I'd Kill You First: when bad meets bad

Chap. 44

BRODY:

I sat with my little sister as she slept soundly in her bed. A hospital bed. I was in the chair beside her, large hand engulfing her tiny one, and I couldn't ever remember being so lost.

My baby sister was broken, hurting, afraid, and I was at a loss as to how I could help her. I didn't even know who had hurt her in the first place. Hell, I didn't even know where she had been living ten months ago. What kind of brother did that make me, that I knew literally nothing about my sister?

I mean, sure I knew her favorite color was gray because it was a neutral and calm color. I knew she always wanted to be an astronomy major because she was so in love with the stars. I knew she liked apple juice and secretly had an addiction to dramatic teen shows like Vampire Diaries. I knew all those things, but what good were they doing me now?

I didn't know who held her first kiss, or who her first boyfriend had been. I didn't know where she had stayed in those two years of silence we shared after the accident. I didn't even know who Matt was to her, though he seemed to mean the world to her. I wasn't sure what was going on with her and Keenon, I didn't recognize any of the people that showed up to see her when she was in the hospital last time. I didn't know she was in deep trouble with bad people, and I certainly hadn't known just how dangerous her life had become. I had had to find out the biggest part of my sister's life after I got the call she might not make it.

Do you know what that does to you? Hearing that the only thing you have left in life that matters to you is about to leave you, and you don't even have the technical right to grieve because you don't know them? You're no better than all those other people that would have claimed to know the deceased if there had been a funeral. That... That kills you inside.

Now my little Soda Pop was all grown up, and where was I?

I left her all those years ago to suffer the great cruelties of life with our father. I let him almost kill her every night, and I had no excuses for myself. I had been a self-serving coward who left his brave and strong little sister to fend for herself in a house where literal bullets reigned over her head every minute. Trace and I up and ran away, leaving with each other and not once considering saving Soda too. In the end, our individual guilt tore out brother bond apart. The difference between us? I was sorry. Oh man, I was so sorry. But Trace...he never showed any remorse. He had done well for himself with no thought to the cost of his success.

And Soda?

Well, she was something else.

She stayed with mom, she loved her like there was no tomorrow, and she loved dad too. She had the biggest heart back then, the most compassion anyone could ever hold inside themselves. She took the beatings, the hospital trips, the hell on earth, and she just loved everybody through it all. Even Trace and I, who deserved nothing, got nothing but her love even when we deserved hell for all the times we walked away from her.

I guess that's why I hated her so much when we were kids. She was everything I wished I had the courage to become. As young teens, Trace and I would run off to friend's houses or the park and leave her at home to deal with everything. We skipped out on it while she took the blows with a smile and welcomed us back home after the storm had blown over. I hated her for being better than me.

But then that horrible, awful year happened. Uncle Tommy got shot, dad went off the edge, mom wasted away then died in the accident- and Soda?

She was gone.

I never saw my little Soda Pop ever again. She died the night our mother did.

In her place was the hardest, numbest girl I had ever laid eyes on.