The Halfblood Sister

Chapter 2: The Beginning

  I'm so confused and don't know where to begin. It seems like everything I thought I had finally been able to get together in my life is just unimportant now. How can I just keep going when all I want is for the world to stop long enough for me to process all the shit going through my head. I guess it's best to start at the beginning.

I'm Jo, short for Joleen, and my sister's name is Leslie. She is ten years younger than me but acts like she is still a 10-year-old most days. That's very unbecoming of a 17-year-old mind you, or at least that's what mother would say. If you haven't done the math yet that makes me 27. The worst number I have turned so far in my distinct memory of numbers I've turned. I always heard that thirty was the worst, but I can't attest to that just yet. However, if it is worse then I just don't want to reach thirty.

The history Leslie and I have is possibly why I wanted so much to have a more stable life at this point in my timeline. I wanted to provide her with stability and show her that we would break generational curses by exceeding anything our parents or theirs had ever accomplished. And we have so far, but you know how failure likes to raise its dreary head and take back over. Dragging you down until you feel you will never survive another letdown.

Leslie and I had come from a long line of addiction and poverty. Our sad story isn't much unlike anyone else's really. Hungry and cold most winter nights, thirsty and hot most summer ones. We had neglectful parents who didn't pay attention to me when they partied with their friends, and this allowed their teenage sons and daughters to do whatever they felt so inclined to at my expense. I was punished for being too loud or interrupting the party if I complained too much or didn't want to "play" with their children. Our parents were too high or drunk to realize it was a distress call to save me from my surroundings.

Then one night we received that salvation in the form of an overdose from a bad batch of whatever drug they were shooting up that night. I found our mother first on the floor of the bathroom of our home. It was dirty and disgusting as she wasn't a house-cleaning type of mother. She had days where she was lucid and loving and would cook us dinner after cleaning the kitchen and sprucing up the house but those were few and far between. It had been a minute since that kind of day in this bathroom.

I remember feeling so sorry for her that she had to die in such a dirty room. A bathroom would have been bad enough but one so dirty was only pitiful. I wanted to clean it to save her some humility when the ambulance showed up, but I knew it may wipe away some type of information they may need to determine her cause of death. I was thirteen years old for three days when this happened to us. I was only thirteen.

I headed from the filthy bathroom into the kitchen to retrieve the phone that hung on the wall beside the empty refrigerator when I saw my dad in the recliner in the area most people call a living room. Ironic to call it that when it was now, quite literally, a dead room. He was unlike my mother and looked as though he had fallen asleep peacefully there watching a show.

Mother had very visibly had a much worse reaction to the drug as she was quite swollen and her face distorted. She had foamed at the mouth and asphyxiated in the process of her death. I didn't look at her face for very long before I left her. I called out "Dad? DAD!" but he didn't respond to me. I walked a little closer and saw his skin looked pale and stiff so I just backed up into the kitchen and picked up the receiver of the telephone dialing 911. I tell them that I need someone to come because I think my parents took some bad medicine and then I go to Leslie and keep her with me until the police show up. They sure brought a lot of people and a lot of cars. I hope they don't figure out what I did.