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I'm Glad My Mom Died, By Jennette McCurdy

A small note: These are just my thoughts and reflections, noted down for myself mostly and not meant to encourage or discourage you from reading the book. I believe whether one likes or dislikes a book is ultimately so personal and intimate a choice that you can't trust a recommendation or a non-recommendation beyond the bare bones synopsis.

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relatable - The shock-inducing, click-bait-sequel title initially turned me off this book completely (So much for not judging a book by it's cover - or in this case, title.). Rather, I picked this book up yesterday on impulsive whim after a bout of crying over some things my mother said to me. Recently, I've felt increasingly tormented by her comments, doubting at times if they may be a cause for my sadness and general lack of confidence. I hoped reading another person's account would guide me in some way and for the most part, this book delivered.

Jennette's account came across frank and honest. I relate to many aspects of her story on a surface level - the way I desperately seek my mother's approval, glance over at her - literally or figuratively - before every decision, every move - the way my confidence and happiness seem less dictated by my own wants and values than my mother's. Reading Jennette's story affirmed my suspicion that I would be correct to resist my mother in some aspects, to not follow everything she says to the dot. I thank this book for giving me that assurance.

engaging - I read the whole book in a day or so, which is very quick for me. The chapters are short, the story is fast-paced and immersive, lingers and skips at the right moments.

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unremarkable prose - I didn't much like the writing style, didn't find the humor humorous. The prose is not bad enough to distract, but not good enough to please. However, style is, of course, a matter of personal preference.

detachment - The narrative drew little emotion from me. I experienced no visceral, deeper-than-surface-level connection with the author. The bulimia posed a brief, mild shock at points, but nothing else touched me beyond a bare brush of the shoulder. I don't blame my detachment on the book though, it's more so a reflection of my cynicism than anything.

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June 23, 2023 4:13 pm

I understand finally why we return like clockwork to people who are cruel to us - those content to slam doors in our faces, to leave us crying in hallways, to ridicule and criticize even as tears dribble unbidden down our cheeks.

We go to them again and a again because we all succumb, at intervals, to loneliness, to a desire to be loved. And we have nobody else.

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Toby was surprised that her skin, pale as alabaster and raw bone for as long as he could remember, didn't burn under the sun's sword-like rays. Rather, the light dotted her cheeks, glinted off stray curls, and set her aglow.

He wondered what she'd have been like in another world, a parallel fate where the sparrow hadn't dug her up and she'd been left, unknown and unknowing among the masses - if her skin should have been a few shades warmer, more vanilla creamer than skim milk; whether her hair was really blond, not brown; if her eyes might once have been blue instead of dull grey.

"What?" Lily asked, not taking her eyes off the road. It hardly took an arith to spot his prolonged and intent staring.

"You belong here." On the outside, he stopped himself from adding.

Perhaps she understood anyway, for he thought she smiled then. The light caught the corner of her mouth and lifted, stretched the taut line of her lips into something more than the typical Lucian-esque quirk of the mouth that more denoted joy than expressed it.

He could have kissed her then, leaned ever so slightly left and pressed his mouth to the corner of her lips. He didn't.

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March 12, 2023 3:36 pm

A word of appreciation for those books and stories that perchance you pick up, that don't have exceptional plot nor singular prose, but which fill a hole in your heart, are just what you need in the moment. They voice your most coveted hopes, most secret fears, so you may feel less alone.

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March 9, 2023 2:25 pm

It is fundamentally a deception to know that your best wasn't good enough, isn't good enough, would never be good enough.

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March 7, 2023 8:49 pm

Did I do something to offend you?

No, I assure her. Somewhere, deep down. I’d expected the question. It was nothing out of the ordinary, given how suddenly and unflinchingly I’d ceased to say more than a few words to her. I only didn’t expect her to care enough about whatever flimsy, translucent strands of friendship existed between us to ask. The idea that anything she did could anger me, that I had the time or mental energy to invest in fury was in itself preposterous to me.

