Sister Dearest

Chapter 10 - A Tittering of Magpies

During her free period at school the next day, Elody retook the English test that she had previously failed in Mr. Sterling's class. She had pored over the materials over the weekend and was confident in her answers.

Mr. Sterling had two back-to-back free periods and one of them lined up with Elody's study hall period, so she was able to take the test peacefully in the classroom with no distractions aside from her teacher filing papers.

After marking her last answer, she stood up and walked over to Mr. Sterling's desk.

"I'm done," Elody said. She held out the stapled pages of the test.

He took it from her hand. "Thanks, Elody. I'll grade this right away."

Elody nodded, but didn't move to walk away. Neither of them knew exactly why. Elody hesitated, looking like she wanted to say something.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Mr. Sterling said. He didn't know what she was going through, but it was obviously something of an important weight.

Elody pulled a chair out from one of the nearby desks and sank into it, dropping her book bag on the floor.

"I found out something huge and now everything is just going to shit and I feel overwhelmed all of the time but I'm trying to push it down so that I don't feel anything so that going through everyday isn't a struggle, and I feel like I'm overreacting to the matter at hand so I don't want anyone to know how I'm feeling!"

The sentence came out as a run on and Elody inhaled when she was done. She instantly felt stupid for blurting out her personal information like that. Sure, Mr. Sterling had been her teacher for almost three years now, but he wasn't a therapist.

He clasped his hands together on his desk. "It sounds like you're going through a lot," he said.

Elody sighed. "Yeah. I'm, like, a week out from having a Thanksgiving on someone."

"What does that mean?" Mr. Sterling asked, raising an eyebrow.

Elody thought back to Thanksgiving three years ago. They had been invited to an overseas celebration with a lot of extended family, including an uncle that Lisa had hated. She ended up cursing him out and saying a few pretty terrible (and also funny) things.

"It means the same as 'having a cow,'" Elody said. "Like I'm going to explode."

Mr. Sterling nodded. "I understand," he said. "Some of my students make me feel like that every day."

Elody cracked a small smile. Sometimes her peers could get on her last nerve, too, especially during the week they rehearsed different scenes from Hamlet and a boy in her class would not let up about "the importance of realism in theater." Mr. Sterling unsurprisingly did not end up letting him actually stab his classmates.

"Yeah," Elody said.

Mr. Sterling wore a look of moderate concern on his face. "Do you have anyone to talk to about this? Your parents, maybe?"

"I don't see a therapist, but my mom-" Elody stopped herself.

She wanted to share the least amount of details as possible. She was warming up to the concept, but it still felt too foreign to introduce people who knew Lisa as her mom instead of the cool older sister everyone knew her as.

"-No, I don't," Elody continued.

"I didn't necessarily mean a therapist," Mr. Sterling said, shifting around in his seat. "If you're having interpersonal conflict with someone, it can help to tell them how you're feeling, even if you think they'll react negatively."