Schizoid personality disorder they called it. This pretty much summed up to what June had described as "bloody cold" a long time ago. They were still children, Tiffany maybe seven or eight years old at the time, and they were left alone to stroll around the playground on a sunny August day. Mom was nearby chatting up the neighbours, entangled in an intriguing gossip-like conversation. Tiffany was sitting by the side of a bench. She was feeling particularly bored and enjoyed doing nothing but staring at some swans swimming in the nearby pond. Her sister, June, on the other hand, was hyperactive as usual. Two years younger than Anna, June was a little devil incarnated in the flesh and bones of a six year old. She would laugh and run and spit and swear, bursting out the few "forbidden" words she knew at any given chance, and then laugh and run again. That was life for June. Easy as it gets. And surprisingly enough, this feeling of easiness would accompany her throughout her entire life. If Tiffany could feel jealousy, it would be the one thing that would definitely make her envy June. Lucky for her, this was not the case.
It didn't take long for the drama to begin. June was playing by the pond, an inane game of throwing pebbles at the swans that swam scared away to opposite directions. She was laughing almost hysterically as the little creatures struggled to avoid her blows. It was only a few minutes after she had started her game that Tiffany shouted at her to stop. Not that she felt any sympathy for the birds but this whole fuss disturbed her in some peculiar way. On that morning she wanted nothing more than some brain numbing peace and quiet and her sister was doing anything in her power to prevent her from having it. Tiffany's wishes left June indifferent. But then again this was only typical since, despite the two-year gap that separated them, June was used to defying her older sister, who normally would do absolutely nothing in return. This was not one of these days.
A whole fifteen minutes had passed and June was still enjoying herself, not halfway bored with her harassment game. Tiffany stood up calmly and trod lightly to her side. She gazed down at her sister, a few inches shorter than her, with her funny freckles and her grim smile, and then she suddenly raised her arms and pushed her to the ground with all her force. In an instinctive reaction June backtracked towards the pond but lost her balance and fell full-length onto the water. Her scream broke the morning's silence. She hardly knew how to swim and was now struggling, swinging her arms and knees in agony, trying to surface. Tiffany remained stationary and unperturbed, observing her sister from above with a void look upon her face, while June was swallowing mouthfuls of water and letting out fade cries asking for help.
Some people suddenly arrived to the rescue, mom among them. She pushed Tiffany aside, only to find out that June had already been pulled out of the pond by an eighth-grader a few seconds earlier. The girl was soaking wet, trembling, mostly of fear than of cold, and holding her right arm in pain. She was yelling and moaning as mom picked her up and carried her to the family's station-wagon. Tiffany came along followed by a few other curious bystanders. Once the doors of the station-wagon closed, Tiffany in the front seat, maintaining her detached style, mom turned to her in fury:
"What on earth were you doing back there? Why didn't you help your sister?"
"She pushed me, mom. SHE did it!", whined June from the backseat.
That was a shock; one that mom had to take a few moments to digest.
"Did you really push her?", she asked finally.
Tiffany nodded affirmatively.
"Why the hell would you do such a thing?", the woman yelled.
Tiffany shrugged her shoulders but said nothing. She had no idea why she had done it, nor any regret about it for that matter.
"She's mean, mom." June's weeping had now turned insanely loud. She was dangling her arm in the air, the emotion of pain drawn across her face. "I hate you!", she shouted at Tiffany. "You… you're bloody cold. And mean. That's what you are…"
The aftermath of that day's incident was a broken limb for June and the beginning of a series of psychiatric sessions for Tiffany, only to find out that what her sister had so eloquently described as "bloody cold" actually had a name. It was called schizoid personality disorder, which, to put it in simple words, meant that she was emotionally numb, lacking all these notions that people call intimacy and affection and that, pretty much, make us… human. And now that she knew the name, Tiffany needed only to come to terms with one more thing. That she would live with this disease her entire life.