We got into a somewhat drawn out conversation after school, mostly because I still cannot, will not shut my mouth.

I noticed the way she seemed to recoil, to balk at conversation as she had never done before. It bothered me, at first because I knew I had unwittingly become one of the girls who’d so disappointed me in middle school. The sort who’d talk and laugh with you one day and look through you the next.

Upon further pondering however, I came to the conclusion that electing to ignore her abruptly and rudely had not been my chief mistake. My mistake had been in ceding again to the belief that revelation would cultivate kindred understanding, that laying oneself bare would bring anything but deceptive nakedness, that my internal cynic could ever trust any stranger I spoke to without a fluorescent screen to shield my identity.

Every few years, I succumb to the wish for the brand of elusive, deep, interpersonal connection that books depict in tantalizing detail. Every time I have been disappointed. I can’t help but think I shouldn’t try again. Stupidity is, after all, doing the same thing and expecting different outcomes.

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March 6, 2023 3:37 am

I've swum halfway out to the middle of the lake. The only way is forward.

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"Would you ever be an internet personality?"

"No." I reply shortly, some vain attempt to nip the digression in the bud.

"Why not?"

"I don't have the personality for it."

"I'm sure that's not true."

"I don't have a personality."

"Who told you that?"

"I don't think I needed anyone to tell me that."

"Everyone has a personality."

If holding no opinion, cowering at conflict, wallowing in mediocrity was a personality; if the vanilla ice cream squished at the bottom of the freezer was a personality, then sure, I do have one.

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March 1, 2023 9:36 am

I wish good things would befall tragical people.

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February 19, 2023, 10:04 am

I like the idea of leaving this here, sending it out to someone or no one. Much more satisfying than keeping doubts and misgivings contained, buried folders deep in a Google doc. I like the idea of my trivial musings traveling through the visible and invisible tubes of fiber and binary that connect one IP address to another. 

I like to think it’s the modern equivalent of tying a letter to a balloon and seeing where it lands, or sending a package to a fake address, or leaving a message in a bottle on the shore.

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February 17, 2023, 3:51 pm

To have said too much, and left yourself too bare in front of someone that doesn’t care, is an acute, poignant, pernicious strain of discomfort. It’s that moment of open-mouthed, deer-in-the-headlights shock when the camera flashes just as you look up, before you’re ready. You’re naked, exposed, stripped of something you can’t quite put your finger on.

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A Prologue Nobody Asked For - Chapter 4

The last bit of my fanfiction for M.L. Rio’s If We Were Villains.

He waited until the others had retreated to bed before handing James the book, sensing somehow the exchange was too intimate to be had in front of the others. If he’d wanted to avoid suspicion though, solitude was unquestionably a mistake.

“What did you think?” James asked. It wasn’t what he’d been expecting, and Oliver was never much good at improv.

He knew. “Boring, drier than Frederick’s lectures.” James laughed, though it didn’t reach his eyes.

“And the poems?”

“What?”

“You had to be at least a little curious.”

Perhaps he should have kept playing, shouldn’t have given in so easily. But he knew instinctively lying would drive an unbreachable rift between them, and he couldn’t bear the thought of losing the only proper friend he’d ever had. 

“They were good.” Then, sensing that was too unfeeling an assessment for something James had probably poured his heart and soul into, went on, “I was impressed by how much thought you put into them. I think…I think you put into words emotions I’ve never been able to describe.” 

“You’re lying.” he retorted, and for a moment, Oliver thought he’d seen through partial truth, guessed at all the piffling critiques he’d left unsaid out of nicety. Perhaps he would have said them one day, perhaps never. Should James persist down the writer’s path, he would get enough flak from their viper-mouthed classmates, bespeckled editors and yellow-toothed critics. He thought he would rather have been encouraged in James’ place, so that was what he did. 

