Yesterwary

“Congratulations, Margaret-Jean!” Mrs. Harper shouted, as Demi and Margo cautiously maneuvered into the dark living room. Light flooded the walls, and confetti thickened the air as family and friends jumped out from their hiding spots to join in the congratulatory cries.

“Thanks, mom,” Margo said, cheeks red, and baring the awkward, forced smile often found on the faces of those who find little surprise in surprise parties.

As Margo was suffocated by hugs and jolly pats on the back, Demi stood quietly in the corner, scoffing at the hypocrisy of it all. At some point, every single person in that house had urged her sister to get a “real” job. ‘Writing is a nice hobby, but you need stability. Words won’t get you anywhere.’ But now that her years of morbid ramblings had landed her a publishing deal, they couldn’t have been happier to support her “worthless hobby.” If only they realized the book that had gotten her the contract was actually about how completely and utterly fucked up their family was.

“Hey… Margo’s sister?”

To no avail, Demi tried to blend in with the wall—if only skin could camouflage itself as sickening pastels and florals,—as Jason trotted toward her with arrogance in his stride. They’d lived next to each other their entire lives, but she was surprised he even knew her name. Well, maybe he didn’t know her name. But he knew she was Margo’s sister, at least, which meant that he was aware of her existence.

“Hi,” Demi said in nothing short of a whisper. Her cheeks burned as her eyes refused to break contact with his.

“Where’s the bathroom?”

She lowered her chin, glowering at the boy from deep beneath her eyebrows. “Upstairs, down the hall, second door on the right.”

“Thanks,” he said with a wink and a cheesy grin.

Demi’s lungs released a long-winded whoosh of disappointment and self-criticism as she watched him walk off.

“You don’t want to waste your love on someone like that,” Margo said, glaring at Jason’s back as she handed Demi a glass of champagne.

“I’ll waste my love on whomever I damn well please, thank you,” Demi said with feigned stubbornness.

“Careful. You might run out.”

“Run out of love? You know I admire your imagination and creativity, but I think I’ve slightly outgrown your dark, cautionary fairytales,” Demi said into her drink.

“I’m serious. It isn’t infinite, little sister. You need love to fuel love, and if you give it all away without getting any in return, your battery will stop beating.”

Typical Margo, always over-dramatizing everything. She could look at a basket of kittens and come up with a beautifully depressing story. Probably something about how one of the kittens eventually found itself in a wonderful, loving home… but when asked about the others, she would have gone on to say, “They all died, of course. Life is harsh, and nature is cruel. For every happy ending, there are seven terribly unpleasant ones.”

“Good thing I have you to love me, then,” Demi said, wrapping an arm around her big sister, who happened to be much shorter than herself.

“And good thing love isn’t bothered by pesky little things like time and distance,” she said, returning the gesture. “Don’t ever forget that.”

“Incoming,” Demi whispered, gulping down a mouthful of champagne at the sight of their father, and immediately doing the exact opposite of remembering Margo’s words.

“So, Demetria,” Mr. Harper said, the stench of bourbon burning Demi’s nostrils as he blatantly ignored the concept of personal space, “when are you going to do something with your life?”

“She’s younger than I was when I finished my first book, Dad,” Margo said, bounding to her sister’s defense.

“At least you had goals,” Mr. Harper mumbled, checking his watch, which looked remarkably like a face contorted into a judgmental grimace.

“I have goals,” Demi said, a wave of red-hot anger creeping up her neck at the insult. She had her father’s eyes, feet, and temper.

“Writing is a nice hobby, but you’ll never be your sister.” Mr. Harper downed the last of his drink and half-stumbled back to the bar for another.

Some people find confidence in alcohol. Some find courage, strength, warmth... But many just find a good place to hide away from the rest of the world.

Demi dangled her legs over the railing, breathing in the cool night air from the balcony of her sister’s bedroom. Even with Margo leaving, at least she would always have the stars to comfort her when she was upset; tiny glittering specks, so far away that most of them had already died out by the time she could see their light.

“Don’t listen to him,” Margo’s voice called from inside. “He’s just drunk.”

“He’s always ‘just drunk.’” Demi sighed, wearily pushing herself to her feet.

“I know,” Margo muttered, shoving messy heaps of clothes into her brand new suitcase, “but you’ll show him.”

“I guess.” The truth was, Demi agreed with their father; she would never be as wonderful, brilliant, or successful as her sister. She just didn’t have that inexplicable thing that lived within Margo. And she felt it was unlikely that she would ever happen upon an inexplicable thing of her own.

“Hey, I did. And once I’m all set up in New York, you can come live with me. It’ll do you good to get out of this place… away from them.”

“Your apartment is smaller than this room,” Demi laughed, helping her sister to pack.

“You can sleep in the bathtub.” Whether or not Margo was joking mostly depended on Demi’s willingness to sleep in said bathtub.

