The Broken Sister (Sister #6) (3 page)

It still didn’t make total sense to her. How could it affect her so much when she didn’t remember it?

HOME.
SHE NEEDED TO go home. To Calliston and her mom. That’s all Kylie could think about as she nearly sprinted to her small apartment just three blocks off the campus of Peterson College, a private university located in Marsdale, California. She dumped her book bag down and thumped around the small dump she lived in. It was a studio. Her bed was right in her living room and she used it as a couch. The kitchen was only a few feet away. But at least she lived alone. She like to be alone. When she wasn’t partying, she needed to be alone.

Her hands were shaking from the encounter with Tommy. His smirk. His knowing. That was what most spurred her frenetic search of her messy place,
his knowing
. She kicked around her stuff until she could find a few clean clothes to take home with her. She stuffed it all into a backpack, grabbed her keys, and hightailed it out of there. It was just over an hour drive to Calliston; she’d take the bus. It would give her time to think. To decompress. To not show up a shaking mess, who her mother would then start grilling over whether she was on drugs… again.

Kylie sighed, leaning her head against the smudged glass of the bus’s window. She closed her eyes and tried to let her body release the tension she felt bound up in, like it was rope wrapped all around her. There were times when going home was more of a hindrance than a help. She knew how her mom worried over her, and the guilt of disappointing her was strong and made Kylie hide at school. She made sure Olivia and Ally didn’t tell her mom what she was actually doing at school. Olivia was her cousin by marriage and her best friend. Ally was her older sister. Just a year older in school, Ally was the perfect version of the girl Kylie should be. She never lived up to it though. Ally was on her all the time. Monitoring how her grades were, if she was going to classes regularly, how much partying she was doing, and even concern over her weight.

They all tried to monitor that. They took how skinny she was as a sign that something must cause it. She knew how her mom and Aunt Gretchen were always discussing it. Gretchen, a psychologist, had offered numerous counselors for Kylie to try. They had all been at her for years, really. To talk. Share. Be different. Explain how she felt. She just didn’t know how to give them what they wanted of her. She especially didn’t know how to give them this.

How did she tell them about something that happened to her but didn’t happen in her memory? She scrunched her knees up to her chest and shifted on the bus seat. She sighed, admitting the real reason to herself.

It would hurt her mom.

Mom would be horrified and embarrassed and hurt to find out the way Kylie had been behaving. Her mom would think it was all her own fault and somehow Mom was the failure, not Kylie. So Kylie didn’t tell her mom she had been sleeping with boys and partying hard, drinking and doing drugs in casual ways. She also knew she was at fault. She had put herself in the situations countless times that she had been warned about since she was young.
Watch your drink. Don’t go out alone. Don’t sleep with boys at parties. Don’t be a slut.

She didn’t tell anyone because she had been doing all those things. She had gone to parties, alone. She had slept with boys she didn’t know, in places she was unfamiliar with, and in partying settings she couldn’t fully trust. She had drank what was handed to her. She had done it dozens and dozens of times. She had acted recklessly. She had in some ways set herself up to be raped like she had been.

It had started innocent enough. She had sex a few times in high school, and liked it. That was it. Her big sin when she started her freshman year in college. She liked to have sex. It made her feel good. Orgasms made her feel in control, powerful, and interesting.

The thing was, she was extremely reserved and shy. She had no capability for flirting or expressing herself in the ways that got guys to ask a girl out. She could only accomplish it by drinking. Drinking loosened her up and made her talk more, act out, flirt and draw guys’ attention.

It was easier at college. There was a party every night if she wanted, where young, drunk people congregated. She could find guys easily and she didn’t have to talk. That was the conundrum of her personality; she wasn’t actually very social or pleasant to be around. She didn’t have much luck getting the boys she liked to actually want to date her because she didn’t flirt very effectively. And more than that, she was painfully shy. It was hard for her to find the words in a dating situation. Her mind went blank as if she were almost deaf and dumb. She lost track of conversations and her nerves kept any witty or interesting response from coming out. Instead, she’d learned to maintain an impenetrable silence. She could be quiet that was her gift. She could hide her anxiety and her shyness.

