She glanced at me, her mouth opening once to speak before she shut it and waved me off. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“You’re right, I don’t. You worry so much about what they will think and say, but I’m the one who’s always bailing you out. I’m the one who took your Spanish test last week so that you could pass and not get kicked off the field hockey team for failing a class. I’m the one who’s tired and freezing my butt off over here so Mom and Dad won’t find out that you snuck out. The least you could do is—”
“You want your coat back, here, take it.”
She took off the shoulder portion of her seat belt and tucked it under her arm, then tugged at the sleeves of my jacket. I held my hand up to stop her. I didn’t want the coat; she could sleep in it for all I cared. “It’s not about the coat, Maddy. It’s about me always having to pick up your pieces.”
“I never asked you to—”
“You called me. You. Called. Me. Me!”
“Maybe,” she said, and shrugged. “But you didn’t have to come.”
I had to swallow hard to hold back my tears. I’d always done whatever she asked. But no matter what I did or how far I went for her, she’d kept me on the outside, five safe steps away from her and her inner circle.
When we were kids, I knew everything about her. We had one diary until the age of thirteen. One. Each day one of us would write in it, then hand it to the other to read and write her own entry. The embarrassment I felt on my first day of middle school when I tripped and fell in the cafeteria, my lunch going everywhere. The pain Maddy felt when she found out the boy she liked in seventh grade bet his friends he could get her to make out with him in the janitor’s closet. And the fear and excitement that first time we went off to camp the summer before fifth grade, wondering if people would like us, but not really caring because we had each other. Back then we shared everything, including those things that were too embarrassing to say out loud. Now, I was lucky if I got a nod of acknowledgment as I passed her in the hall.
“I’m not doing this anymore, Maddy. You’re on your own with school, with Mom and Dad, with everything.”
“Wait … What? Why?” She anxiously rattled the questions off, not giving me time to answer before continuing. “You can’t do that. If they find out, I’m screwed. They’ll ground me for weeks. I can’t. Alex’s birthday is next week, and the Snow Ball is coming up, plus Jenna’s having a—you can’t. You’re my sister, you can’t.”
“Not my problem.”
“Why, Ella? Why are you doing this to me?”
“I’m not doing anything. That’s the point, Maddy. I’m not doing anything for you anymore. Like I said, you’re on your own. I do all the work and you get—”
“You’re jealous. You’re doing this because you’re jealous.”
I didn’t bother to respond to that. It was a ridiculous thing for her to say and completely untrue. The last thing I wanted was to be her, constantly worrying about what I looked like, who I was dating, and watching what I said. She was always on, always pretending to be perfect. Too much work for me.
“Do you know what I’d give to be like you?” she asked. “How much easier it is for that nameless person in the back of the class who doesn’t have to worry about what people think or how they…”
I didn’t hear what she said next, I was still trying to process the nameless-person-who-no-one-gave-a-damn-about comment. I mean, I wasn’t an idiot. I knew what people thought of her versus what they thought of me. The countless pictures of her on my parents’ bureau, the massive number of people who seemed to gravitate toward her at school, and the fifty thousand text messages she got each day compared to my ten were evidence enough. Hearing her say it though—my own sister admitting that nobody in school cared much about who I was—somehow made it real.