Published to FB Notes in Dec 9, 2015
I woke up to use the bathroom and the first thing I did was check to see the time on my phone, it was 5am. In the bathroom I checked my Facebook and got a well-intentioned message from someone saying that the person partially responsible for my sister’s death talked about my sister in some high-gloss poorly laid out posh socialite print magazine, one of those that no one really knows about and fewer people even read. After suffering through the crimes against graphic design that this magazine committed, I finally found the page where this woman took the edit tool the the memory of my sister.
Not even touching upon the fact that my sister was trans at best or gay at the very least (the difference between the two was lost on all of us in 1987) and that my sister was taking her to the Winter Formal (Snow Ball) in the coming weeks, I’m sure this narrative doesn’t fit into the picture she is trying to paint of herself now in her floor length crystal-adorned dress that is ironically fit for a drag queen. This was insulting on its face because it was, at the time, what made her the most unique person that anyone in our small town knew. She was THE bravest person. While there were plenty of people we suspected of being LGBT, not one of them was brave enough to admit and live it fully. Correction. There was one and it was my sister. She didn’t just live it, she screamed it in the way she lived her life. Fearless of what anyone would think of her. Unconcerned with being judged. And as a result NO ONE JUDGED HER and everyone gravitated to her. Including a young up-and-coming social climber. She called herself the Freshman President. A title that I wonder if she bestowed upon herself because my sister died in November and I find it hard to believe that a school would hold class elections in the first two months of a school year, but maybe. I have my doubts but sure, she was Freshman President.
So now comes the bulk of her revisionist history, the story of the day my sister died as a lesson of how precious life is and no one is immortal. My sister “offered” to drop her off at home. Yes. But she leaves out a huge part like how my sister took me home first and would be coming back for her. It was a drizzly November afternoon, that happened to be two days before my 14th birthday. She and I skid on the way home and my sister decided it would be unsafe to go back and take this other girl home. My sister had assumed she would just eventually take the West Cat (our local bus) home after a little while. This predated mobile phones or beepers so we heavily relied on things like LOGIC to communicate these things to each other. But as it got later and darker and wetter, the phone rang, and I, in my mom’s room, picked up the phone and it was her, that girl, and she was agitated. I yelled for my sister that the call was for her and she picked it up in the kitchen. I heard the short call as the receiver still lay off the hook in my parents room next to me. She screamed that she was going to stay there until my sister came to get her because my sister promised her. This girl was a social climber even then and she knew the social currency that came with being seen on the back of my sister’s scooter was incomparable. If I didn’t mention before, my sister was incredibly cool. In the high school sense, even in the adult sense. She couldn’t have been more perfectly written a human if John Hughes wrote her himself for a movie.
My sister yelled “I gotta go” and I yelled back “Bye” and the door slammed. That was the last I ever heard my sister. I remember the police coming but no one home except me, my little brother and my grandfather and them needing to speak to a parent. I knew already that something was wrong and asked what happened to my sister in a panic rage. The the two policemen looked at each other, then me and said, “sorry we have to talk to your parents.”
She remembers “wandering around aimlessly in shock” I remember I busied myself for the next few hours trying to calm my mind and then my father and his new wife came over and they were both crying. They sat down in the living room and I stood across from my dad opposite a low glass coffee table. My grandfather lay next to my dad on the sectional covered by a blanket and my brother sat by my grandfather. My dad started talking and before the words could come out, my legs caved in on themselves I fell backwards screaming “NO!” and kicking the glass the the coffee table up, it came down on itself and the glass top broke in two huge pieces. I got up, ran to the piano, grabbed the two knob pullies for the cover of the keys and yanked it and it came out on one side. I ran to my sister’s room and punched a hole in her sliding closet door and fell on the floor and thrashed until I couldn’t breathe and I was gasping and cramping and couldn’t even scream anymore. Walking around aimlessly in shock as a reaction seems so luxurious in comparison.
Understandably, I missed school for a long time. I thought that when I’d come back she would be guilt-ridden about the part she played in my sister’s death. Imagine my shock when I realised that the social currency of being the grief stricken bff of a dead girl equated to the National Treasure. She was MILKING it for everything it was worth and played the grieving widow to a tee, so-much-so that at the end of the year In Memoriam in the yearbook to my sister mentioned HER and not the the actual sister of the girl who died who also attended that school. Not that I wanted any attention. I had carved out a beautiful life for myself as a bump on a log polar opposite to the big personality that my sister had in the social org charts. I was very happy to not be paid attention to so maybe I should be thankful that the burden of being constantly worried about by people was now attention she relished.
It’s unfortunate that she feels the need to still talk about my sister and leave out the best parts of her. It would behoove her to use her own family tragedies, sadly, I know she’s had plenty, to communicate how fragile life is. Please leave my own family out of your story.
