Wandering into the room, with chores and small goals on her mind, the mistake was made. She was usually so careful, but even the best of plain girls make mistakes. Her error when through the doorway became apparent when the air became still, hushed and in between that hushed era and the next noisy moments (the scraping of chairs and clanking of metal upon metal) she lived years of revelation and revulsion. Life folded out before her, sighing, full of regret and self-incrimination. It was as if she had already lived through the consequence and looking back to the day her life changed. She was beyond the belief of her own existence. How she could have been so careless, so absent minded regarding her own health and psyche in that brief eternity she knew would follow her forever?
With the first harsh word that sounded like a scrape upon an old blackboard, intentional and mean-spirited, her mind went from realization to self preservation. What did she think she was doing, what right did she have? That grating voice, the voice her sister reserved for only her, sounded like a rusted gate slamming shut against all freedom.
Her sister and her friends, all beautiful and flouncing when outside and before crowds of admiring, small town fans had crowded into her sister’s room. Her sister’s room; off limits to such disasters as she. When indoors, behind the secret keepers of wood and curtains, the darlings of old church ladies and weak old men grew fangs and gained a foreign language. The door to her sister’s room hid sibling’s vices. The quick squashing of ill rolled joints smoldering between prettily painted fingertips, the slush of clear filmy liquid capped with rusty sounding metal lids was quickly stuffed away behind flowing, bright material that draped her sister’s room.
She often wondered if her sister appreciated the royal hang and drape of her room or insisted upon the princess material she might hide and secret away the reprehensible thing. The latter assumption was a now fact as she walked mindlessly into the dark den.
She and her sister had separate rooms and upstairs away from her parents. But the second story was no stopping point for those who were limber and in on her sister’s secrets. The laughter, the hushed moans, and the sharp whispers to “shut up if you want to do this again,” that only she could hear and her parents never fathomed. She kept her distance and played her music to silence the hissing laughter that leaked from the thin slits that illuminated her sister’s bedroom door.
And now she was in her sister’s room, in broad daylight, with only a direction from her mother to take her sister’s bedding to the charming side of the family. Cream and red with bits of stylish black woven into the six hundred thread cotton sheet. She herself had white by her own insistence. What a thing to think at a time like this.
Makeup smeared and a masculine chuckle and she did not want to look up–if only she had thought if only all of her sister’s friends weren’t standing around with smiles as diabolical as demons. She felt her stomach lurch when she heard someway say cover him up.
And then a faint call, a singsong wavering request from downstairs. She was to come down and help with chores and leave her sister alone with her friends.
She brushed past her mother’s smothering smile, while feeling like the last person in the world.