Beside You

Mom and Dad picked me up at the airport and from the looks on their faces I knew that Marc had told him. He’d generously waited until he’d dropped me off at the airport to call everyone, but I couldn’t imagine that he would’ve been able to keep it to himself any longer than that. He’d been absolutely livid, when I finally told him last night and after letting me sleep on it for a night and recover a little bit, he’d made me tell him exactly had Jordan had said.

I felt awful. Never in my life had any of my brothers said anything even in the slightest similar to this to me, not even in joking. I was surely coddled and spoiled and all those things being the baby and the only girl, but none of my brothers hated me for it. Or so I thought. It’s a safe thing to say that little sisters, especially ones that are so much younger than you, get extremely irritating and annoying sometimes, but no one had ever said something like this. Maybe thought, but never said out loud ‘to my face’.

When Jordan had called, he’d already been riled up, thoroughly angered by the fact that I was not going to attend the All Star game at the end of the month. Where he knew that from, I had no idea, but it was the truth. That week was exams week and it also just so happened that my 17th birthday was on Saturday the 29th, the day before the actual game. Many reasons spoke for attending, the game being held in Raleigh, Jordan and Eric both on the team...

But after talking about it to Eric and Mom and Dad, I’d decided not to. Since my Sweet Sixteen had ended so badly last year, Mom and Dad had promised me a good party for this one and all my friends, especially Abby and now Matt, had put a lot of help and thought into making it a party to never forget. Matt’s parents had offered the club room at the stable that would easily hold my 25 guests and was equipped with a good sound system and anything else I could want and need for the party. It was going to be a movie themed party, complete with costumes and everything and I was really, really looking forward to it.

Jordan didn’t even let me finish explaining all that to him, instead he immediately started bitching about how ungrateful I was, how I could dare not to come watch my brothers play in Eric’s team’s hometown and how I was an all around brat that only always selfishly thought about herself, instead of taking into consideration how important this game was for her brothers. I’d barely been able to get in a word or two as he continued to call me some of the meanest names I’d been called thus far and when I’d finally yelled at him to shut the fuck up, he’d proceeded to tell me how I hadn’t been planned anyway and how he wished he didn’t have a little sister, that the family would be better off with just four boys.

It would just not go into my head how somebody could say such cruel things to a family member, a sibling even. I’d heard of really bad family problems before and I knew things were not pretty at all in a lot of families, but I’d thought that all the respect for others and the love for each sibling that our parents had taught us would prevent that happening to us as well. I’d obviously been wrong.

Jordan and I had always had a strained relationship right from my earliest memories. It probably wasn’t easy having to deal with another younger sibling, a girl on top of that, somebody that the entire family made a huge fuss about from the day of my birth. The boys had always had hand-me-downs from the older ones, Eric usually the only one that really got new(er) stuff, but since I was the only girl, everything I had ever owned, save for maybe a few snowsuits at a younger age, had always come as brand new and polished as things come. Mom had once said that Jordan was the only one that could never get over that, over the jealousy of all the attention I received and that he was so nasty to me because of that probably, it just didn’t make much sense to me. Why was he the only one that couldn’t deal with it, when the other three guys had clearly gotten arranged with it?

When they shipped him off to Peterborough I’ll admit that I’d secretly thought ‘finally’ back then. But that never meant that I wished Jordan would disappear forever or that I didn’t love him or anything. He was still my brother and while I could seldom really connect with him, I still loved him just as much as I loved all my other brothers.

Mom let out a deep sigh when I’d finally trudged my way over to them and pulled me into a tight hug right away. I closed my eyes and fought with everything I had in me against bursting out into tears right there at the airport. I’d never known that words could really, truthfully hurt this much.

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“I’m going to kill him,” Abby declared and I’m afraid to say she sounded pretty serious. “He’s such an... I don’t even have a word for what he is! How can he say something like that to you?!”

“I don’t know,” I offered weakly and she immediately calmed down a little, falling into a seat next to me. “He just did.”

“Are you sure he belongs to his family? He’s the only blonde one after all,” she tried to joke and got a weak smile out of me. “Oh man, Eric, Marc and Jared are going to annihilate him. And I’ll be glad to help. Do you know if anyone plays the Pens again this season?”

“Carolina twice, February at home and in March at the ‘Burgh, the Rangers play them in Pittsburgh at the beginning of March,” I recalled easily and she nodded slowly.

“He’s gonna die. Legit die. Even if they don’t say anything to the other guys on the teams, he’s gonna die. There’s no NHL rule against repeatedly hitting someone’s head off the ice, is there? That puck to the nose is going to be nothing compared to that.”

“I’m pretty sure there’s a rule that prohibits that and you forget that he’s in Raleigh for the AllStar game...” I pointed out and she whistled through her teeth.

“Do think Disco Dan will be very upset if he doesn’t come back from the weekend? It’s not like they’d really miss him, I figure. They don’t have the Kid right now, but he’ll be back and the Russian and the rest of that bunch, they’ll manage just fine,” she thought out loud and I listened to her ranting gladly, because she was saying all the things I wouldn’t.

