Shut Up I'm Thinking

Fighting Our Demons

She was so young. Bex was so young. She was fifteen, my baby sister was only fifteen.

No one saw it coming, for us to come home from work and see such a gruesome scene. At First I thought it was a break-in, but the gun was in her hand and she still had fresh tear streaks down her face. She was always smiling, her big green eyes always shining.

But now as I sat next to our parents, dressed in our black attire, I couldn't stand to look at her picture on the stand. Those eyes deceiving everyone else's, haunted me in my dreams because maybe, just maybe, if I had just looked a little closer I could have noticed something was wrong.

I sat by her grave all day. I didn't mind the ants crawling over my feet or legs, I didn't mind that my dress will be stained by the fresh dirt, nor did I mind the goosebumps forming on my arms from the chill of the October air. I just sat in silence and stared at her grave.

My parents came and got me a few hours later. They set a jacket around my shoulders and guided me to the car. I didn't say anything along the ride and they didn't force me to. When we were home, I went straight to Bex's room and fell back on her bed, staring at the ceiling.

When Bex was eight and I was eleven, she used to sneak into my room because she was scared of the dark and didn't want to be alone. One day, to make her feel better, I surprised her by gluing a bunch of glow-in-the-dark stars to her ceiling. She ended up falling in love with astronomy and added constellations to the bunch. We would talk for hours about the stories behind the stars and what it would be like one day when we get added to them. Even though we were three years apart, my little sister was my best friend. There weren't any secrets between us, at least I didn't think there were.

We only started growing more distant almost a year ago when I got Bex her first phone for her fifteenth birthday. Our parents didn't want her to have a phone, claiming she wasn't "responsible" or "old" enough for one. I knew how much she felt left out with her friends, being the only one without a phone, so I decided to help her out. Mom and dad were mad at me, but when they saw that beautiful smile on Bex's face they let it go. I'm not sure how her cheeks didn't hurt after smiling so big.

After that we stopped talking as much since she was always distracted by her texts or new social media accounts. Once, I tried to see who she was talking to and she hid the screen from me and hid in her room.

As I was laying on her bed, my eyebrows furrowed. I looked over at her desk where her phone was laying, face down. Slowly I sat up to grab it then sit back against her headboard. Her phone was turned off, which was odd since she always had it with her. I turned it back on, and while I waited for it to load, I subconsciously scratched at the case. Then my nail got caught on something that turned out to be a sticker on her sky blue case. I would have flattened it back out, but I noticed writing underneath it. Slowly, I peeled off the boy band sticker and saw a date written in sharpie.

8/17/16

As far as I could remember, there was nothing significant about that day. A sound buzzed to notify Bex's phone had turned back on, so I tried to put in her password but it was incorrect. We had set up her phone together, so I should have known her password unless she changed it. With furrowed brows, I typed in the numbers from the date written on the case. They worked.

With one hand on the phone and the other by my mouth as I chewed my nails, I clicked on the messenger icon to see who she had last talked to. There was only one chat there under a name I didn't recognize and it was to a girl named Tara. I had always remembered Bex to have more friends and always asking to hang out with them on weekends, so it surprised me when the only conversations she had were with a girl named Tara, our mom, and I. I clicked Tara and noticed Bex had sent a paragraph text message to her without a response. As I read the paragraph, tears started to stream down my face until my vision was too blurry to see the words anymore. I never even got to see my baby sister in her first relationship, let alone know she was in one. The more I looked through her phone, the more I felt oblivious to everything in my sister's life. Her pictures were filled with a girl I assumed as Tara and herself. There were so many, continuing all the way back to August of 2016.