Eventually then James smiled.

“If somebody had to read it, I’m glad it was you.” Oliver couldn’t remember smiling wider in his life.

Their opportunities for one-on-one conversations dwindled that year. Camilo had answered Oliver’s silent wish, replacing the morning laps with theatrical stunts like back flips and balancing apples on their noses. 

Whenever James insisted on staying behind in the library “to finish an essay”, Oliver was the only one who suspected what he was up to. If Pip had her doubts, she never voiced them. 

Occasionally, James would ask him to stay behind so they could “run the script again.” It was then that he’d read out his latest piece, nervous and stumbling, then peer over the edge of the paper at Oliver expectantly as if his life depended upon his assessment. Oliver looked forward to those moments, just the two of them. Like so many friendships, theirs was built on this confidence, and he felt himself lucky to know a side of James Farrow nobody else had seen.

Dennis was cut at the end of year two. And then there were seven.

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A Prologue Nobody Asked For - Chapter 3

Another scrap of fanfiction for the wonderful If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio; how I imagine Oliver became fascinated by James.He happened upon it while reshelving his borrowed books in the library on the last day of term — a battered copy of Shakespeare’s theatre by Walter Hodges discarded spine-in atop the row of Greek classics. J.F. was the only one of two names printed on the check-out list taped to the inside cover. He vaguely remembered Frederick mentioning the book in passing. Leave it to James to keep track of Frederick’s supplementary reading recommendations, let alone follow through on them. James had already left via the airport bus that morning, and Oliver didn’t trust the bands of sticky-fingered campers Dellecher housed in the summer months, so he took it with him. 

On the train home, he neglected his planned summer read in favor of James’ textbook. Frederick’s recommendation hadn’t moved him, but the mere possibility that James had paged through the book he held made it tempting, his reading of it unavoidable. Doing so, Oliver imagined, would be like trodding through the same places James had. Perhaps his conscious aim was to cram in some extra studying, avoid toeing the line of expulsion, as he’d done the past year. But it was only a poor excuse, invented to reconcile his infatuation, his obsession with solving the enigma that was James Farrow. 

It was the first of James’ books he’d read. Sure, they'd shared library books. Unlike most schools, Dellecher didn’t forbid students from writing in library books, and even encouraged them to annotate the margins “with noteworthy ideas”. Most of the books had filled up over the years, with newer comments forcibly tagged on in flaps of neon-colored sticky notes. They became the site of heated debates, spontaneous friendships, and even a handful of melodramatic love confessions that made Oliver chuckle on bleary-eyed all-nighters. James was an avid note-taker, and Oliver had made a habit of looking out for the marks of his blue-black fountain pen. 

Oliver slogged through page after page of garrulous minutiae — the quadruple negative “ne, never, no ... no” intends emphasis. It is not bad grammar. — Oliver had his doubts about that. He decided Hodges was the sort who wrote more to display his own intelligence than to inform his readers. As he nodded off to sleep, the book slipped from his hands, splaying open with a splat. He hurried to pick it up, noticing rows of millet-sized letters squeezed in the margins — a poem.

He holds it out to me:

“How to win friends and influence people”

Warren Buffet had read it

And a host of other names.

I took it with a shapely smile and nod of gratitude.

It’s put on,

a coat of paint that cracks when I shift the muscles on my face.

It surprises me how easy it is to lie.

Perhaps that was all acting was —

a series of lies.

Oliver suspected it referenced his father. He was surprised by how deep the bitterness ran, and how closely it resembled his own.

The margins were crammed with poems, mimicking Virginia Woolfe's Orlando in both the ferocity of emotion and the hasty way the words were crammed onto the page.

He should have stopped there, feeling himself intruding on something impossibly intimate, but couldn’t help himself. His eyes slid over poem after poem, absorbing like a sponge the clues that would form a whole of James’ character.

On page 115:

She was a contradiction.

