Disclaimers are in Chapter One

Chapter Four

We end up at, what I assume is Catherine's house. Sara tells me we're just going to drop them off. I don't know why, but she gets out of the car and walks them both to the door. I let them run off and look into my athletics bag. I'm hoping that I have a towel or something to wipe off my face. I'm starting to feel really sticky and it's becoming really annoying.

When I look back up Sara is headed back to the car. She jumps back into the driver's seat and starts the car back up.

"Do you have any questions?"

She sounds nervous, but I have no clue what she's talking about. "About what?" I put my face back down in my bag, wondering if I left my towel in my locker, because if I did then it's going to really start smelling bad after the weekend.

Sara sighs. "Nothing."

I lift my head from my bag and put the bag back on the floor. "Do you have a towel in here? I'm starting to feel a lot ickier than is within my comfort zone."

We pull out of the driveway. "I don't think so."

So I'm going to have to deal with being icky for a while longer. That's cool. If I can handle my father screaming at me about my worthlessness I can handle being sticky.

"So what do you think of Catherine?"

Sara's voice surprises me. I was starting to nod off in the back seat. "I'm sorry I used her as a shield," I reply through a yawn.

"She's already forgiven you for that." I can't see Sara's face, but she sounds truthful enough.

"I guess I'm also sorry that I smacked you perfectly with that cheese," I can't help the smile that crosses my face no matter how much I try to suppress it.

"I don't believe you."

I shrug even though I know she can't see me. "That's probably for the best."

We're finally someplace I recognize and I can tell we're not that far from Sara's apartment. "So do you like Catherine?"

What's so important about me liking Catherine or not? "She's cool, a little bossy, but cool. And before you ask, Lindsey's just as cool."

"Cool?" The word sounds rough coming from Sara.

"I don't hate them. I can't love them because I don't know them. They're cool." I explain. "I wouldn't be angry if we hung out with them again."

We pull into Sara's apartment complex and quickly find a parking spot. I'm out of the car before Sara can say much else to me and run ahead of her. I have a key to the apartment in my bag. The sooner I can start my shower the better.

I run into the apartment and leave the door open for Sara. I throw my bag in my room and rummage through my clothes to find some clean ones. I'm in the shower before I'm even sure Sara has made it into the apartment.

It's a harder task than I thought it would be to get all the food out of my hair, but I do manage. I'm not sure how long I'm in the shower, but eventually I hear Sara banging on the door telling me to get out. Apparently she'd like to wash the food bits off her skin too. I turn off the water and grab a towel to start drying off my body.

I step out of the shower and take my time getting myself in order before I exit the bathroom. When I finally step out Sara is standing there waiting for me.

"We've got to move to a place with more than one bathroom."

I rub the towel through my long hair one last time. "Can you afford that?"

"We can make it work," she says as she walks past me and into the bathroom. She shuts and locks the door behind her.

"I'll start an online search," I say to the door then walk away. Maybe if we move out of this hardly lived in place, I can have a room full of things that are within my tastes. I don't know what my sister was thinking, but when she decorated that guest bedroom, she probably wasn't thinking.

My guess is she used to use the room as an office before I came along. The desk is even still in there, along with the computer and bookcase bursting to the seams with science journals and other non-interesting reading material. The woman must have absolutely no life.

The towel I was using to dry my hair, I throw to the floor and walk over to the computer. I turn it on and check the cables in the back of the tower to see if I'm working with a dial-up connection. I'm not. Sara's got a cable connection. Cool.

I sit down in the only chair in front of the monitor and wait for the computer to finish booting. Sara has never directly given me permission to use her computer, but she hasn't not given me permission either. She doesn't really give me a whole lot of rules about anything.

It wouldn't really matter if she did anyway. She's never here to make sure I'm doing as she says. Plus, it's not like I'm going to do anything wild or crazy either. As much as I'd like to be rebellious, I'm too busy trying to be perfect.

When the computer is done booting, I do a Google search on available apartments in the area. Then I realize that I really don't want to live in another apartment. If I do miss one thing about living with Sara's parents it's the whole house aspect. Apartments just don't feel comfortable to me, plus I can hear that couple above us boinking all night long.

