“Well, we’ll miss her, sure,” I said. “But I mean, what will dinner be like without her? What will the weekends be like?”

“Well, the weekends will be easier, because we don’t have to worry about making noise and waking her up,” said Molly, in her very matter-of-fact Molly way.

This was true. Jenna liked to sleep in on the weekends, and she was always barking at us to keep it down. Molly and I are early risers.

“But won’t it be like one person is just missing?” I asked.

I knew Molly wasn’t always into these kinds of conversations, so I was pushing it.

“Things change, Kelsey,” Molly said in a tone that sounded like she was explaining it to a two-year-old.

“Oh, never mind,” I said, and pushed away my chair. Molly was making me feel worse instead of better.

Sometimes getting people to talk in our family was impossible. My cousin Lindsay was the one I used to talk to about everything. We’re just about the same age and grew up together, so in a lot of ways we are more like sisters than cousins.

But Lindsay’s mom, my aunt Amy, died a couple years ago after being sick for a long time. If you talk to Lindsay, she doesn’t burst into tears or anything, or at least not usually, but I’m always really careful when I talk to her now, especially if I’m talking about my family.

If, say, I complain about Mom, I’m worried that Lindsay is really thinking, Oh, well, at least you still have your mom. If I tried to talk to her about how weird it would be with Jenna gone, I’m afraid she would think, Well, she’s just going to college. She’s coming back. But my mom isn’t.

Lindsay is actually really sweet, so I don’t think she’d think those things on purpose, and she would never say them to me out loud, but there are things I just can’t talk to her about anymore.

“You’d better get your homework started before Mom gets home,” said Molly.

I looked over, annoyed, and I noticed that while I’d been sitting there thinking, she had already set up her laptop and was typing away.

Molly is only eight months older than I am, but she acts like she is my much older sister. So between her and Jenna, I really feel ganged up on sometimes and like I am the baby of the family.

Jenna and Molly are a lot alike. They are both super organized and they belong to a million different clubs and are always thinking about their next project or what they’ll be doing in ten years.