My Baby Sister's Boyfriend

I don’t remember when my little sister started smoking. The first time I had seen her doing so, I yelled at her and tossed the cancer stick on the ground, crushing the barely-used tobacco between the sole of my shoe and the concrete of the sidewalk. She had glared at me and told me that she was a big girl and didn’t need me bossing her around—she had our mother for that.

Charlotte was the rebellious one out of the three children born to our parents. She was the one who wanted to go on the roller coasters when we were four and five, even when she didn't meet the minimum height requirement. She was the one who didn’t need a band-aid and a kiss from Mom when she skinned her knee. My baby sister wasn’t afraid of anything. Or so she said. It took fifteen years for the first cracks to break through her tough exoskeleton.

It happened when our brother died.

The night that he'd passed, she'd ran away. Away from me, from our parents, from the house. After shouting at me and at our parents, she was out the door and down the street without sparing a passing look over her shoulder. No one moved to go after her. Even if we had, she had still been on the track team at the time and would've easily outrun any of us. The only person who could catch her was Sam.

We thought she wouldn’t come back. But, three days later, she returned home. Her best friend's home had been her sanctuary as she dealt with the aftermath of the loss of her eldest brother. Zack had apologized for not divulging Lottie's whereabouts to us and whispered to me of how she'd done nothing but cry from the moment she set foot in his home. Although he was her best friend, even Zack walked on eggshells around her after that night.

At the funeral she was emotionless; her expression blank and her words absent. She wore a simple dress and held a single rose in her left hand. She didn’t react when anyone talked to her, apologized to her, or hugged her. It wasn't until everyone else had begun to disperse that she began to move. Her hands shook as she approached Sam's grave. I had stood in the background, watching her solemnly as she allowed the rose to slip from her fingers and freefall into the casket.

Lottie wasn’t Lottie anymore—from that point on, she was Charlie, a completely new version of herself. Charlotte Gaskarth 2.0. For the first few months following Sam's death, she had been withdrawn and aloof. If she would talk to me or Mom and Dad, her conversation was dull and monotonous. To this day, I still believe that Zack was the only one who heard her speak outside of the family.

When the phase distance passed, she started getting in trouble. Big trouble—she’d spent a handful of nights in a jail cell, as result of god-knows-what. Of course, being her remaining brother, I had bailed her out and didn't breathe a word to our parents the mornings following these imprisonments. The trouble didn’t stop until our parents found out and attempted to knock sense into her.

They took her phone, her computer and TV privileges and confined her to the house unless she was going to school. That’s when part of Lottie came back, but she was still Charlie. She still had that troublemaking edge to her, that spark of disobedience and rebellion that could never be muffled.

My little sister was no longer innocent. Not by a long shot.

Lottie would wear preppy, modest clothes.

Charlie wore skinny jeans, tank-tops and anything out there.

That part of Lottie, the innocent Lottie, never came back. Charlie was there forever, embedded into my little sister like a parasite. I could still see that vulnerable look in her eyes from the night our brother died, but only because I knew where to look.

That look of pain and despair has never left her brown orbs. Sometimes, I wonder if she’s still hurting from it. I try to talk to her about it but she’ll always snap at me or turn up the volume of the music, or the television. She avoids it like the plague. If anyone as much as mentions our brother’s name, Charlotte’s gone—out of the room, out of the house, just out. I know she hates to be reminded of it.

“Charlie,” I begin, looking to my sister, where she sits across the room, legs crossed under her.

She looks up from her book, “Yes, Alex?”

“I’m sorry I’m never there for you.” I blurt. “Don’t say I am there because I know I’m not. I’m sorry.”

Charlotte frowns and closes her book. Her eyes take on an angry glint and she stares at me, glowering, for a moment.

“Alex, shut up," she snaps. “You know that you are a great brother.”

I sigh and drop the subject. I won't try to explain my thought process to her, or why I'm still thinking about our brother who's been long dead. Instead, I return my attention to the television. The volume is turned down low and a rerun of a sitcom from the nineties is playing and the feel-good theme song barely reaches my eardrums.

I jump when her cell phone started to ring, the noise much louder than the muffled sound from the TV. Though I'm pretending not to eavesdrop on her phone call, I can't help but scowl when I hear that it's Kyle calling her. Kyle hasn't taken Zack's title of best friend to Charlie, thank goodness. I can't help but think that he's bad news considering he's one of Charlie's friends and not Lottie's.

“I’m going to meet Kyle at the park,” Charlie informs me before setting her book on the coffee table. “I’ll be back later.”

Despite my displeasure, I nod and let her leave. It's many hours past curfew, but she won't listen if I tell her to stay. Avoiding a fight that would have the very likely possibility of rousing our parents, I say nothing and watch her walk out the front door and into the night.