That's certainly something I never had to listen to in the house. The parents stopped having sex probably long before I was even born. It's not something that I'm about to start complaining about either, but then again maybe if they did share the physical love then they wouldn't have been so bad to me.

Who knows what it would have taken them to be better people. It certainly wouldn't have mattered if I was their own blood. It didn't seem to help Sara out all that much. She ran away from them as soon as she could. I think I can actually remember her holding me as a toddler, but it's so fuzzy that I probably made it up.

"You find anything decent yet?" Sara's voice scares me and I jump up in the chair knocking my left knee on the desk.

"Shit!" I get out of the chair and start hopping around.

"Are you okay?" Sara moves up to me and puts her hand on my shoulder causing me to stop my hopping.

"That hurt."

Sara leads me to the bed and sits me down on it. She bends down and takes a look at my knee. Her hands are warm against my skin and somewhat comforting.

"Doesn't look like anything is severely damaged."

"Better not be," I pull away from her a bit. "I can't play with a bum knee."

Sara gets up from the floor and sits on the bed next to me. "You really enjoy playing, don't you?"

"It's my ticket," I say softly. "It's what's going to get me away from this family."

"Melinda, they're dead. You don't have to plan your big getaway anymore."

"Doesn't matter," I bend my knee experimentally then relax it. "I don't want to be a part of this family anymore. As soon as I'm able, I'm going to change my last name and do my best to forget I was ever a Sidle."

Sara turns her head to her lap where her hands are wringing together. "Were they really that bad to you?"

I get off the bed and move a couple of steps away from this heart wrenching moment. She doesn't get to talk to me about them now. She left me with them alone. The past doesn't matter anymore. "What do you care how they were to me?"

"I do care," she tells me softly lifting her head to meet my gaze.

"Bullshit. If you cared then you would have visited a little more than never. If you actually wanted to be my sister than you would have pretended to give a damn before I got thrown in your lap because they died. Play your lies somewhere else. They don't sound so real to me." I walk angrily out of the room, hoping she doesn't follow me. I don't feel like having an explosive confrontation with her.

Things seem to work out a lot better when we don't talk.

I walk to the kitchen and open up the refrigerator. I'm still really hungry. Most of the food we ordered ended up being thrown and not a lot of it ended up in my stomach. I rummage through the fridge, but quickly realize that we have absolutely nothing to eat. Sara doesn't go shopping a whole lot and I don't have a car or money to go do the shopping. I do have my license but it's still a California one. I'm going to have to get that changed at sometime.

I close the refrigerator door and turn back towards the living room. Sara's again standing there waiting for me to face her. Why does she do that? Can't she announce her presence like normal people do?

"I really do care," she tells me.

"Whatever." I move to walk past her but she grabs my arm and stops me. I look down at her like she's gone crazy.

"You don't know anything about what happened. They kicked me out of the house."

She looks upset. I think she might even start crying. I can't really bring myself to care at the moment. "And you left me there, knowing who they were."

"What did you expect?" Her grip tightens just a bit on my arm. "I was seventeen."

I rip my arm from her grip. "I was two. Tell me, which one of us do you think had more power at the time?"

Her answer is her silence. "I thought so." Again I walk away from her. I go back to my temporary room and am happy to find a lock on the door. I lock it and turn off the lights. The computer is still on, but I don't mess with it. I climb into the bed and hope I'll be able to sleep. Maybe I'll sleep far enough into the day that I won't even have to see big sis tomorrow.

It's surprising that we can go from kind of getting along to not getting along at all so quickly. For someone I haven't ever lived with at all, and only had partial contact with, she sure does rub me the wrong way. The only clue I ever had that she existed was the birthday and Christmas card I got every year. She usually put money inside.

So I can't see how it comes as a surprise to her that I really don't want to be a part of this family anymore. I don't want to have anything to do with them. I don't even want the name anymore. I want to get away from all of it. I think after the hell I had to go through as a kid, I deserve at least the small courtesy of being able to walk away.