DEAR DIARY,
These are things that happened to me, cross my heart and hope to die.
“Lazy bones, crazy bones,” my sister chants. I press my fingers into my ears and pretend not to hear. She sees that our parents are busy in the dining room getting ready for Christmas dinner. She comes over and punches me in the stomach.
“Ow! I’m gonna tell!” I say, and my face screws up with pain. The punch is not quite hard enough to leave a bruise. Oh, no, she never leaves a bruise.
“Go ahead, crazy bones,” she says. “You know they’ll believe me over you. You might as well not even try. They’ll punish you for telling lies again.” She pinches my shoulder, hard. “You better save me your dessert and all of your cookies from the farm, or you know what will happen to you tonight.”
I shiver thinking about it. I’m eight-years-old and skinny. Spaghetti legs, Mom says, spaghetti arms, all I need is some tomato sauce to make a good dinner. Mom must think that’s really funny because she says it a lot.
My older sister is very strong. She can hold me down and pour salt water in my mouth, or cover my face with a pillow until I absolutely can’t last another second without dying.
I hate Christmas dinner because my jerky relatives from Chicago are here. Grandpa Marshall, who gives me the creeps with his cold hands and beady eyes and I never want to be alone with him in a room again, is sick and can’t travel. Maybe he’ll die.
A good part about Christmas is the farm cookies. Dad picks them up every year. They come in a cardboard box tied with red string. Butter cookies shaped like reindeer, round cookies with cherries or nuts in the middle, cookies that are half-chocolate, cookies that look like half moons, gingerbread men. Mom never makes anything like that. Some old farm woman bakes them. If I’m fast enough, I can get some in my pockets before my sister sees me.
“Where’s your new doll?” my sister says in her bully voice.
I close my eyes. Mom and Dad finally gave me something I want for Christmas, probably by mistake. My sister saw the happy look on my face. I wasn’t fast enough hiding it. Big mistake.
“I don’t know. I guess I lost it,” I say, trying to keep my voice from showing that I still have it. “You don’t like dolls anyway.”
“You little shit!” She talks like that when Mom and Dad can’t hear. “Gimme that doll!”
“No! You have presents of your own. You don’t need mine. You don’t even like dolls!”
She comes right up next to me, so I have to look up to see her face. I look right up her nostrils. They don’t look any better than mine, I’ll bet.
“Listen, you freak,” she says, “Don’t you ever talk to me like that. I’ll have to tell Mom and Dad how bad you are. Maybe they’ll send you off to live with Grandpa Marshall!”
She sees the fear shining in my eyes and knows she’s got another thing to tease me with. So far I’d hid that from her real good, that I was scared of him and his big, scratchy hands. He wouldn’t think of putting those hands on her, no, of course not. He’d get in trouble if she said anything. With me, he knows everybody will think I’m making things up again.
“Hah, hah, hah, you’ll go live with Grandpa Marshall,” she sang. “Then I’ll have everything to myself the way I did before you were born. Everything was so much better before you came along, crazy bones.”
I’ve heard that a thousand times. A thousand times a thousand. What makes it so bad is that maybe she is right. I might be a freak. When I look in the mirror, I’m not sure what I see, me or a freak. Mom and Dad think I’m a liar because of all the things I’ve said about my older sister. “What are you talking about? Your sister’s sweet as pie. Everybody knows that.”
Hating myself for every step I take, I go into the bedroom. I pull the new doll out of my most secret hiding place, the one she hasn’t found yet.
I walk back into the dining room, my feet dragging but pulled along like she’s tugging on my leash. Which she actually does, sometimes. Puts Jingles’ collar and leash on me and takes me for a walk, outside, where everybody except Mom and Dad can see.
Her hands are mean to my doll, and then she throws it on the floor.
I kneel down next to the doll, with her head hanging sideways and her new outfit torn. I wrap her in a washcloth to keep people, especially my jerky relatives, from seeing her bare front.
If only other people could see how mean my sister is. But they only see her shiny hair and her pretty face and her woman’s body and that she moves like a cat, real smooth.
They don’t see what’s inside her the way I do. Her black, black heart. If I could, I’d rip it out of her and feed it to Jingles. Whenever nobody’s looking, she pulls Jingles’ ears or tail and then shoves him at me, like I did it. I would never hurt him. Jingles is nervous around me, and it’s not my fault.
But she’s my sister, and I’m supposed to love her. I guess I do, kind of. She’s a lot easier to love when she’s not around.
She didn’t have to do that to my doll, though.