Turned up her nose at plastic surgery,

but the skincare bottles filled up the counter.

Curled her lip at “all that chemical stuff” in hair dye.

Bought plant-based rubbish that barely held pigment.

Railed against tradition,

Did the same against my hold on the fork

the clumsy way I sliced broccolini

the fold of my napkin.

That must have been about his mother.

One titled Kindred Spirits read:

I’ve always wanted a friend, always sought a kindred spirit. But maybe the best friend, the one that can never disappoint you, is the one you never meet.

The final poem — shoved rather fittingly beneath the line “There’s daggers in men’s smiles” — read as follows:

I have lied,

once, twice thrice.

A school of acting,

a cocoon of lies.

I may be lying,

for all you know.

On stage,

we wear borrowed clothes,

say others’ lines.

It’s an escape from life’s troubles,

or a chance to live daringly,

tread carelessly,

kiss the girl you’d only dare observe from afar.

He closed the book and sat still, staring at the wall across from him in meditation. The writing was not objectively good, but there was something there. The words, though muddled and amateur, had gotten across their meaning, the twisted jealousy, bitterness, and loathing hidden beneath the smile and debonair and ease. Strangely, the look into James Farrow’s mind hadn’t humanized him for Oliver. It only fascinated him more and intensified his infatuation.

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A Prologue Nobody Asked for - Chapter 2

I've had the rest of this bit of If We Were Villains fanfiction sitting in my writing folder for a while, so I thought I'd continue posting it. As Sheryl Sandberg said, "Done is better than perfect".

They became running friends who chatted on the daily non-timed runs between misty puffs of breath.

James’ parents ran a successful orthodontic practice in California. “Orthodontists are respected like real doctors. Earn as much too. But they're really more plastic surgeons.” James had put it. They’d slung him all the way to a boarding school in London, for no other reason that he could conceive than to be rid of him for the majority of the year. He’d got his revenge though, he told Oliver with a bitter laugh, by deciding to become a Shakespearian actor. All of this Oliver already knew. One learned a lot by the simple, unremarkable act of being there, and perhaps he paid James some special attention.

James had noticed him at lunch, sitting in a lonely corner bent over a battered copy of Hamlet and shoving the occasional soggy fry in his mouth. He hadn’t turned the page once. The words slid over his glazed eyes, the t’s acquiring two tails and the i’s two heads. The book was a deterrent, a real-life do-not-disturb sign.

“Can we join you?” He asked, always with that charming, too-friendly smile. His friends stood behind him, the boys still with dirty glares, Wren still curious, and a new addition — Filippa. She was all angles and corners, square jaw, bony knees and sharp, discerning eyes. Oliver thought she must know as much about him as he did about her, but while his tidbits came to him through passive observation, she’d sought and received her intelligence.

“Uh, sure.” He made a move to scoot over, though there was no need. The nearest group of four droll and unpopular poetry students were piled at the other end of the cafeteria table, looking as though they’d rather slide off the bench than get an inch nearer to him.

That was how he became stuck onto their friend group like a piece of lint. Joel quickly warmed to him, a puppy whose eternal loyalty was easily earned by the passing smile and proffered bone. No doubt James had taken the grinning, big-hearted boy under his wing out of goodwill; he was rather fond of charity cases. Oliver thought with rueful bitterness of himself. Turns out, they’d both underestimated Joel.

“Thanks for being nice to me. Not many have been.” He’d said to the four of them — James, Oliver, Wren, and Pip — after being cut at the end of first year. Fat, globby tears dribbled down his apple-shaped face. Oliver thought it not a coincidence that Dennis wasn’t present. It was his turn to go and fetch the mail that morning.

