Amy's Vision Board

I couldn’t even dream of my own graduation day coming, but for my older sister Amy, it finally had.  I couldn’t believe that my sister had finished the entire thing, an entire twelve years of school:  all of the drama, the bad times and the good, hard schoolwork, projects, the entire journey.  She made it.  She got through it all.  And today was her day to celebrate.  While I felt like I should have been happy for my older sister, I couldn’t help but feel sad, mostly because her graduation meant that she would be going away to college.  She would be leaving us, right when I needed her most, and I would be left all alone in a house that still carried the sting of my oldest sister’s death.

            Amy’s graduation party took place in the summer of 2006, a particularly sunny day in June.  The trees were bright green and the weather was warm.  Some days in Bridgeville during the summer would get so humid, but today was different.  The sun shone down on everyone at the party, basking them with cheery delight as everyone celebrated my sister’s achievement.  I wasn’t allowed to spend a lot of time in the sun because my skin was very sensitive and I would get sunburn, even with the layers and layers of sunscreen my mom had already diligently applied.  My bright red hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and while I felt like I would stick out at this party, nobody really noticed me.  I was used to the hairdressers and old ladies telling me how you couldn’t get my color of hair from a bottle, and I had grown accustomed to the teasing and snide remarks like “ginger.”  I had expected at least some attention at this party, but because Amy had achieved a major milestone in life and all I did was finish the seventh grade, nobody noticed me.  Everyone congratulated Amy and asked her where she was going to college and what she was going to study.  I could see the look of excitement on her face, like her world was really just beginning.  She gladly accepted cards from everyone, sneering at me because she knew that she would be getting money and I wouldn’t.  I just smiled back, but it was a fake kind of smile, because while my sister teased me about her leaving, I was actually quite sad about it, but she was too caught up in her own new world to realize.

            One of my older, bubbly aunts approached me with a smile after she had noticed I was sitting all by myself sipping an orange-flavored juice box.

            “Hey, Court,” she said.  “Aren’t you excited for your sister?”

            I nodded.

            “Are you excited about starting the eighth grade?  You know, pretty soon you’ll be in high school, and then before you know it, you’ll be graduating, too!  Aren’t you just excited about that?  I can remember when I first started high school…”

            She kept talking and talking and talking.  I zoned her out and thought about starting the eighth grade.  I was a little afraid because I may not have classes with my best friend Mindy.  I was nervous that I wouldn’t know anyone and that I would have to make all new friends.  And I was also scared because the end of eighth grade year meant that we would commemorate eighth grade recognition, and that event marked the celebration of becoming a high school student.  I didn’t want to think about all of these things coming up so quickly.  I wanted to scream out, to let everyone know how frightened I was that Amy was leaving, and that I was still really sad about my sister dying last year.  But ever since Rachel’s death, no one talked about their feelings because it might upset my mother, so we all held our grief in quiet solitude and pretended that we were fine.

            When my aunt finally left, I decided to walk over to the tables where there were all kinds of foods and drinks.  Some were made by my mother and others were brought by family and friends.  I stopped in front of what my mother called “Amy’s Vision Board.”  There were two sections of this board, one called “Past” and one called “Future.”  My mother had put together the part labeled “Past.”  On this section, different pictures of Amy’s life were pasted with captions and little stories.  I smiled at the pictures of us, and then frowned as I saw all of the pictures that had been taken with my older sister, Rachel.  I looked for a distraction, my eyes racing toward the “Future” section of the vision board.  This one had been put together entirely by Amy herself.  There was a picture of her in front of the mascot at the college she would be attending, a picture of an elementary school classroom, a picture of a wedding ring, and a picture of our family.  I started crying because in the picture of our family, Rachel was still alive, and it didn’t make sense that she would be in the “Future” part of the vision board because she wasn’t coming back.  She was gone, and she wouldn’t be part of our family anymore.  I cried and cried in front of Amy’s Vision Board, and I wanted someone to come up and give me a hug and tell me it would be alright, but everyone was too focused on Amy’s achievement, that she had graduated, and that she was going to college.  I was still trapped, lost in a world between youth and adulthood, and I was terrified of being alone.