to live in the present and the future at the same time. The Garveys smiled hard when they were happy because they were also sad, taking the bitter with the sweet, the good with the bad, every single minute.
Her sister’s coughing was the background noise of her childhood, though Jill muffled the sound at night, not to keep the house awake. Every morning, Jill took antibiotics in pill form, and Pulmozyme and albuterol through a nebulizer. Every time she ate a meal or a snack, she took pancreatic enzymes, and she endured percussive therapy twice a day. Jill never complained, and everyone said she was a trouper, an angel, even a saint, but Allie knew the real Jill, who was funny, goofy, and naughty. The real Jill loved thick books with maps in the front and joked that she was going to smoke when she grew up. The real Jill wasn’t a saint, but something much better. A big sister.
If Jill was dying on the outside, Allie was dying on the inside. When Jill was hurting, Allie couldn’t stop her tears, crying in her pillow for them both. The worst was when she helped with Jill’s percussive therapy. She’d beat her sister’s rib cage to loosen up the mucus, which left them both drenched with effort, just to win a few puffs of something as insubstantial as air. Air. You couldn’t see it, but you couldn’t live without it. It didn’t weigh anything, but it had all the weight in the world. It was like a bad riddle. It was even free. All you had to do was breathe. Take a deep breath, people said, but Jill had never had one of those in her life, which ended after seventeen years, at home.
Allie had been there when Jill died, hugging her in hysterics, clinging to her like a kitten hooking its flimsy nails into a sweater. Allie had been heartbroken, devastated, reeling at the prospect of a life that no longer included Jill. Allie didn’t know who she was without Jill. She was not-Jill in a world that was Jill’s, in a family that revolved around Jill’s illness, specialty meds, and therapies.
Allie didn’t know how her family would fill the hole that Jill left because it was everything. It wasn’t a hole, it was the whole. So it could never be filled. Now Jill was gone and so were the hospital bed, commode, nebulizers, oxygen tanks, and pill bottles. But somehow Jill was everywhere, in the very air. Her absence was her presence, and the girl who could never get air had become it. The Garvey family breathed Jill every moment.
The thought made Allie’s stomach knot, and sweat broke out on her forehead. Tryouts for the cross-country team were coming up, and she needed an extracurricular to get into a good college. She couldn’t sing well enough to make choir, didn’t play an instrument, and was too shy to be onstage. Her guidance counselor told her she should write about Jill for her personal essay, but Allie wasn’t about to write My Sister Died So Let Me into Penn.
Allie kept running, panting hard, her legs hurting. She’d gained fifteen pounds and was falling so far behind the others she didn’t know how she would catch up. It was how she felt all the time lately. Behind. After Jill’s funeral, Allie was supposed to go to school like nothing ever happened, but that was impossible. The other girls had best friends, but Allie’s best friend was Jill. She didn’t fit in any of the cliques, like the pretty princesses, the field-hockey jocks, the fast girls who smoked, the goths, druggies, mathletes, or Ecology Club hippies. The boys called her Allie Gravy, and she was behind everyone, a permanent little sister to the world.
Suddenly a silhouette appeared at the top of the hill. It was Sasha Barrow, captain of the development’s running team and one of the most popular girls in school. Sasha was tall, lean, and totally beautiful, with big blue eyes, a tiny nose, and not a single zit. She had on a cool blue Nike tank and silky dolphin shorts, like a professional runner compared with Allie’s thick Phillies T-shirt and old gray gym shorts. Sasha ran for the development team as a way to stay in shape for the cross-country team at school.
“Hurry up!” Sasha shouted, her hands on her slim hips.
Allie sped up, but her ankle turned and she tumbled to the ground, landing on her butt.