Savanah Garcia
She thought she was a Garcia
She was only just 9 years old when everyone forgot about her.
She's been bullied, gone through a heartache, been kidnaped, has a best friend dealing with cancer, her family has turn their backs on her, wh...
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| Savannah Rodriguez |
Having walked from school, to the only place that I knew better than I knew my own house, was the place where the person that had cared for me the most in the world, now resided, buried under mountains of dirt with a piece of cobblestone with the words that he would never get to here, because they were on top of the place where he had been put to rest.
He left a mark on my heart, that no one would ever be able to replace or even fix, only the one that did the damage. I could still remember the feeling of the shirt that I had once clutched on, begging him not to leave me, but he had to. He had to be the sacrifice, as he was the eldest. He wasn't going to force someone else to take their life, even if they wanted someone else, he still would have been the sacrifice.
That was just the person that he was. He would make sure that everyone had something and he would go without, but like our parents would ever let him go without something. They had once cherished him, making sure that he would have the best car for his 16th birthday, which he never got, or he would have the best training equipment or opportunities. He had his life altogether, and was already applying for college scholarships. He had his life together and ready for anything.
The only thing he wasn't ready for, was to in the ground where my feet stood above him. Never once in my life, did I think that I would here, standing above my brother that had always towered over me and made sure that everything was fine. He never wanted any tears on our cheeks or anyone to be hurt. He wanted everyone's lives to be just as good as him.
What he would never know, was that as soon as he was gone, my life only got worse. Being abused by our father got worse, but not like it had never been there. The people that had killed him, were now after me, getting in through the front door of the house that I had once called a home, when Rafael, my brother who slept beneath me, had once made sure it was a home for anyone and everyone.
Rafael had always made sure that no one was ever left out, even making sure that his friends were always over at our house, even if he wasn't there. He had been so many people's safe place, and to think that we could just lose that and move on, was the scary part of it all. I had never moved on from his death, always wanting to know more to why he was gone. No one would just take someone like my brother and kill him. There was just no way.
To know that he could have gotten the scholarship that he had been dreaming of for years, and be halfway through his college degree, having since graduated from high school while I was only just starting. He had had everything right there, in front of him, even only if he had been given another day. That was all he had needed, to reset that trigger and dodge the bullet, but he didn't, because he knew that I would be next if they didn't get to him first.
The rain started to trickle down, cleaning away the surface of his headstone, as I placed the bouquet of sunflowers on his grave. They had been his favorite flowers, because he said that he saw me as his sunflower. I had never gotten the chance to ask him why, and I really wish I had, because then maybe I would have more than just the unused room in the house that was starting to collect dust.
Maybe I would have had more time with him, and maybe gotten a real goodbye, if he hadn't taken me down to the nearby diner, where we had been cornered and kidnapped. I had always known that I was bad luck for my family, as it hadn't been the first time that something had happened to me and my brothers when our parents weren't with us.
I had been in many car accidents and had many incidents where I had been kidnapped, but no one had ever died as a result of it. My brothers death had slowed my kidnappings, as there had only been about one, but it was only an attempt, as I had run away, and distracted the person that had tried to take me again.
But now, they came to the front door of the place that had once held my brother. The same door that he used to walk through, a smile on his face, was now the same door that his own killers thought that they owned. So, as I sat down in the dirt, tears spilling down my cheeks, I wished that I wasn't sitting here, wishing that we could trade places.
Wishing that he could have had more time with our parents, Nic, Bella, Ben, Liam and the twins. Even me, but I wasn't really part of our family. No one even knew that I had come here, every year since he had passed. No one knew a thing about me and I didn't know a thing about them either, and that was just how it went these days.
I used to know everything about them and they used to know everything about me. We used to be close. We used to be a family. It was all what we used to be. There used to be good memories, but deep down, they were covered by the blood stain marks of the brother that wasn't here anymore because of me. Half of the issues in our family was because of me.
"Savannah, what are you doing here?" a voice cut my thoughts off, as I sharply turned to my brother, as he stood, dressed in layers of jumpers to keep the rain away, and an umbrella to stop the rain from wetting him even further. Unlike me, he was no longer in his school uniform, so he must have been at home. He would have found out that I hadn't done the chores that I was supposed to.
I didn't want to go back to that house anymore. "I miss him too, you know" he sat beside me, getting his clean pants dirty, as he held the umbrella over my soaking body. I grimaced at the thought, knowing that I had taken someone my brother admired, away from him. I had been the one that had done it all, and god did it feel bad to know that.
"It was my fault, you know" I muttered, right as my head was pulled towards my brothers shoulder, as he wrapped an arm around my shoulders, pulling me in close to him for the first time in years. "No your not and you know it"
The thing was, I didn't know that. I had just assumed that it was my fault and accepted that as the reason why no one liked me, because everyone knew that I was at fault. I had just accepted it and taken it on the chin and pretended like it didn't bother me because I hadn't been the one to kill my brother, but we had been given the option to change spots.
"I know" was all he said, as we just continued to sit there, in silence apart from the rain that was hitting the umbrella and the tears that were running down our cheeks and hitting the place where both of our hearts were sitting, buried under the mountains of dirt that separated us from our brother, that had once made us smile.
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