a breath. This is Micah. My big brother. Who is like a moon that revolves around my sister, lighting her up, Nah the center of his world. Vibes are not hard science, and I am going to go with what I know. And what I know is that Micah loves my sister more than anyone in his world. At least, that’s my working hypothesis based on previous evidence.
“She’s in her room,” I say. “Listen, Micah, Nah would kill me if she knew I was calling you, but I need your help.”
I tell him everything. The pills, the night with the broken bottle of bourbon. The ditching.
“You’re wrong about the pills,” he says. “She only had a few left. And she said that was it, she just needed to take the edge off—”
“These are new ones. Percocet.”
He curses. “Did you check your aunt and uncle’s cabinet?”
“There’s nothing there. And I can’t ask if they’re missing anything.”
“She probably just asked your cousin to hook her up if she didn’t take it from them. I know you’re worried because of all that shit from before, but this is different. She’s had a rough time. Go easy on her, and if she starts screwing up at school, then worry. She just needs to chill, and this helps.”
I am not a person who throws things, but I’d really like to now. At him.
“How can you say this—you saw how it was before! This is exactly what it was like before she went to detox and all that.”
“Look—I know you two are close, but she doesn’t talk to you about this kind of thing. She told me she just needed to get through these past few weeks—”
“Wait, you knew and you didn’t tell her to STOP?”
“Whoa. Hold on. Yes, I know. I’m her boyfriend. And I’m not going to, like, tell on her to her sister. She’s okay. I’m checking in. She’s just sad, Mae. You gotta lay off her.”
“I’m certain she’s on something every day. She had—has—a serious addiction, and you’re being extremely irresponsible in your logic right now. Nah’s becoming reclusive, temperamental, she won’t eat, she’s making very bad choices—”
He blows out his breath in a frustrated way, which I resent, I really do.
“Mae. Dude. Chill. Your parents just died in a really fucked-up way. You’ve had to move to a new city across the country. Nah and I are going to be apart for months.” He sighs. “And she’s still having a hard time about … you know. What happened in March.”
What happened in March. We use all these euphemisms, as if not saying abortion somehow makes Nah hurt less. I think everyone just wants to pretend it never happened. But it did. I think it’s part of why she can’t get better. I don’t know how to make him understand. Mom said that part of why people are sometimes intimidated by me or don’t understand me is that I need to be more vulnerable. She said even astronauts have to wear their hearts on their sleeves sometimes. I told her that would medically disqualify me as a candidate, but I know what she meant.
I take a breath. I tell him my greatest fear for my sister. “She could turn into my bio mom, Micah.”
He knows about the meth and social services, about the way they found me in a crib covered in excrement. Dad let me read my file when I turned sixteen. That was our deal. It was a difficult night.
“This time, Hannah chose to have an abortion,” I say. “But what about next time? What if she doesn’t, and then you guys have a baby that’s all messed up, or you get lucky and have a healthy one like me, but then she forgets to change its diaper because she’s too high? She’d never forgive herself. I’d never forgive her.”
I’m grateful I exist, grateful that when my birth mother recognized that she wasn’t able to care for me, she gave me a fighting chance to have a better life—which I got. But I’m also grateful that Hannah doesn’t have a baby right now. I’m glad she made that choice. I don’t really know how to reconcile those two things.
“What the fuck, Mae? That’s not gonna happen. She’s not your bio mom—Jesus.”
“Really? Because the woman who gave birth to me was the kind of person whose entire life was defined by the drugs she couldn’t stop taking.” And then I say the thing I probably shouldn’t, but I can’t help it.