit. In fact, I usually keep the picture tucked away inside the pages of my tattered old copy of The Princess Bride. It's of my mom, of course, taken at a party about a year before she died. It's a total contrast to the picture Felicia threw away. In that one mom had been beautiful and tempting and full of life, whereas in this one it's easy to see what terrible, terrible things years of drugs did to her. She looks old. Really, really old. At least ten years older than she actually was. Her skin is yellow, her eyes glassy and bloodshot and unfocussed, her hair a greasy, stringy mess and her frame so thin she was definitely anorexic. It's awful to look at. “I hate it so, so much.”

  “Why do you keep it?” she asks in a small voice.

  I shrug. There's a tiny, frayed hole in the knee of my jeans and I dig my pinky finger inside, making it bigger. “I could never bring myself to get rid of it. It reminds me of everything I never want to be.” Jemma continues to stare down at it. “Once upon a time, my mom was just a teenage girl at a party trying to get the attention of some older guys too.”

  She looks up at me and blinks, reminding me of a wide eyed baby deer.

  “You should keep that,” I say, standing up to leave. “I don't think I need it any more.” And as I say the words, I realize they're one hundred percent true. I'm done letting my mom rule me. I don't need my past to define my future.

  She speaks up just as I'm reaching for the door. “Why can't you just leave me alone?” Her words lack the venom she probably intended. If anything, her voice is shaking.

  “Because you're my sister,” I answer simply, glancing back over my shoulder. My stomach churns as I prepare to say my next words, words I can't remember ever saying to anyone. “And I love you.” It feels foreign coming out of my mouth, but I don't regret it.

  “I love you too,” she replies, surprising me. “I know I don't always act like it, but I do. I'm...I'm glad you're my sister.”

  FELICIA IS SUPER busy with some local fund-raising event over the weekend—she's a stay-at-home mom but gets involved with pretty much everything to do with the town—so Ila takes the opportunity to hang out with me over at Granny Yo's place. Silver and Nash have gone hiking so I know I'm safe.

  Valentine's Day is next weekend and I've been tasked into helping Ila make a card for a boy in her grade she's been crushing on (and talking incessantly about) all year. Granny Yo's old, wooden kitchen table is a mess of glue and glitter and scraps of paper, but she doesn't seem to mind.

  “It reminds me of when Silvester and his brother and sister were younger,” she says, watching us over the rim of her teacup with smiling eyes. “My walls were positively covered in their artwork. Their grandfather used to joke that we should open the place up to the public as an art gallery.” She chuckles fondly at the memory.

  “Are you gonna make a card, Blair?” Ila asks me. She sticks her tongue out the corner of her mouth in concentration as she twists up some pink tissue paper into a heart shape. It's all kinds of cute.

  “Nah.”

  “Why?” The kid loves to use that word. A lot.

  “'Cause I got no one I wanna send one to, that's why.”

  Granny Yo raises a cynical eyebrow at me and I ignore her. She sees way too much; it's unnerving.

  “What about that boy?” Ila continues.

  “What boy?”

  “You know, the tall one with the spiky hair who's always calling by the house to see you 'cause he's just 'passing through the area'? Ah, she must mean Gage. Ila's eleven and even she can see through his paper thin excuses.

  “I don't want to send Gage a card.”

  “Isn't he your boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. But Jemma says you're gonna marry him and have loadsa babies.”

  I roll my eyes. “Jemma's dreaming.” She likes to do that sometimes. She has an on again/off again thing with Gage's best friend, Vic. I'm pretty sure she has some kind of plan where we have a double wedding and buy neighbouring houses and raise all our babies together. Because in her head that's not at all insane.

  Ila finishes glueing her paper heart and moves on to colouring the bumble bees I drew for her. Got no idea what bumble bees have to do with Valentine's Day but what the kid wants, the kid gets. It's another couple of minutes before she speaks up again. “Blair, what's a drug?”

  Her words are so unexpected I somehow manage to choke on air. Granny Yo looks equally as shocked. “What?” I demand. “Where did you even hear that word?”

