Requiem [COMPLETED]

Things Fall Apart--In Many Ways

I hadn't liked my sister. With all the callow and unashamed awareness of a seven year old, I thought this honest piece of my feelings would sooth Mrs. Hansen. Her reaction had startled me and it was then I had first begun to understand one doesn't speak ill of the dead, even if they did yell at you a lot.

Mrs. Hansen never told Sven and I how it had happened; this highly subjective and suppositional story is from my own partial gleanings, memories of random and seemingly unrelated moments, somewhat fuzzy from the years passing, and the tactful questions given to those who would know little more, old neighbors, and the few articles I was able to find looking back through old newspapers.

As I've already mentioned, my sister was uninterested in forming any kind of family life with our new family, and felt only the imposition they made on her determined push for teenage freedom. Her recalcitrance only increased as her infatuation for the opposite sex found reciprocation in another young rebel, an adolescent boy of a single mother who had too many children and boyfriends to keep track of any of them in a more than cursory fashion. He had a chip on his shoulder the size of--well, let me put it this way: he called his mom a slut and a whore to her face, stole her cigarettes (and car keys) more often than not, had a tattoo sleeve that looked like it'd been done by a third-grader with crayons and spiky hair done up with paste glue. My sister and he sat together in the back of the bus and forbid us to sit near them on the ride to and from school. They caused the bus driver to have to stop the bus several times a week, either for their screaming arguments or because they were doing mysterious things (underneath jackets) that weren't allowed. One day when we got off at our cul de sac she had two earrings in--or rather, safety pins.

"When did you pierce your ears?" asked Sven.

"On the bus," she said defensively. "Half the kids I know have them already, I can do it if I want to."

"Did it hurt?"
"I'm not a baby," she rolled her eyes. "You just stick your earlobe against the frozen window until it's numb and then stick the safety pin through it. It was easy," she shrugged. It was easy. That was her attitude about a lot of things that were done in poor judgment, or, as I've come to suspect, perverse self-destructive tendencies. Her words still haunt me because I've come to find exactly how easy it can be to do the wrong thing, to make a bad decision, to self-destruct. It was easy. I know.

* * *

Sven and I only once actually met this boy's family, purely by happenstance. Birgit had been put in charge of our welfare for an afternoon when Mr. Hansen had to have an outpatient surgery done on a Saturday; Mrs. Hansen was taking him in at noon and they would be back by dinnertime. Our foster brother Paul was at his friend's house for a birthday party. Birgit, instead of disappearing whenever she woke up after noon, decided it would be best to tow us along so that we didn't tattle on her while she was out. We obediently were led out to a rusted Grand Am and thrown into the backseat through the passenger door, onto an assortment of emptied pop cans and disposable plastic soft drink cups and wrappers from Taco Bell, along with old cigarette butts and a sticky and burnt blanket. We were trapped as the front passenger seat was shoved back into place and Birgit lunged across the seat to make out momentarily with Tim.

"Why did you bring the twerps?" he whined, rolling his eyes. "I thought we were gonna hang out."

"Chill, the foster parents pushed them on me and I didn't want them to kill themselves trying to make food or something. They won't get in the way; they're pretty lame, they just sit and read. Where are your books?" she asked, pointedly, as if we were dogs doing a trick. We each held up a book we'd clutched to our chest as we had been tossed in.