Page 82 of Irreversible

“I’ll be your sidekick,” she announced, swinging from her knees on the monkey bars. “I can even have a nickname. What should it be?”

“I don’t want a sidekick. You’d probably pee your pants at the first sight of the Joker.”

“No, I won’t. I can be brave like you. Oh, I know!” She pointed to a nest settled in the branches of an aspen tree. “I could be a bluebird.”

“Nobody’s afraid of a bluebird.” I pulled one of the braids hanging upside down. “Besides, that name is taken.”

I spent my weekends sitting on the floor of the local comic bookstore, reading. I knew these things.

“Why? If no one is scared of them?”

“Because…you’re a pain in the butt. That’s why.”

The next day when she went to school, she asked her first-grade teacher to help her come up with a name inspired by the birds, and when she returned, she announced herself as the Blue Jewel.

Of course, I thought that was ridiculous.

“She followed me around for years after that. Always afraid she’d miss out on helping me do something heroic.” Objectively speaking, my fists were just prone to finding trouble, but in Sara’s imagination, I was fighting for justice. Protecting the defenseless.

“That’s the cutest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I didn’t think so at the time.”

“Sounds like a typical big brother, little sister relationship.”

It wasn’t.

Truth is, I had very complicated feelings toward my younger sibling. As we grew up, she was treated like a princess—like she was solely responsible for all the light and hope in the world,while I was born with a shadow attached to me. One I could never escape.

I wanted to hate Sara for what she represented.

And I tried.

But in the end, she was everything her parents saw in her, and as I lean back against the barricade, my gaze fixed on the cot where she once slept, I let the essence of her bleed through my words.

I bring her back to life, if only in memory.

“When I was finishing high school and deciding on a career, my mother looked me dead in the eyes and told me I shouldn’t bother, because I was destined for prison, anyway.”

“How could she say that to her own child?”

“She had her reasons.” My mother was a complex human. Damaged, in her own right.

I believe she was hopeful once, but when life let her down, she turned bitter. Unfortunately, I symbolized the beginning of that. “Anyway, it was Sara who followed me out—who told me she thought I had a different destiny. That I was meant to save people.”

She believed in me so hard, it started feeling…possible.

Her dreams gave me this little pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel—just enough to keep me from giving up. I enrolled in the police academy because of my sister and her audacious dreams, but that’s a secret I’m holding on to for several reasons.

It doesn’t really matter. That was a different life.

Now I’m a prisoner, just like Everly. Like Sara.

Our lives, threaded together between two cells. Devoid of light. Destined to end the same.

“Good.” Everly’s voice carries the same hard conviction my sister’s used to. “Because youareworth something. You’re worth so much more than you give yourself credit for.”

“Yeah.” I smile to myself. “You two are alike in a lot of ways.”

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