“I still don’t understand why you’re moving to New York. You can write from anywhere. Why choose a tiny apartment in the middle of a smelly, noisy—”

“Because I’ve always wanted to live in the city, and I’m finally in a position where I’m able to live out my dreams.” Margo smiled. “If I don’t like it, I’ll move somewhere else. But I have to try. Trying is the most important thing anyone can do.”

“How did our parents manage to produce something like you?” Demi asked, shaking her head in awe of her sister. She was incapable of comprehending how she could have possibly shared DNA with the person standing next to her.

“I’m sure there was a lot of liquor involved. No way could dad have landed someone like mom if she’d been sober,” Margo said with a toothy grin, pushing down on the suitcase with all of her weight in a failed attempt to close the lid around its contents. “Here,” she said, pulling a black, sequined dress from the pit of fabric, “take this.”

“I thought you bought it for your launch party?”

“Yeah, well, my agent kindly informed me that I greatly overestimated the fanciness of said party,” she murmured. “My career is nowhere near sequins and rhinestones, not yet.”

“I’ll keep it until you’re ready for it,” Demi said, wrapping the heavy dress up into a ball. “Do you really have to leave tonight?”

“No. I just want to get out of here, Demi,” Margo said, looking around her room, which had been elegantly and obnoxiously decorated by their pill-powered mother. “Anyway, your birthday’s in a few weeks, and I’m certainly not going to miss that. I’ll be back before you know it.”

Demi bolted upright in Margo’s bed, her pillow soaked through with tears, as it had been every morning for the last three days. After the dream-saturated haze of her last memory with her sister had faded, her eyes wandered to the still-packed suitcase on the floor. She had hoped it wouldn’t be there… but there it was, bruised by dents and scuffs and burns; a constant reminder that her sister had returned too soon, and that she would never be coming back.

“I hope you’re not planning on staying in bed all day, again.” Mrs. Harper’s disappointment permeated the door.

“I was considering it,” Demi retorted, flopping back down to her damp pillow.

“I could use some help with the party, you know.”

“It’s not a party, mom. It’s a wake. If you think they’re the same thing, your doctor needs to reevaluate your combination of meds,” she snapped, yanking the blanket up over her head.

“Demetria Lynn Harper, you get your sassy-ass dressed and come downstairs to help me!”

Demi sighed, and rolled herself to her feet. When her mother was actually capable of forcing a real emotion out through the barrier of various medications, and when that particular emotion was anger, she was not to be messed with.

After little debate on what to wear, Demi dragged her feet the entire trip to the kitchen, where her mother was anxiously fussing over the new chef’s shoulder, as he attempted to put together plates of tiny hors d’oeuvres that actually met her impossible standards.

“You can’t be serious,” Mrs. Harper said, eyeing her daughter with disapproval.

“What?” Demi asked, motioning to the black, sequined dress that skimmed her body; it didn’t fit her quite as well as it had Margo, what with her lack of voluptuousness and all, but it worked. “I’m dressed.”

“Your father’s going to have a fit,” Mrs. Harper muttered, returning to her careful inspection of the chef’s work. “Couldn’t you use regular lilies for the stuffed blossoms? Daylilies are so… common.”

“Regular lilies are no good.”

“I don’t care if they’re no good, they’re prettier.”

“No, no, no,” the chef said. “Bad!” he shouted, wrapping his hands around his throat and sticking out his tongue as he forced a cough. “Very bad. No lilies for food.”

“Fine,” she huffed, shoving a package into Demi’s hands. “Demetria, hang these up,”

“Really, mom? Streamers?”

“They’re black,” Mrs. Harper said in defense, a look of slight confusion on her face. “They’re appropriate for the occasion.”

Demi shook her head all the way to the living room. Margo would have hated the entire ordeal, not just because her life had ended, but, if her death had to be celebrated, she would have wanted it to be celebrated poetically; to have her ashes drift from the windy cliffs of Ireland at sunset, or spread across the graves of her favorite writers. There was no poetry to be found in fragile paper streamers and tiny foods. A cocktail party simply couldn’t do justice to the wonderfully eccentric enigma that had been Margaret-Jean Harper.

Mr. Harper staggered into the living room, distracted from his third morning-visit to the bar by the sight of his least favorite daughter in his dead daughter’s dress.

“You’re not wearing that,” he said. The alcohol made it difficult for his lips to form words.

“Clearly, I am,” Demi said from atop her step-ladder, paying little attention to the drunken ramblings of her mourning father.

“I said,” Mr. Harper boomed, grabbing the back of Demi’s dress with numb fingers, “you’re not wearing that.”

Before Demi could get a firm grasp on what was happening, a throbbing pain was pulsing at the back of her skull, and her father was hovering over her with a look of pure resentment as she stared up at him from the floor.

“Richard!” Mrs. Harper screeched from the doorway, but made no attempt to help her fallen child. “Demetria… go get yourself cleaned up.”