But at these parties, no one cared. There was no need to get the boy to like her. They simply could skip all that. It was an environment where she could just start kissing and groping a boy and that was okay. They got to forego all the things that caused her painful embarrassment and go right to the thing she knew she could do. And that was have sex.

But there was something wrong with that. She soon started to learn, it was okay for the boys she slept with to hook up with her. At first, all she hung out with were the fraternity guys. But then… things started to get said about her. Derogatory, rude, crude, downright mean slurs and names. It was confusing at first. It would make her want to hunker into herself and shame burned bright in her cheeks. She was the tramp, skank, ho, hooker, slut, and mostly a whore. She was called those things simply because she had sex. What was so bad about having sex? She was old enough. She was single and unattached. She made no commitments. She used protection each and every single time. She didn’t hurt anyone. Yet she was deemed wild and slutty.

It hurt at first. She would cower in her dorm room and cringe to meet people in her classes. Did they know? Did they hear what she was? Did they hear where she’d been over the weekend or who she’d slept with?

For this reason, socially, she kept to herself even more. She isolated herself even further. Even if she still partied.

When she went to the parties there were guys there, hooking up as much as she did. Yet they weren’t particularly called anything. And stranger still, they were often the source of the name calling.

Then January of her freshman year, she went to an ABC party at Tommy’s fraternity.

She withdrew completely for a while after it. No parties. No boys. No drinking. No drugs. No classes. But Ally had come and kept checking on her. She was afraid her mom would hear. So she started to go to classes. She tried to function. She tried to be good.

She didn’t know why it wasn’t easy for her to be good. She was raised right. Her mom… her mom was the kind of mom every girl should have. Tracy was kind and supportive and funny and smart and irreverent, and Kylie knew her mother put Kylie’s well-being and happiness before her own.

It wasn’t her mom’s fault Kylie was such a failure.

Was it her father’s? She supposed it was. She didn’t know what else would make her so not fit into the mold of who and what her family was. Her aunt and mom were straight-laced, good moms and wives and members of society. Olivia and Ally both were too, and were going to be just as good as their moms.

Just not Kylie. Maybe she was like alcoholic, flaky, flirty Aunt Vickie, Mom and Gretchen’s baby sister, who had disappointed and embarrassed all the family on numerous occasions. But Vickie was fun and sweet and personable, and people liked Vickie, even if she drove them nuts. She was the life of every single party, drunk or sober. Nowadays mostly sober.

And Kylie had nothing in her personality that accomplished that. So she wasn’t really like Aunt Vickie either.

Her father, the criminal. There was no one else she had to compare herself to. No one else to blame for why she was so awful when those around her were so good. He had stolen money from his clients. He had disappeared one day when Kylie was merely ten years old. One day she had a big house on a lake, with two parents who were happily married, and she thought she had a normal, typical, good family. And then the next, her father was gone. He’d ditched them. Her mom. Her. Ally. He’d thrown them out of his life as if they were trash. Refuse. Shit. They were flushed out of his life like his own shit. She had clearly, that day, gotten his message.

No matter how nice and wonderful her mom tried to be about it, there was nothing she could do to make up for that moment. The before and after moment that defined her childhood, and sometimes she suspected her personality. The moment she had a dad, and the moment she didn’t.

She could not seem to assimilate the changes. It was so hard. Her father was there, then gone. Poof. Just like that. She had a family and then she didn’t. Mom was a happy stay-at-home mom, then not. Kylie’s childhood was secure, stable, and full of love and normalcy, and then it wasn’t. She had not understood as a naïve child how quickly her life could stop and be destroyed on the whim of another.

