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Volg ons!
I didn’t have an answer that made sense. I still don’t. Maybe because Lena had once, two years earlier, pulled me aside at a party when I was crying over a boy who’d humiliated me. She’d held my hand and said, "The first person who breaks your heart doesn’t get to own the rest of your story." She was fifteen then. Already wise. Already hurt.
I told her the truth back: "I used to come over because I felt guilty. Now I come over because I miss you when I don’t."
"Mom’s on her way. Dad’s at work." He lowered his hands. His cheeks were wet. "She keeps screaming for someone named Danny. I don’t know any Danny."
We were seventeen that summer. We should have been failing driver’s tests and sneaking into R-rated movies. Instead, we spent nights in Lena’s room, not talking, just existing. She would sit on her bed, knees to her chest, staring at the window. Marcus would sit on the floor, back against the wall, watching her. I sat in the desk chair, feeling like a third wheel to a tragedy no one had written a script for.
Marcus eats lunch again. He joined a support group for siblings of survivors. The first time he went, he came home and cried for an hour — not sad tears, he said, but relieved ones. "I didn’t know there were other people who also check their sister’s breathing at night," he told me.
The thumping stopped. Then the door opened a crack. Lena’s eye appeared — red-rimmed, wild, but lucid. She looked at Marcus, then at me.
"I know," I said.
They didn’t. Not fast enough. Thanksgiving. Lena came downstairs for dinner. That alone was a miracle. She wore an oversized sweater and her hair was clean. She sat at the table, picked up her fork, and ate exactly three bites of mashed potatoes before excusing herself. But she came downstairs. That mattered.
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