Kimmie’s Sister by Lisa Wolfe

“You mean a complete internet suicide too?” I nodded agreeing with her. I have been on Facebook since I was thirteen. She told me she has too. And we yammered away then for almost two hours. I pulled out my phone and played her Mary J. Blige’s “Everything.” But after meeting her that night at the aunt’s house, I have only seen her a handful of other times, and these were brief, snippets of seeing. I’d catch her all dressed up in what looked like a flag core uniform, a shiny, polished baton at her side sitting in the bleachers during marching band practice, or I imagined I glimpsed a girl with her honey blonde hair near the woods outside of our neighborhood. But that girl had a wild look about her as she left the forest of trees, that girl smoothed her skirts and spat in her hands to fix her hair. (And that girl never waved back.)

When I asked Kimmie more about her sister, she grunted and said, “We’re twins, Emily’s the baton twirler.” I made up stories about who Emily was. But most of what I knew about Kimmie’s sister was that she seemed to listen to me ramble on about Mary J. Blige and then Stevie Ray Vaughan (that first time I met her at the aunt’s house) when most of the other girls wanted to talk about their icons. And she likes the country music that her aunt’s boyfriend plays in the house while Kimmie likes Blige. And Kimmie pushed my headphones deep into her ears the first time I played her “Everything” in the cafeteria line. (They both make me jittery as if I have drunk too many colas.) And all girls are not the same.

“Probably she’ll go,” Kimmie had said. My palms started to sweat weeks ago when Kimmie told me her sister liked big parties. I gazed around at the clusters of girls and the few token guys, and I couldn’t decide where to join and whether the dim light in the large cavernous room that opened to the outside made us all prettier. When Emily stumbled on the patio, and tossed her head back and shook her hips, I moved in slow so I could watch for a few moments. She danced with another guy but this wouldn’t matter for long. My legs refused to move. I choked on my breath, and if I couldn’t breathe or move, I couldn’t break in. What would she say to me when I strolled up to her? Would she even remember my name?

There were some things that seemed to work out naturally, and after those few minutes hanging back, when I moved toward her, I wasn’t hearing Taylor Swift anymore. “Leave My Little Girl Alone,” echoed in my head, and Kimmie’s sister was everything. I tried sauntering smooth to where she danced, as if I was every bit as cool as the music playing in my mind, like this wasn’t any big deal I happened to be at the after prom party too. The guy she danced with and any guy in the room that stood within two feet of her, I noticed and instantly did not like. When I got up close enough to hear what she would say, it felt like breathing to slide up next to her and tap her arm. “Wanna dance?” I glanced around the giant patio and surveyed all of the other girls. I put Emily’s face on every one of them and pictured them all saying yes.

Lisa Wolfe is a freelance writer living in North Carolina. When she’s not working on a story, she enjoys bird watching with her husband and their two children. (She counts her blessings to have seen a great horned owl perched in a bushy magnolia tree take flight during a family walk this winter.) Her latest book, Leaving the Party, is a collection of short fiction available on Kindle Direct Publishing. She currently writes flash fiction and has a collection due out later this year. She blogs at “Character Talk,” http://charactertalk.wordpress.com/