Chapter 12 - Flashback

It was a cold winter day, Angie was waiting outside school with her heavy backpack shivering in her thin jumper. Her mother hasn’t turned up to pick her up from school yet. She’s been very forgetful ever since she found out she was pregnant.

A black sedan pulls up on the sidewalk, her grandfather’s car. She looks up at her older sister, Sophia. Sophia opens her mouth to say something, but David, her brother, is already walking towards the car. Sophia hesitates but then takes Angie’s small hand in hers and walks towards the car, towards their grandfather.

He greets the trio with a warm welcome and a smile, one that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. It never does. The one that always makes Sophia grip Angie’s hand tighter. David doesn’t notice though and immediately dives into a play-by-play of his football game. Angie can’t wait to be fifteen and all grown up. Only five years to go.

Her grandfather takes a different route than usual - not to his house, not to theirs. David asks where he’s taking them, but their grandfather stays silent. He’s never this silent unless he’s mad. But why would he be mad?

Sophia stiffens slightly beside Angie and reiterates David’s question, not in the same curious tone, but in a firmer one. When he finally replies it’s in an eerily calm voice, one Angie has never heard.

“Don’t you worry about that, we’re going somewhere particularly… special.” Angie’s face lights up, she loves when her grandfather takes them somewhere special. But Sophia’s face hardens. Angie doesn’t know why, but before she can answer the car halts to a stop

---------

It’s September 5th, Angie’s birthday. She’s finally fifteen. But it’s not how she imagined it. No one remembered it was her birthday, not her mother, and not five-year-old Nicole, but they can hardly be blamed. Nicole’s only a child, and her mother is overwhelmed to say the least.

Angie had always imagined her big brother David - he would have been twenty by now - to teach her archery like he had promised when she was ten. She had imagined Sophia - twenty two by now - to bake her cake and light her candles like she did every birthday. But now, on her fifteenth birthday, all she had were pictures of them and two gravestones hours away.

Angie walks home from school, her bag heavy on her back with all her books and that familiar, albeit invisible, weight she carries everywhere with her. She takes a detour instead of heading straight home. Why would she want to go home anyway? Where grief is a constant and silence is a familiar companion that greets her with open arms. And her sister - her sweet, innocent, young sister - tries to fill the house with jokes and cheerfulness that never reaches their mother and hardly ever touches Angie, even if she pretends for Nicole’s sake.

She walks past the lolly shop for the first time in five years. It’s loud, vibrant, obnoxious happiness doesn’t reach Angie like it did when she was ten. Now, on her fifteenth birthday, she walks past it alone, something Sophia promised would never happened. But it did, on her fifteenth birthday.