Dennis never ceased in his attempts to flick Oliver off with his round, shell-shaped nails. Dennis had always classed himself and James, along with Wren and Richard, as elites. Being rich private-school graduates should have distinctly demarcated them from charity cases. But the fact of the matter was that no matter his flamboyancy and flatter, Oliver and James clicked better. Wren spoke little and blushed much, but directed the occasional smile his way as a token of goodwill. He didn’t know what Filippa thought, taking the sharp nods and one-word acknowledgements to be complete indifference.

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A Prologue Nobody Asked For - Chapter 1

Another scrap of fanfiction for the wonderful If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio; how I think James and Oliver may have met. I suppose my fascination with the Dellecher Seven has earned them an indelible place in my heart. 

Perhaps it didn’t matter how you introduced yourself to a soulmate, so long as you did.

“You’re so bony.” Oliver turned, instinctively curling in on himself to escape a beating. He didn’t expect the dimpled, lopsided grin on the other boy’s face. If possible, James was handsome even then, somehow bypassing the awkward pimple-cheeked teenage phase that everyone else around him suffered. 

Oliver thought he ought to act offended to avoid being thought a pushover, though he wasn’t bothered, not really. He absently touched his left shoulder, fingering the pointy protruding bone. James was only telling the truth, was he not? 

As he vacillated, taking too long to decide, James pushed on, “What’s your pace?”

They were eighteen, two in a sea of Dellecher first years with starry-eyed optimism. Optimism, Oliver would look back in retrospect, was precisely their problem. Most had come in expecting lessons on how to strut down red carpets, sign six-figure checks, and hide from overzealous paparazzi. Instead, they were hit in the face with tome-sized scripts and Gwendolen’s chilling stare. Sure, they were all theatre kids, the best or at least the most Shakespeare-obsessed of their respective high schools, but most of them had acted in one or two Shakespeare productions at best, dumbed-down and modernized for the audience’s convenience. In short, they had no idea what they were getting into. 

First-year fitness training consisted of lapping around the periphery of the grounds every morning, and a dreaded timed mile — two and three-quarters of a lap — every Thursday. 

"Each successive time must be within 30 seconds of the last, or a redo is obligatory." Camilo had announced a few minutes into their first class. By Oliver’s conjecture, the only reason Camilo had them running laps instead of accidentally punching in each other’s noses in mock combat or prancing through a musical theatre number (both more practical for a would-be actor and dare he say it, more exciting), was that there were simply too many of them to supervise. Prestigious as the school was, it was not rich.

“I-I got a sub-6 last time.” He stuttered. “But that was probably a fluke.” He felt the need to tack on.

“Want to run together?” He looked over James’ shoulder to his friends, a lanky prep from upstate New York, a wiry, loudmouthed Asian with a buzzcut, and a pale girl, slightly pudgy, with a heart-shaped face white-blond hair. The boys side-eyed him with raised eyebrows, clearly wondering why James Farrow, who’d within the first weeks established himself as top dog of the freshman class, was talking to a nobody. The girl, for her part, just looked curious.

They had their merits. Dennis knew the classics (not only Shakespeare, but Marlowe, Homer, and Tennyson too) better than anyone; he crammed an allusion into every sentence he uttered just to make sure others did too. Joel had a comedic streak about him and managed to sidestep any potential mockery for his slowness with clownery flamboyant enough to force Frederick to hide smiles behind his teacup. Wren, with her wide doe eyes and pale porcelain skin, made a perfectly dainty damsel in distress. None of them, however, couldn't run a sub-6 mile. 

If James topped the first-year class after years of rigorous training on the high school track team, Oliver kept up a close second due to spending the majority of his school career running from bullies with a half-swallowed wad of lunch money in his throat. It didn't matter how you got there, so long as you crossed the finish line.

He shrugged, which James took as a yes.

“I’m James by the way.” I know.

“Oliver.”

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Book Review: Anne of Windy Poplars

“You were never poor as long as you had something to love.”  -- L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Windy Poplars

A one-sided epistolary account of the three years intervening Anne and Gilbert’s engagement and marriage. One-sided as all of the letters are penned by Anne, Gilbert’s replies up to your imagination.

