There was a difference between being a slacker and being lazy. I’d been the slacker in the family-or maybe I was the lazy one. There’d been talk at our old school about raising our GPA from a 4.0 to a 4.2 scale. Everyone was nice to me, though, thinking back, that might’ve been because of Willow. I wasn’t in the top tier of the social hierarchy, but I was liked. Robbie wasn’t ever going to be normal, but Willow and me-we were. He was a walking, talking, and eating computer. I didn’t know why she felt she had to compete with Robbie. We’d shared the bedroom too until our pre-teen years, and then we got freeeee-dom! (I’m saying that in the best Braveheart yell I can muster.) We were the only two sisters, so it made sense we shared a bathroom. I’d found empty bottles of laxatives in our shared bathroom, smelled the dried puke in the toilet, and a couple of times, I’d woken up to find her exercising in the middle of the night.

Maybe she felt as if she had to compete with Robbie.

Once, she made a six-foot papier-mâché dragon that won a state competition. She excelled at almost everything creative, or it seemed that way. My brother could spit out statistics because he was the family genius. Portside wasn’t huge, but it wasn’t small either-maybe around twenty thousand people lived in this suburb outside of Merridell. My family had just moved to Portside, Oregon, from Schilling, Arizona, because of my dad’s promotion, so the whole picnic had been new faces, new names, and that feeling of being the newbie on the scene. I’d been lying in bed next to this girl I’d been introduced to twelve hours earlier at a company picnic. The first time I snuck into Ryan Jensen’s bed was an accident.

Ryan's Bed by Tijan