My problem growing up was I thought I had time to do everything in this world. I believed life was limitless, that it was a paved road always lined with prosperous opportunities and a new adventure that resided over every bridge and sharp curve. Death was a stigma of shadows that lay unopened in my mind, a façade to scare little kids when they misbehaved. Nobody had ever died in my family to convince me that there was a vigilante pocking souls until we lost Blaine the summer of my tenth year. Blaine had been my older brother. He was a senior in high school and seventeen years young. At first I could not wrap my head around the sour fact that Blaine was gone and he was not coming back. I could not believe it at first. I would sit for hours on our staircase, my eyes glued to the front door, just waiting for Blaine to plow though our small threshold with muddy feet and smelling like gasoline and sulfur. He never did come though and I eventually stopped waiting around for Blaine’s ghostly smiles and baritone laughs. He was gone, thus leaving me with the dry fact that time passing is inevitable.
I did not get to see Blaine at his own funeral. There was just a closed ebony casket sitting in the middle of the church. People crowded around the big square box exchanging tissues and words of sorrow and guilt. Nameless people asked if I was okay and said they were sorry that I had lost an older brother as brawny and loving as Blaine. I never said anything back to these unknown people. My words were fruitless and unimportant and I just sat in the last pew of the church trying to understand everything that was going on. I kept repeating in my head that Blaine was gone, that he died in a car crash because he was drunk. Blaine’s friends had been in the car with him, but they had all lived only emerging from the crushed pickup truck with black bruises tarnishing their skin. Because of this, I found myself asking death why he only took my brother, but he never responded.
I never got over my Blaine’s passing. I came to the bitter conclusion that it’s hard to forget someone who gave you so much to remember. I believe this is why my parents started cracking down on me a couple months after they buried Blaine. They wanted me to fill Blaine’s empty shoes and to be the golden child that Blaine was not able to be. They did not want me to fall into the same mold Blaine fit into. My parents wanted me to redraw the family name so they would not be known as the people who lost their son to substance.
I was not able to liberate my parents of their dream of me being the perfect daughter. I could not fit into my parent’s jigsaw puzzle. My sides were made of razorblades. They were too rough to fit into my parent’s life, and once they realized I was a lost perilous, they gave up on me.
Death, on the other hand, had never let me go. I could feel him breathing down my neck and snooping in the shadows. I undergo his everlasting presence every time my lips touch the end of a cigarette and when my car lines up for another daunting street race. All this time, I assumed death was waiting for me to slip up like Blaine did, so he can pocket the second sibling for his own, but I was wrong.
The summer before my senior year of high school, I was forced to cope with another death, but this death was not a mistake. It was a murder, lathered in resentment, lost money and blood, and I was thrown into the middle of it. I became engulfed in guilty parties, lake-buried secrets and hidden pasts, and tangled in caution tape, steamy lies and love triangles. Instead of death playing me this time around, the murderer was. He was burning me at the stake, and pinning me against washed out facts so people could start pointing fingers at me. I had become the murders’ pawn and my time was dwindling. Life could no longer protect me with beautiful lies, for death had resurfaced with the painful truth as he asked me question, “Avalon, who really did it this time?”