  “Well, last weekend I heard mom telling all her nosy old lady church group friends that the reason you don't come to church with us is 'cause your mom used to play with a drug, and that you're a bad girl and maybe you play with a drug too. Something like that, anyway. So I asked mom and daddy what a drug is and why it makes you bad if you play with one, but they got real mad at me and told me I was too young to know about stuff like that and then they sent me to my room! I don't even know what I did wrong, all I wanted to know was what one was. I'm not a baby, you know, I'm almost twelve years old!” It's easy to guess what happened there—Oliver and Felicia were so horrified by Ila's curious question that they responded with guilty anger. Understandable. Wrong, but understandable. A typical parent move. “Maybe I'll just wait 'till I'm older and find out for myself.” She's barely even glanced up at me throughout her entire speech, too busy colouring. She sounds so...casual. Like this is totally normal conversation for an eleven year old to be having and not the most disturbing thing she's ever said to me. What in the hell am I even supposed to say to something like that?

  I look to Granny Yo for guidance but she just nods her head and I realize she's leaving this up to me. I bite back a groan. Why is it that when you want your elders to treat you like a kid that they finally decide you're adult enough to deal with the tough crap?

  Damn. What to say, what to say...

  The thing is...kids are smart. Smarter than they get credit for, anyway. You can lie to them all you want but eventually they're just going to go searching for answers themselves, probably behind their parent's backs because they were too dumb not to be honest with them in the first place. And then who knows what kind of trouble they'll get themselves into. Sometimes kids need a bit of honesty. Obviously not too much, because they're still just kids, but they need to be met half way.

  The proof of that is in the fact that I'm even having this conversation with Ila to begin with. If Felicia and Oliver had just talked to her instead of getting mad, her curiosity wouldn't have grown like it has.

  “Drugs are something people use for fun,” I decide on eventually, though I'm still not entirely sure I'm doing the right thing. “Or something people use when they want to forget, or even try to be somebody else.”

  “Cool!”

  “No, not really. They're very, very bad for you.”

  She finally gives me her full attention. “In what way?”

  “Lots of ways. Bad for your body, your mind, your soul, and even to everyone around you who loves and cares for you.”

  “Why?�
�� There she goes again, but this time I'm glad.

  But how to phrase this in a way that's not going to completely freak her out and give her nightmares and/or scar her for life? “Like, you know when you eat candy it's good, but when you eat too much you get all fat and gross and your teeth rot and drop out and you get all ugly?” Oh wait, maybe I'm not doing too good a job of phrasing this after all...

  But Ila isn't perturbed. I should have remembered that this is the kid obsessed with gory horror films. “You mean like old man Thatcher down the street?”

  I have no idea who that is, but Granny Yo snorts in amusement. “Sure.”

  “Okay?”

  “Well, it's kind of like that, only a gazillion times worse. And the reason that hurts everyone around you is because they love you so much and they don't like to see you that way.”

  Ila chews on the end of her pencil for a moment, frowning. “I don't like the sound of that, and I definitely don't want to look like old man Thatcher.” Seriously, who is this guy? “Now I definitely don't want to play with a drug.”

  I sigh with relief and Granny Yo sends me a proud smile. Despite my worries, I think I did the right thing here. Ila will probably forget all about this conversation over time, but maybe the point of it will stick in the back of her mind, something she can reflect on when she's older if she's ever put in the situation where drugs come up.

  It feels good, like I might have made just the tiniest little difference to Ila's life.

  I like bonding with my sisters.

  “Blair?” Ila pipes up again a while later. She's abandoned her card and is now painting glue over her fingernails and sprinkling them with glitter. It's a gloopy mess. Felicia is going to be so pissed. Ha.

  “Yup?”

  “If a drug is so bad, why do you play with it?” She sticks out her bottom lip. “I don't want your teeth to drop out.”

  I sigh. “I don't, Ila.”

  “But why did mom say you did?”

  “She's just mistaken.” And that's all I'll say about that, to Ila anyway, because no kid needs to hear someone diss their mom. Even if Felicia is a bitch.