Read Online Pieces of My Sister's Life by Elizabeth Arnold - Free Book Online Page B

comment or you’re way too vain.”
    “I’m not crying.”
    He didn’t respond, probably pondering the absurdity of this statement.
    I wiped my eyes and pulled my hair over my face, then pushed at the door.
    Justin took one look at me and his face seemed to fold in on itself. He wrapped me in his arms, and I gulped a breath, tears freezing in my eyes. He stroked at my hair, his hands sending prickles down my back, through arms and legs. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t breathe, my heart slowed, beats drawn like they were pulsing through molasses.
    “Oh Kerry, hush,” he whispered. “It’s okay. I know it’s hard, you have to just let it out.”
    His words whispered at my hair. I clutched at his soft flannel shirt, then slowly reached out my tongue and licked it over the stitching on his pocket.
    “I never see you cry, you or Eve. It’s not healthy, Kerry, it’ll never feel better unless you do.” He pulled away, studied my face. “There’s something else though, isn’t there? Something happened.”
    I shook my head.
    “I know you pretty well, and something’s going on. I can see it in your eyes, you look like you’re being torn apart.”
    “No. Nunh-unh,” I said, but the funny thing was, this is what I’d been thinking all the night before, about one of his stories where a girl had literally been torn into two pieces when the boy she loved had left. Justin hadn’t described the blood that must’ve been involved, the spilling out of guts, but I’d pictured how that kind of death would look, more revolting than romantic. Lying there, I’d felt that bleeding and spilling, and I’d known it was the worst way in the world for a person to die. Maybe his words were not just coincidence but some kind of sign, divine intervention, a way I could make him remember our world. I wiped at my face. “Hey, y’know what, Justin? You know what would help? Maybe you could read me some of your stories.”
    Justin stared at me like I’d gone off my rocker, and I thought I could read his mind.
Leslie never goes off her rocker,
is what he was thinking. I steeled my shoulders. “Like you did when we were kids. It used to make me forget everything, become somebody else.”
    Justin nodded slowly, considering. He finally smiled. “Didn’t especially want to go into work anyway. If that’s really what you want, really think it might help. But you have to promise not to laugh, or I’ll sew your lips together. My feelings get hurt easily.”
    I wanted to jump, twirl Modern Movement pirouettes. Instead I rolled my eyes. “What a wimp,” I said.
    I dressed quickly and followed Justin to his office, my heart skipping with jumping-bean beats. I pictured how Eve might react when I told her, how she’d have to shrug and pretend she didn’t care. And I’d tell her everything, the way he smiled at me, the expectation in his face, working on her until she was caught up in the thrill of it too.
    In the office Justin knelt on the floor and began gathering loose pages, looking suddenly excited. “It’s a real mess, not really shaped into any kind of story, just a bunch of stories that don’t have any kind of chronology.”
    He stacked a pile of papers and rolled his sleeves to the elbows. I studied the veining on his arms as he sorted through the sheets of paper, the vulnerable hollow at the nape of his neck where the ends of his hair were sun-bleached to the color of beer. He finally threw the pile up into the air so that the stories fluttered around us. “Pick a page, any page.”
    I ran my finger over the scrawled script on the paper that had landed on my lap, then handed it to Justin. He glanced at it. “Okay, good choice.”
    He leaned beside me, resting on his elbow, and I closed my eyes and listened. His voice was smooth and deep and I fell into it, saw the marshes where fairies lived, saw little blue-faced Morwyn left stranded among the reeds.
    “‘For eight years Morwyn had lived there with the fairy folk,’”