Demi held the back of her head, taking the stairs three at a time. Her eyes burned as she stared into the mirror of Margo’s bathroom. It had been years since her parents were able to bring her to tears, mostly because her sister had always been there to offer words of comfort. “One day, you’re going to leave this all behind, and you’ll never come back. We’re both going to run off and be happy, and they’ll be stuck here, alone, with each other’s terrible flaws.” But Demi downed a handful of aspirin from the medicine cabinet for her head and let the tears roll, because those days were over. Margo had no more words to offer her; they’d all been stolen by someone who was too drunk to care that they were too drunk to drive.

Demi didn’t change out of her dress, she simply waited in her sister’s room until people started arriving for the wake. She knew her father wouldn’t dare touch her in the presence of company, because nothing was more important than the impression they left on others. As she weaved her way down the staircase, a sea of black dresses and charcoal suits filled the living room, crowding around the Margo-shrine that Mrs. Harper had made. Demi appreciated the effort her mother had put into the wake, and she loved her sister dearly… but still, the thought crossed her mind that, had she been the one to die, the festivities would have been far less grand. They likely wouldn’t have surpassed microwaved hot dogs, and a cell phone handed around to show the pictures of her middle-school spelling bee, with a mandatory note about how she hadn’t made it to the third round, because she’d misspelled ‘pedantries’… but at least Margo had helped her find humor in the irony. Of course, that would fully depend on the assumption that her parents would have invited guests at all.

After hearing innumerable ’I’m sorry for your loss’s and ’She was too young’s offered to her parents, Demi was on the brink of puking. But it was Mr. Dallon’s—Mr. Harper’s business partner—mention of ‘untimely death’ that had pushed her over the edge. She managed to slip away from the crowd, which, admittedly, hadn’t been all that difficult. As she was the biggest disappointment of the family, her parents rarely held any sort of event in her honor, which meant that most of the family and friends tended to forget about her existence entirely. To those eyes, she was just another person in black, showing up to support Mr. and Mrs. Harper in their time of grief. After all, the loss of a sister couldn’t possibly hurt as much as the loss of a child, even when it was the same person who was lost. With a teary glare back at the people who were not sorry for her loss, Demi closed the door and made her way down the sidewalk.

‘Untimely death.’ What an odd phrase. It insinuates that there is such a thing as a timely death, which there isn’t. No one ever says, ‘Oh, Great-Aunt Rita was one-hundred-and-two. She still enjoyed kickboxing every other Thursday, and she played a mean game of Twister, but it really was about time for her to go.’ No one is ever truly ready for someone’s life to end. Death is that person who shows up to parties too early, while you’re still running around with curlers in your hair trying to get everything taken care of. You knew they were coming, of course, but damn them for completely ignoring the time that was clearly marked on the invitation. And they didn’t even bring crackers!

Demi breathed in the cool night air as her feet led her to the library. It was a path she had taken so many times it didn’t require any sort of consciousness, which made for an awful lot of mind-wandering. By the time her knees hit the ground in front of the library’s back door, fiddling around the lock with a bobby pin, her cheeks were shining with tears from memories that never used to make her cry.

She didn’t break into the library to steal books that were already free, of course. She broke into the library because she had spent so much time there with Margo. They’d haul armfuls of books up to the roof—a place where neither books nor people were meant to be—and read to each other for hours. They’d read dark poetry, and silly children’s stories; airship adventures, and vampire romances; books about magic, and orphans, and zombies. No matter the story, Margo would always find the loveliest things to point out. “There’s beauty in everything,” she would say, “if only you look from the right angle. Sometimes, the greatest beauty is in the distance.”

Demi stumbled her way through the dark library, breathing in the musky scent of words, which would forever remind her of Margo. Stepping out onto the roof, a new tear ran down her cheek. She had never seen this place without her sister, and her sister would never see this place again.

After making her way to a pile of pillows they had left in a hidden corner, Demi lay on her side, muffling sobs into her knees, which she had pulled tightly to her chest.

Crying over a loved-one’s death is often a selfish thing. You cry because they will no longer be in your life. You won’t ever see them or speak to them again. You won’t hug them, or hold them, or laugh with them. People rarely cry for the lives that the lost will never lead. But Demi did. She cried for the words that Margo would never write; for the big city that she would never see; for the stunningly miserable love story that she would never experience. She cried until her chest hurt so badly that she couldn’t breathe, or speak, or cry any longer.

Gasps. Horrible, desperate, rasping gasps. Demi tried to fill her lungs with air, but the pain in her chest bound them like barbed wire. Waves of static filled her head, drowning out the sounds of the night, drowning out the sounds of her own heartbeat. Of course, she had no way of knowing that her heart wasn’t making any sound at all.

Struggling to push herself to her feet, she tried to force pleas of help past her lips, but nothing came. The pain radiated through her shoulders, down her arms, down her torso, to the tips of her toes and the top of her head. The pain engulfed her in a savage flame, until it became so unbearable that her vision went muddy and the world crumbled in around her. Stumbling backward, the last sight Demi set her gaze upon was the stars. Somehow, the sky was hovering directly in front of her face, and she was floating—flying through the air, racing toward her sister. Then, in the enveloping darkness, the pain was gone.