Twenty-one

Silent Nights

I’ve barely sat down at the desk in my bedroom, ready to fire up my laptop, when a knock on my door disrupts my plan of isolating myself from the world for the foreseeable future.

“Yeah?” I call.

Julia walks in, the image of a repentant sister. “Can we talk?”

Well, we had to face off at some point. Better to just rip off the Band-Aid, I guess. I’ll still have plenty of time to be alone. The rest of my life, actually.

“Sure.” I shrug and shift my chair so that it’s facing her.

Julia sits at the foot of the bed. “Let me start by saying I know I can be petty and insufferable at times, and that I’m aware I have a serious problem with not being the center of everyone’s attention.”

My mouth dangles open. I’m shocked. This is the first time in twenty-eight years I’ve heard Julia admit she has flaws, and that she isn’t always one hundred percent right about everything.

I narrow my eyes at her. “Who are you, and what did you do with my sister?”

“Why did you run after Paul to save my ass yesterday?” she asks, ignoring my joke. “After the way I treated you.”

“Because I know Paul; never let something fester with him. He needed to hear the other side of the story, and that couldn’t come from you, not while he was still so mad. Also…” I pause here, undecided if I should say what I’m really thinking. But if we have to have one big, clarifying talk, it wouldn’t make sense to leave my hurt feelings out. “…I’m not in the business of ruining the lives of the people I love on purpose.”

Tears well in Julia’s eyes. “I never meant to ruin your life or hurt you.”

“Really? Because dating a guy only because you knew I liked him seems like a pretty good way to achieve exactly that.”

“When I said ‘yes’ to that first date with Paul, I did it only to annoy you a little. I thought we would’ve gone out once, flirted some, and then the fling would die there. I wasn’t prepared to fall in love with him so completely after only one date. And after that, I didn’t have the strength to call it off because of you. And I hated myself for putting an even bigger wedge between us. In the past two years, you’ve become even colder and more detached.”

“Well, can you blame me? And why did you want to annoy me so badly in the first place, anyway?”

“Because I wanted you to pay attention to me. For twenty-six years, you never so much as—”

“Please, Julia, not the neglected sister act again,” I interrupt. “I’ve always been there for you when you needed me.”

“Technically, yes, but was it out of duty, or because you wanted to? I always felt like the sister you were stuck with, as opposed to the sister you wanted, or…” Julia stares out the window across the street. “…the sister you chose.”