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I.

My sister stood over ahead of me like she would when we were girls and she’d get me up in the morning.

            “Andrea!” she’d hiss in this pseudo-haughy taughty voice she’d perfected, as if we had suffered through years of prep school together. Her eyes would be as narrow as if she was born with Asian blood.

            It was the same now, except there was no bed. Only a pool with tepid water that I wasn’t leaving anytime soon.

            “Andrea, I’m about to leave for the airport,” she explained slowly after saying my name one last time. I started humming “Say My Name” by Destiny’s Child to myself.

            She was certainly dressed to travel, but I started to hope (secretly and thus illicitly) she got flagged down by security for some TLC.

            “Have fun,” I said after a silence spent examining her, my gaze lazy and unconcerned.

            “Please act like an adult while I’m gone. Can I ask that?”

            “You can. It doesn’t promise anything.” Her brow furrowed. Audrey (my sister, my parents loved their alliteration) always had a brow that was furrowing. To see her brow not furrowed would be to see a great disrupt in the universe.

            “You’re 25,” she sighed. Audrey was sometimes more mother than sister to me; it was something I had to deal with when we were in grade school, something I had to deal with when we rode the bus together, something I had to deal with when we worked at the grocery store together where I was a bagger and she was the perpetually exasperated cashier.

            “You’re 28,” I retorted.

            “And I like to think I act it. You can’t go on, living the way you live, Andrea. I think you know that.”

            I began to imagine more and more vivid security-related nightmares. I wish I had a gun I could have slipped into her luggage. Keep her detained by the government for, oh, just a few extra hours.

            “Okay. Get going. You’ll be late.”

            “Please don’t do anything stupid, okay? Can you promise me that much?”

            She could have run through a long-winded list of my errors, my tragedies, my various trials and tribulations from before even I could remember. And even some I still wouldn’t remember.

            “Only if you make me a promise in return.” She twitched, adjusting her posture.

            “What do you want?”

            “Don’t see her. Don’t look her up. Pretend she’s dead.” At this point Audrey stopped looking at me because I had hit a sore spot. I saw the angle of her jawline turned in my direction.

            “I’ll try.” But I knew that to be an admission of “no, I’m too weak.” I knew better. And to myself I shook my head.

            “Okay.”

            How callous a statement “okay” can be. How dismissive, if you sit and think about it and put it under logic’s microscope. Does anyone ever mean anything when they say “okay” or is just a nice, polite, breezy way to tell the other person to shut the fuck up, there’s nothing more to be said here?

            I did not watch her leave, but I was happy to have her gone.  I knew she had left by the sounds and general absence I felt, lording over me.