Jamie just wants to relive her days here through me. Why, I have no idea. It’s just high school.
Six
I’M FINALLY READY TO admit I’m too sick for school. When we get home, I head directly upstairs, the grinding in my gut and the dull pain everywhere else pointing me toward bed. I know without checking the house is empty—my dad’s dermatology clinic keeps him until five, and my mom comes home from the firm in time for dinner.
Our house is quiet, the stillness of spaciousness. So is our suburban street of cream-stuccoed homes and wide lawns. My family is fortunate, with my lawyer mother and doctor father—I know we’re privileged to live where we do, to worry about what we worry about, to afford any and every college we could want to. It’s part of why I work as hard as I do for my every goal. I don’t want to waste a single one of the many chances I have.
Jamie closes the front door, the click clear and audible. I drag myself into my bedroom, where I collapse on the bed. Jamie follows, her footsteps in her Uggs padding on the carpet. I can practically feel her watching me with concern from where she’s leaning in the doorway. Facedown on the comforter, I wait for her to leave.
“Can I get you anything?” she asks. “Soup?”
I groan, the sound muffled by the rumpled fabric. The idea of food is not a particularly pleasant one.
“We could watch Netflix,” she suggests, undeterred. “It might distract you.”
I roll over. “You don’t have to entertain me.” In reality, I’m somewhat suspicious Jamie doesn’t want to entertain me. She wants to entertain herself. I just happen to be here. I know her days probably feel long, formless, even empty—mine are just too full to add anything to.
Jamie brightens. “I know,” she replies. “I want to. It’ll be fun.”
“You think watching me run to the bathroom every half hour will be fun?”
She rolls her eyes playfully. Walking into my room, she sits down next to me, leaning on one elbow like she’s done this hundreds of times before. “I want to spend time with you. I feel like it’s the whole point of this year for me,” she says contemplatively, looking around my room like she’s found her epiphany in the space between the comforter and the ceiling. “You know,” she continues, “we’ve never had a chance to be in the same place together. When I was a senior in high school, you were in, like, fourth grade. By the time you were a teenager, I was away at college. This feels like our opportunity to get to know each other.”
There’s her favorite word. Opportunity. I don’t resent what she’s trying to say, though. We never had a normal sisterly relationship growing up—Jamie was closer to a babysitter. I remember wondering what it was like to have siblings only a couple years older, like Dylan’s brothers. Siblings who would steal your dolls during playdates, or crank the volume up on their video games until you just had to come watch. Instead I had Jamie, whose weeknight rock concerts in the city and occasional boyfriends brought over for dinner felt endlessly distant from elementary-school me.
In theory, I wouldn’t mind getting to know my sister for the first time. It’s unfair, though, to turn my life into “The point” of her year just because she has nothing else going on. I’m not Jamie’s new project, not the job she’s giving herself, not the role she’s cast me into. I’m me. I’m busy. I’m not a replacement for the plans she once had for herself. Getting to know me would look like conversations about school and college, my workload, my goals for the newspaper. It wouldn’t look like TV on the couch when I’m already behind.
“Honestly, I think I’m going to try to get ahead on homework,” I tell her. The words come with their usual combination of excitement and anxiety. I do have a ton to do. Editorial emails from writers with questions, the hockey-puck physics lab I have to double-check, the essay I’m outlining for AP gov on constitutional review . . .
“Come on,” Jamie implores gently. “Take a break. I’ll give you a pedicure.”
I feel my brow furrow. Yeah, I’ve had Dylan do my nails from time to time, before dances I’m obligated to go to for ASG and the handful of dates I’ve had over the past couple years, but they were distinctly un-busy days. Not days like today.
Jamie’s watching me expectantly. I gesture to the wall of my room near the door. “I have things to do, Jamie,” I say.
She doesn’t need to glance in the direction I’m pointing to know what I’m referring to. On the opposite wall of my room hangs one of my honest-to-goodness prized possessions. It’s a whiteboard six feet long and six feet high, every inch covered with information I need to remember. One edge holds the outline for my constitutional review essay. There’s a quadrant for newspaper deadlines, Chronicle staffers’ photo and story assignments. This month’s issue is the one we’ll submit for consideration for the prestigious NSPC Awards in every category: reporting, photography, editing, and my goal—publication of the year. The entire top half of the board is the ever-changing to-do lists I keep for the day and week.
It’s a marvel of grids and connections, checklists and colored ink. Dylan said it made my room look like a classroom. I told her that was the point.
Jamie gets up from my bed. I know she’s not pleased with my brush-off of the pedicure offer. She’d never show it, of course—ever the optimist—but I catch the strain in her grin, the new forcedness in her voice. “Okay,” she says. “Let me know if you change your mind.”
“I will,” I promise.
While I know she’s being friendly, I dislike the quiet pressure in her efforts. I live my life like I organize my whiteboard, with carefully interconnecting lattices of responsibility and timeliness and thorough detail. With her invitations, her lightly imposing jokes, her eye rolls when I remind her how busy I am, Jamie, knowingly or unknowingly, is prying those lattices into uncertain new geometries. I hate the feeling, the expectation I’ll drop everything going on for me right now because she’s got nothing else to do.
Wandering toward the door, she pauses in front of the whiteboard. “You know, slowing down wouldn’t be the worst. I studied all throughout high school, and looking back, I just think, wow, I wish I’d let up on myself sometimes. The world is so much bigger. You just don’t know it yet.”
“Thanks for the advice,” I say flatly. It’s not the first time an adult—if Jamie qualifies—has told me to slow down, enjoy high school. I don’t appreciate it. I have to conclude high school is the only time people feel free to give such intrusive, unsolicited, condescending suggestions. As if I’m not capable of knowing what I want just because I’m young. It’s rude when people give adults unwanted advice on how they should parent, decorate their house, or load the dishwasher, but when directed to a teen it’s somehow “mentoring.” I’m not interested.