“I don’t hate you,” she says quietly.
“Yes, you do.”
Clara nibbles on her top lip, then closes the front door as she struts out. “I hate how everything comes easy for you, so sue me for enjoying something being hard for you for once.”
I laugh and then laugh harder when I realize how crazy I sound. “You’re mistaken on the easy.”
She snorts and leans on the porch railing. “You have no idea what hard is. Do you know what it has been like to be your older sister? Everyone’s like Look how smart Breanna is, Why can’t you be more like her? and then there’s my favorite pitied comment of Poor Clara, everything will always be a struggle for the poor dear because she’s stupid.”
I flinch. “You’re not stupid. You’re as smart as I am. In fact, you’re smarter—”
“Save it,” she spits. “Mom and Dad have been giving me the pep talk for years. You know what the world looks like to me? Chaos. My mind tries to merge letters together, it starts to do math problems from two years ago. I can’t focus. Not like you. I’ll never be you.”
For years, this is the same conversation we’ve had. That somehow I’m responsible for her misery and I’m sick and tired of the guilt. “I’d switch brains with you if I could.”
She chokes on a laugh. “Sure you would.”
My throat runs dry and I swallow, but it doesn’t help. “I don’t sleep.”
“What?”
“I don’t sleep. In fact, I don’t remember sleeping. I mean, I do and it’s enough to get by on, but it’s hard to fall asleep, and when I wake up, I can’t go back because my mind starts working on things, but I didn’t want you and Nora to know, so I would lie in bed for hours counting the plastered dots on the ceiling. There are four hundred and thirty-eight over my bed.”
Clara sleeps. It’s one thing she has been able to do. Her forehead wrinkles, but she quickly recovers from her shock. “So there’s one drawback for you.”
There is and there’re so many others. “I’m like you...more than you know. When I’m not working on something, it’s like a painful itch I can’t reach. Sometimes my head hurts when I can’t find the logic in the every day. There’s a throb in the front of my head and it shifts to my temples and then I’ll feel like I need to vomit because I don’t understand how it doesn’t make sense. And if none of that was annoying enough, I would freaking rip off my arms if, for thirty seconds, I could fit in with someone, somewhere.” Like I have with Razor.
I briefly close my eyes as all of the taunts from my past pound me like a wave. “At school. At work. At home. With you. All I’ve ever wanted was to be a part of this stinking family, but all you have ever done is made me out to be the freak show and maybe I am. Maybe I am the weird girl who no one will ever like, but at least my family should love me. At least somewhere in the deep recesses of your soul you should like me.”
A knot forms that cuts off my breathing. My eyes water and I try to blink the tears away, but more appear in the corners.
“Bre...” Clara starts but then stops.
“Home is supposed to be safe. Home is supposed to be the one place you can go and know that the horrible things people say to you won’t be said to you there. It should be that place that forms a protective shield and it’s okay to be quirky and messed up and...and...accepted.”
Yes, I stood up in seventh grade and I explained how I made an operating telegraph. I smiled as I explained my experiment. I stumbled over my words as I attempted to chase the thoughts in my mind, and I even experienced a slight high when I saw several classmates’ faces light up when they saw it truly worked.
My heart sinks when I recall the first insult and then nausea strikes me in the stomach when I recall the laughter. But if it’s the truth that is to be told, it’s when I walked into the house to find Clara crying alone in the kitchen over her ACT score that my life changed.
“You’ll score higher than me. You could take it now and score higher than me. I know the answers. Everyone knows that I know the answers, but I can’t focus. I lose my focus. I can remember all these things and it makes you smart and me stupid. Everyone is always better. Everyone knows that you’re better. And I’m tired. I’m so tired of never measuring up.”
It wasn’t her words that shredded me, it was Clara hovering over the kitchen sink. It was her wrist poised over the basin. It was the knife that was being held at her wrist.
I loved her. Even though she blamed me. She was my older sister and I loved her.
Clara had looked over at me with wide eyes and she pleaded. Pleaded so much that it appeared her legs were about to give. “Can you try to not be you? Can you just try to be less?” She choked on the sobs and red-hot tears began to flow over my face as they ran over hers. “Maybe then I can keep up. Maybe if you pretend to be less, it won’t be so bad.”
And then she threatened to go through with killing herself if I told anyone what I saw and her burden became my burden. Her pain was my pain.
My head falls into my hands and the same tears I cried that day threaten to spill over now. “I tried, Clara. I tried to be less. I tried to be quiet and to be someone else and I’m sorry it wasn’t enough for you, but I can’t do this anymore. I did what you asked. I never told anyone what you were going to do. I never told anyone how I spent months terrified I’d come home and find you dead and I never told anyone that the reason I stopped being me was that you asked, but I can’t do this anymore because I’m dying. I can’t continue to kill myself in order to save you.”