I’d really like to sleep the way I did back then. After I found her body, I fell deep asleep for two days straight, with no interruptions other than a few times bolting awake, my sweat-drenched T-shirt sticking to my body and reality like a slap to my face.
Mommy never understood how I could sleep after what had happened, and I think she never forgave me for it—that, and the fact that I’d left my sister all alone.
I slept and my dreams were full of Cassandra still alive, playing a video game, her feet on the table, asking me if I was in love with Neil. Dreams where he had sex with me again, like that afternoon, in his bedroom, with those football things on the wall.
It hurt at first, but he was careful, he was gentle, and when he asked if I wanted to do it again, I said yes even though I was late and I had to go take my sister to dance class. I figured that it was too late anyway, that she’d miss class and all I’d get would be a slap on the wrist. She wouldn’t have snitched to our parents—that wasn’t her style—and she knew that it was a special day: I’d told her that I was going to become a woman. A woman? Ha! I got that idea in my head from reading all those stupid magazines Mommy brought back from the clinic she worked at. Cassandra braided my hair ever so nicely so it wouldn’t fall all over the place. She asked me to tell her everything after, but I wasn’t sure I would. What was I going to tell her? A stranger’s hands on my skin, breathing, a boy trembling over you and crushing you? Or how silly he looked after he came, that dripping between my legs because he didn’t have the condom on right? It’s sheer luck I didn’t get pregnant. I really wanted to lose my virginity, men made such a big deal of it but I just thought of it as a burden. A virgin, pure and innocent—that’s such a silly idea.
Maybe if I hadn’t cared so much about losing it, I wouldn’t have lost her too. We’d be eating a slice of cheesecake, sitting on our parents’ couch, talking about our children or our boyfriends. Time wouldn’t have taken its toll on our lives.
But instead, when I got home, two hours late, cutting through lawns and backyards, she was already dead. Lying on the grass, her dance bag right beside her, like it was a sign. She wanted to feel grown-up, too, she wanted to go to her dance class all on her own at thirteen although she still looked eleven and Mommy said no. She met a man that day, too, but he didn’t tell her about love. He just grabbed her throat, choked her, and killed her.
I’d been thinking it was the most important day of my life, and it was the last day of hers, just because a man wanted to kill. Did I sleep for two days straight after that? Yes, so the pain would stay put inside me, so it would seep into every cell of every organ and become one with me, a girl who’d broken her promise for some short-lived pleasure I didn’t even get.