Amber

Chapter 28

February 25, 2015

Dear Journal,

I'm afraid.

I'm afraid that everyone I love will leave me. I feel like every day Brad and I spend together is one day closer to the one where we'll part forever. It's going to happen. Either we will break up at some point in the future, or one of us is going to die. That's gruesome, I know. But we humans are mortal, and nothing lasts forever. So, technically, the closer we become, the closer we also come to breaking apart.

Hannah will leave me too. She's already started. She spends all of her time online messaging some guy she found who is interested in joining that secret society in Asia. They've probably exchanged, like, a thousand emails. It's a little ridiculous, considering the society is supposed to stand against the use of modern technology. I've lived with Hannah for almost sixteen years, and believe me, that girl will never be able to survive without her phone and a hairdryer.

Of course, I could be wrong. Lately she has been a lot less the texting-and-hair-maintenance girl and a lot more the cleansing-of-auras-and-preparing-for-a-supposed-spiritual-journey girl. It's getting a little out of control. She's always lighting candles and listening to bizarre hypnosis music. It's like I'm living with Buffy the unclean aura-slayer.

My parents are getting sick of it too. For starters, they told her there's no way they are going to let her fly to Asia this summer to live in the mountains instead of getting a college degree. Hannah flipped out and told them how unfair that was because they were always more than fine with letting her move to New York after graduation to pursue acting. Then she said it wouldn't matter anyway once she turned eighteen because they won't be able to stop her. Then last week she finally admitted that she and Jake broke up. I guess they had been fighting for a while. We all tried to ask her about it in our own ways: Dad by opening a carton of ice cream to share with her and remind her all of the ways boys are stupid anyway, Mom by mentioning all of the cute boys in the neighborhood she always thought Hannah would get along with, and me by asking, "What the hell happened with you and Jake?"

"Nothing," Hannah said. "We just drifted apart. We want different things."

She didn't have to go into detail for me to know those differences. Jake is exactly like Hannah. Well ... the way Hannah used to be. He's a dreamer. He always supported the idea that he and Hannah might have to live in a studio apartment and bounce around from city to city or wherever the dream took them. He wants to go to school in Michigan on a football scholarship. He wants to win Heisman trophies and national championships. He doesn't want to live like a caveman.

This is the first time in my life when I have a boyfriend and Hannah doesn't. It feels so weird, like everything is backward. It's unsettling, like being pushed so hard you fall up. If the world is spinning backward, what will happen to gravity? Will we all just float away?

Maybe that's what Hannah wants. I remember how she used to tell me she wanted to fly away, soaring so high that she would be unreachable. Maybe she still wants that. Maybe she wants that for everyone.

Every time I try to talk to her about Brad, she brings up Jake or some other ex-boyfriend and mentions how she used to think they were all important to her but that she realized she could never be happy with any of them. She makes it sound like they were all holding her back from what she truly wanted to be. I'm not even sure what that is anymore. I wish she would tell me. I wish she would open up and tell me everything she's feeling. I know she wants to, but she's keeping it in. She always does. Part of being the big sister.

A few years ago we went on a family trip to Colorado. We all went skiing for our first times. Hannah was a natural, of course, and she had to spend most of her time teaching me how to get off of the damn ski lift properly and how to slow down near the bottom of the mountain and not kill myself by running into the giant metal fence guarding the lake.

I went down a few times on my own without her once I felt comfortable, and when I met her at the bottom, she was all quiet and forcing a smile. I asked her what was wrong, and she wouldn't say anything. Then we were all getting ready to leave, and Dad noticed Hannah walking with a limp. She pretended she was fine. She woke up the next day with a tennis ball-sized ankle, and we had to take her to the hospital for what turned out to be a bad sprain that she got while slipping on the ice walking back from turning in her skis.

If we didn't notice it, she probably wouldn't have said a word. She would have sucked it up and pretended to be fine. God forbid she ever let anyone take care of her.

God, she's so stubborn. Always wanting to be invincible. Always wanting to handle everything on her own. Never letting me or Mom or anyone help her.

Hannah is a walking fortress of solitude, keeping it all inside and holding in her screaming as if she can silence it.