Ally adjusted. She got epically angry and rebellious at Mom for a while. And it scared Kylie. She didn’t like all the volatile conflict and loud fights and slammed doors. She wanted Ally to just shut up. What if Ally drove Mom away too? People left. Didn’t Ally fully now comprehend that? Even people you love and are supposed to be there forever and unconditionally, even those people could choose to leave. At least Kylie learned that. Ally didn’t. It took a while but Ally finally siphoned through all her anger and after a few years, she assimilated it. She let go of her anger and she let go of the idea of who Micah was to them.

Kylie didn’t, however.

Micah came back years later. He did prison time for his crimes and being a fugitive. He tried to contact them but they both told him to fuck off. They told him one time in a response email and then deleted or threw away any contact since. Ally had said that’s what they had to do. There was no other choice. He had deserted them and Mom. How could they ever contemplate even speaking to him? Or entertaining his apology, if he even had one? They would be betraying their mom to do so. They would be somehow sanctifying everything he did to them, and mostly to Mom. And Mom hadn’t deserved it. Any of it. Didn’t Kylie totally know that?

Still, she did wonder sometimes if Micah would have apologized to them if he was given the opportunity.

She knew Ally was right, but even now, sometimes she felt guilty twinges of a traitorous desire to just see him. To just see what a decade had done to the man who raised her for a decade, and who she had happily thought of as her dad. She didn’t know until the day he left that he was such a bad person. She had loved him and ached in misery when he was gone. But now she didn’t even know what he looked like. She wondered sometimes what he did now. She wondered as well how she could not have sensed before how terrible a person he was. She looked at his emails once in her junior year. It said he lived in Bend, Oregon and he had recently remarried. Then she quit reading and shuffled the email to some saved folder, never to be looked at again. Though she didn’t delete it. Why? She couldn’t fully admit to herself. She never told her sister she knew where he lived.

Or that he remarried. How? How did he find someone to trust him after everything he did? She must be a horrible person to want him as husband. Right? Had to be. He was a horrible, terrible person, who betrayed those he was supposed to love and take care of.

Just like her.

She lifted her head off the window, opened her eyes, and blinked against the white, illuminated sky. If her mom knew what she was really like and the things she had done, her mom would think that of her too. It was why Kylie could not let her find out. It was why she had to bury that something could maybe have happened to her. It was wrong. She knew. Tommy hurt her, but there was no denying she put herself there in the position to be taken advantage of. In ways, she thought she had asked for it by her very actions. By doing the very things that everyone advised girls her age not to do. How much sense did it make that she willingly did them?

So really, didn’t it make sense she was the one it happened to?

It puzzled her sometimes, why she still went out to parties. Why did she still have sex? Or go out at night? The weird thing was, whatever happened hadn’t soured her on sex. She wasn’t traumatized enough by it to quit sex. Which seemed sacrilegious to Kylie. If she was a true victim of something sexual, how could she desire to still have sex?

And she learned, quickly, it just wasn’t okay as girl to desire to have sex and then do so. It wasn’t okay that she was shy and didn’t know how to date, but still wanted to have sex.

It just wasn’t okay to have casual sex.

So in the end, how could she tell anyone? They’d simply confirm she deserved it. She was part of it. She was to blame. She was a stupid whore.

This time, however? She was shaken by running so boldly into Tommy. It had dragged up feelings she hadn’t felt in a very long while. She needed to go home. She needed her mom. But her mom worried so much about her. She tried to get Kylie to talk and talk and talk. She’d made her see doctors and psychologists over the last ten years and none of it had helped or stuck. So even when she desired her mom, she didn’t always run to her.

But this time it felt a little worse.

She got off at the bus stop in downtown Calliston. She’d grown up here. It was a pretty, small town, not too far from the mountains. Trees decorated the land and the downtown was designed to show off a perfection and neatness that made Kylie feel trapped and unworthy at the same time. She was not comfortable with all the homey, downtown, family-friendly stuff.