Photograph

Photograph

So you can keep me inside the pocket of your ripped jeans.

Holding me closely till our eyes meet

You will never be alone

Wait for me to come home

Zola had dug up some old pictures from around the house, being the nosy 14 year old that she was that was nothing new. She didn’t really have anything to do over summer break so she was bored and decided to try and entertain herself with some pictures just to see what she could find. She flipped through the stack of pictures smiling at them as she looked at old pictures of her and Bailey or of her family. Some of them she remembered taking, others were taken before she was adopted or while she was still really little. There was one specific picture that stuck out to her. It was a picture of her when she was a baby and her Aunt Lexie.

Meredith didn’t really talk about Lexie much. Zola knew some things about her but they were pretty vague and she couldn’t remember anything about her because she was so little when she died. Talking about Lexie was a topic was a topic that was avoided most of the time just because nobody ever asked and when they did they didn’t really feel like digging all that past up. It was avoided mostly because it still hurt to talk about it. All Zola really knew was that she died in the plane crash that her parents were in when she was only a year old. It was the same plane crash that her Uncle Mark died in. She didn’t know much about him either. She knew that he wasn’t technically her uncle but he was her dad’s best friend. She also knew that he was Sofia’s father.

“Hey Zo. What are you doing?” Meredith asked as she walked into the room.

“Looking at pictures.” Zola said looking up from the picture to her mom.

“Mind if I look?” Meredith asked sitting next to her on the edge of the bed.

Zola shook her head over the stack of pictures to her mom. “I got bored so I went and found these. I hope that’s okay.”

“Yeah. It’s fine.” Meredith said looking through the pictures, she stopped when she got to the one of Lexie and Zola. She looked to her daughter who had grown up so much. She would be starting high school this fall and that seemed unreal to her. She looked back to the picture smiling a little at the sight of her sister.

“Mom?” Zola asked. “Will you tell me about Aunt Lexie?”

Meredith was kind of taken aback. She wasn’t planning on talking about her sister but she knew that this topic would probably come up eventually. “What do you want to know?”

“I don’t know. You just never talk about her. You always brush off those questions. And the questions about Uncle Mark.” Zola looked down at the floor under her feet.

“Yeah, I know. I just- it’s kind of hard to talk about.” Meredith said slowly. “She loved you.” Meredith laughed. “She would have spoiled you rotten of she had had the chance before... before everything... She did as much as she could while she was alive though but you were pretty young.”

“You really loved her didn’t you?”

“Yeah, I did. Not at first but I did. I do.”

“Why not at first?” Zola laughed a little.

“Mostly because I didn’t know I had a sister and I was confused. I was more surprised than anything.”

“That makes sense.” Zola nodded. She knew that part too. She knew that Lexie just showed up at the hospital one day and told Meredith that she was her sister, Zola always found that story amusing, but they never really talked about what happened after that. They never talked about what happened that made Meredith actually accept her sister and how they actually became close to one another. “But what happened after that? Like how did you all become like actual sisters?”