I was eighteen when I got into West Point. My parents were proud. For about a week. Then Chloe, who was fifteen, said I thought I was better than everyone, and my mother asked me to stop talking about it at dinner. “You know how she gets. Be a good sister.”
I was twenty-six when Chloe got married. I was the maid of honor. I paid for the bachelorette weekend. I paid for the photographer when their deposit bounced. Nobody ever paid me back, and when I brought it up once, gently, my mother said, “It’s a gift, Kate. Be a good sister.”
In my family, being a good sister meant one thing.
It meant getting smaller so Chloe could have more room.
They were all watching me. Waiting.
I knew what they expected. They expected an argument. They expected me to cry, or shout, or storm upstairs and pound on the bedroom door and make a scene. Then my mother would call me dramatic, and my father would tell me to calm down, and somehow, in the end, I would be the problem.
That’s how it always went.
I didn’t do any of it.
I bent down and retied the trash bag with my boots in it. I tied it very neatly.
Then I stood up, walked right past them, through the living room with the gray couch and the BLESSED sign, through the kitchen that smelled like someone else’s cooking, and down the stairs to the basement.
“Kate?” my mother called after me. “Kate, where are you going?”
I didn’t answer.
The basement was unfinished. Cold concrete floor. Exposed beams. A cot in the corner with a thin blanket folded on top of it, like a prison bunk. Next to it, my father had set a folding chair and a lamp with no shade.
