“Nothing.”
“Why aren’t you in your room? How did you get outside?”
“I…”
“Get back inside,” I said.
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can.”
“He’s waiting for me down the road.”
“Who?”
“My boyfriend.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “Why didn’t he come to the front door?”
Jade crossed her arms, mirroring my pose. “Because you wouldn’t let me go with him.”
That sounded ominous. Hollis slunk away from the door. “So your solution was to sneak out?” I stepped out on the back stoop and peered up, where her window was. “You climbed out of your window?”
“Yeah.” Jade looked at her phone and then back at me.
“You could’ve broken your neck.”
She scoffed. “Oh, please. I just climbed to the roof over the garage and got down that way. It’s not a far drop; I’ve done it plenty of times.”
“Plenty of times?” I was trying to decide just how upset to be. “Call your boyfriend, have him come over to the house.”
“No.” Jade locked her phone and shoved it in her back pocket. “No way.”
“Then go back to your room.”
“Why?”
“If you can’t even bring him around so we can meet him, then you don’t need to go off with him. I didn’t even know you had a boyfriend until Rose told me.”
“Yeah. And Auntie knows.” She sniffed.
“Has Auntie met him?”
Jade scowled. “No. You know she wouldn’t approve.”
“I heard she put you on birth control, but she didn’t insist on meeting your boyfriend?”
“No. Because I told her no. Like I’m telling you now.”
“And I’m telling you that you can’t go out. Not with someone we can’t even meet. Seriously, Jade?”
“If you met him, that wouldn’t make you immediately comfortable with me going out with him anyway.”
“That sounds promising.” I stepped beside and motioned for her to go inside.
After a moment, she set her jaw and went into the house. But the war was far from over, I could see it in her eyes.
“How old is this guy?”
Jade glanced sideways at Hollis, apparently noticing her for the first time. “Twenty.”
It was only four years, I told myself. But twenty meant someone not in high school was dating my sister who was still a sophomore. “College kid?”
“Yeah. I met him at a party.” At my look, Jade gave me one of her own. “Oh, come on, like you weren’t sneaking out and going to parties when you were my age.”
“I went to parties, yes, but I didn’t sneak off. I definitely didn’t climb out my window to meet with some older guy.”
“He’s not that much older,” Jade argued and angrily ripped her jacket off. “God, you’re such a fucking buzzkill.”
Pick your battles, I reminded myself. Now was not the time to police her language. “How often do you do this?” I asked, suddenly feeling suspicious. I looked up at the ceiling, listening to the blare of her music and it hit me before she could answer. “You don’t turn your music up because you need it to sleep. You turn it up so we can’t hear you leave and return, right?”
Jade didn’t nod or speak to confirm my thoughts. The glare in her eyes told me my answer.
“Jade, you are sixteen years old. You don’t even have a license. You shouldn’t be out at parties when we don’t even know where you are.”
“I don’t need a license when I get a ride.”
“You’re missing the point.”
“No, I don’t think I am.” Jade slammed a cabinet above the sink, rattling all the dishes inside. “You keep thinking you’re our mom or something, when you’re supposed to just be my sister. Is that so hard?”
“Even as just your sister, I’m worried about you sneaking off to meet a guy we don’t even know—a guy who is older and more mature in the ways that you’re not.”
“It’s really not that big of a difference.”
“Well, I would hope he’s paying his own bills, unlike you. And I’m sure he’s not sneaking out to meet you. So, yes, there is a big difference. And I doubt he has to lie to anyone about where he’s going—like you lied to me about going to bed.”
Jade looked at Hollis again and then back at me. Too late, I realized I should’ve had this conversation with my sister privately. But I was so in shock from seeing Jade fully dressed in the backyard that I hadn’t stopped to consider our surroundings. “I don’t know what to do here, Jade. If I send you to your room, what’s stopping you from sneaking out?”
I didn’t know how to do this. Did I take her phone away? Did I ground her? I did the only thing I could think, something that was probably not the best choice, but it was the only one I could decide on. “If you sneak out again, I’m going to call Aunt Isabel and you can bet she’s going to cancel your phone and probably ground you as soon as she gets home.” Why did it make me feel like a tattle tale? Why didn’t I feel unequivocally right about this?
“You’re such a BITCH!” Jade screamed, slamming the cabinet again—this time hard enough that a mug fell out and landed on the counter, exploding into dozens of pieces. Jade just gawked at it. It was one of the ones our aunt had made at her pottery class—something I couldn’t replace.
Furious, I moved to the sink and started picking up the shards that seemed everywhere. I was too tired for this, too sick of fighting. My hands shook from it, and I was all out of patience. “I don’t know how Auntie deals with you sometimes,” I said and then closed my eyes, bracing my hands on the sink. I shouldn’t have said that. I couldn’t look at her, I was so ashamed.
My entire body stiffened at Jade’s ensuing silence. I was already apologizing in my head, thinking of ways I could smooth this over when I turned to her, broken pieces of the mug in my hands. “I’m sorry,” I said, seconds too late.
Jade’s eyes were shining—with anger, with contempt. I flinched, as if she’d dealt a blow already. “She deals with me because she wants to.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but she barreled on, coming right up to my face, in my space. Despite our age difference, we were the same height; eye-to-eye.
“You deal with me because you have to. As soon as you turned eighteen, you were out of here. And then, the same for Violet. Once both of you were eighteen, we became problems to you. Not sisters.”
“You’ve always been my sister.” I swallowed, feeling like she’d struck me. “I am hard on you sometimes, but only because I don’t want Aunt Isabel to have to bear the brunt of the burden.”
“Oh, so now I’m a burden.”
“Not you. Not just you. All four of us—Mom and Dad dumped us off on Aunt Isabel when you were too young to even remember. And she handled it, raising us all and sacrificing having her own family for us. She has sacrificed, Jade. And I don’t expect you to understand the depth of that sacrifice, but would it kill you to make her life a little easier sometimes?” I moved to the trashcan and dropped the broken pieces of the irreplaceable mug into it.