“You know...” I started and watched myself fiddle with my fingers. “I kind of wonder how long he’s been wishing that...”

Abby sighed and threw her arm around me, hugging me into her side. “He’s an asshole, Maddie. He doesn’t deserve to be your brother and he will suffer a lot of consequences for this, trust me. Please don’t start thinking he’s right, because he’s not. You’re an amazing sister and your other brothers love you to pieces, they’d jump a bullet for you no questions asked. Your Mom and Dad are ecstatic that they have a little girl, Mads. Everyone loves you.”

“Just not him,” I whispered and couldn’t help it that a tear rolled down my cheeks. Two days later I was still a crying mess every time I thought of it. Matt and Abby were doing everything in their might to distract me, but it barely worked. “Maybe-“

“It’s not your fault, Madison,” Abby cut me off sharply. “He’s a retarded, ungrateful fuck. He’s got issues he’s trying to project on you, so don’t let him try to make you feel bad. He’s the one that’s wrong, not you. You’re the baby sister and it’s your job to get spoiled and everything, if he can’t deal with it, that’s his problem, not yours.”

“But he’s my brother, Abby. Maybe I should’ve tried to harder to make it work with him or visited more or...”

“You can’t focus on the what if’s, babe. You’ll never know how things would be, if you changed the past. We both know that whenever you were in Pittsburgh, you spent more time with the Lemieux’s than you did with him. Who knows if he would have bothered acknowledging all the effort you supposedly could have invested. I don’t think he would have and you’d have gotten hurt anyway, maybe not now, but eventually.”

“I just feel like I’m missing a limb or something...” I sighed. She nodded and squeezed me to her side softly, offering the comfort only a best friend could.

Abby had been my best friend since before I could remember. We’d always been a pair, attached at the hip, unable to function without the other. If nobody else understood, she would. If nobody else bothered to listen, she would. She knew me better than I knew myself and I her and not a day passed by that I didn’t thank God for her. We couldn’t have been closer if we were siblings and really, she was my sister for all intents and purposes.

We were a notorious, infamous, feared and deadly dynamic duo. The pranks and plans we executed were performed with the utmost precision and also with the utmost craziness. All the insane things we’d come up with, you wouldn’t be able to fit them in a library.

She was my other half, as the saying goes: best friends are one soul split into two persons. Where she was, I was and where I was, she was. She had her own drawer in my closet and I in hers and we estimated to spend half the year sleeping over at the other’s house.

Abby was like a sister to my brothers as well. Eric got just as protective over her as he did with me and she and Jared gladly bickered like only siblings do. She was a common fixture at weekend visits and all the teammates knew exactly that ‘Madison and Abby are coming’ meant trouble.

We were very different from each other in a lot of ways. She was more outspoken than I was, had the quick-wit I often lacked and she possessed a creativity that I could only dream of. She was quick to develop the craziest ideas and whoever she chose to be friends with was regarded with the fiercest loyalty and care you could find. In return, if she didn’t like somebody, she let them know. Often she would be the one shooting stinging comments and comebacks at my brothers, leaving me to watch the spectacle, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

If you asked Abby, she would probably say I was a kind-hearted, caring girl, naïve in a lot of ways and protected like the apple of my family’s eye, spoilt, but not a brat. She always told me she envied the patience with which I could do things, she always needed things to happen better sooner than later. I didn’t see it, but she also claimed I could read people better than her, my assessment of what I thought people could be like (could being the key) greatly valued by her.

We completed each other and the day I’d lose her would be the day my inside died.

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“Stop picking on your nails!” Abby huffed, slapping at my hands as I continued to do what she told me not to.

“I can’t help it! I’ve never had my nails done before!” I pouted and she rolled her eyes. It was Saturday and although the exams next week were hovering over our heads, our parents had allowed us to go on a little shopping spree. Retail therapy, in other words. Abby had taken care of planning the event and so I’d found myself getting my nails done first thing and now couldn’t stop at the unfamiliarly long nails on my fingers. I was lucky that my foot was doing just fine by now, because she’d been dragging me through the mall for hours now.

So far, I was really crunching away on my money, buying two dresses, a skirt, a padded vest, a zip-up hoodie, a cropped cardigan and a pair of ballerinas that I could have just as well bought at the Maple Leafs’ shop because of the colors. Now reaching the final stop at the hair salon, Abby was trying to convince me to try something new as we waited.

“I think you would look great as a brunette,” she smirked, pointing at a picture in one of the magazines they had lying around. “With a short bob, too.”

“My parents would not know it was me anymore,” I shook my head and she laughed.

“That’s the point! No, seriously, I think you should try something new. I think you’d look good with some bangs,” she told me, pointing to yet another picture. I’d never had bangs before and I didn’t like the I-can-barely-see-my-bangs-are-so-low bangs that all the celebrities had had a while ago. The picture she was showing me though didn’t have the cut-with-a-ruler straight bangs, but a little side-swept but still short-ish ones that I surprisingly really liked.

And Abby was right, they looked good on me. Nobody was more surprised than me, but I actually really liked how they looked when the hair dresser showed me my finished hair and I made a mental note to ask Abby for her opinion on things like that more often.