I can make many reproaches of this fourth installment to the Anne series. The lack of continuity: characters—Pauline, Hazel, Mrs. Tomgallon, Gerald and Geraldine — appear and disappear with neither preamble nor follow-up; Gilbert’s absent character — I honestly can’t remember him uttering a single line of dialogue; the gradual fading of all those elements of Anne’s character that once won my seven-year-old heart — her imagination, ambition, and stubborn perseveration despite all odds. By now, she has all but given up her authorial ambitions, content to surround herself with the less clever and less educated for their admiration.

 For all its faults, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Perhaps it was the saving grace of nostalgia; perhaps my heart, aggrieved by Frankenstein and bruised by If We Were Villains, found the relief it sought in this light-hearted novel. It’s not one you pick up for its historical or literary value (though I believe Montgomery’s prose is singular in its own charming, diffident way), but for a comforting reminder that the best lies beyond every bend in the road, and the pithy truths tucked between the lines.

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Dear Old Pals - Chapter 1

I don’t think I’ll ever quite come around to the paths Alcott chose for Jo and Laurie, so here’s my ode to this pair of platonic soulmates, the result of regret, and the pang longing for something that never was.

“Can we still be friends?”

Jo nodded at him, the way you do when you can’t trust yourself with words and don’t know what to say anyway.

He kept staring at her, searching her face for something, though she wasn’t sure what. Was that a smile as her face crumbled beneath his gaze?

“Of course.” She smiled to reassure him, but it's jilted, half her face lagging behind. Her voice wavered and cracked on the second syllable and she looked away, standing up to push open the window. 

“I should go.” He said to her back. 

His footsteps receded down the steps - light, brisk, unstirred - leaving Jo with an empty pang where there should have been relief. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed, perhaps he took vengeful pleasure in her suffering. Whatever the case, he hadn’t cared to call her bluff.

She drew in a breath as “I will” passed from his lips, blighted by twinge only fourth cousins with jealousy. She envied not her sister’s position, the duties of bearing children and keeping house, entertaining parlor guests with insipid conversation. She didn’t care to be kissed and praised and swept off her feet. Rather, Jo mourned the loss of a muse, a companion, and an all-too-rare kindred soul. 

At 24, with innumerable manuscript rejections and snubs behind her, Jo had acquired in spite of herself, the inklings of propriety. It would never do for her and Laurie to run around like wild geese in the fields, prancing about in shadowy hallways and reciting poetry on wobbly stools in the Lawrence’s library. Others would not approve, and Amy would just about turn green with jealousy.

She sat perfectly still during the receptions, body frozen in a trance and her mind made up. As soon as Laurie and Amy were seen off in their flowered white carriage, Jo packed her bags and scrambled on a train for New York within the hour. 

“An apprenticeship. In New York.” She’d announced with as much excitement as she could muster, holding up a letter for proof. Meg congratulated her with a concealed glint of disapproval and her father with blissful ignorance. 

“Ms. Gardner must be quite loquacious.” Marmee threw a pointed glance at the hefty envelope. She wasn’t fooled. The letter contained no apprenticeship offer, only her manuscript, and a curt rejection note.

She obligingly wrote letters to Amy. Once every month, just like she did to Meg and her mother and father. She wrote to Amy every month, as she did to Meg and her mother and father, always ending them with “Give my regards to Laurie”. Laurie attempted to take up their old habit of stumbling letters filled with poor bits of poetry and prose, and though Jo would have liked to respond to them with more than a plain familial note, she never allowed herself to. He gave up the practice in time, probably believing her changed. 

When she returned home every Christmas, she was always sure to never let herself be alone with Laurie. There were times when she thought, by a look in her eyes, or the way he turned toward her with words ready upon his lips, that he wished to speak to her, breach the formless subject that they were dancing around. But she’d by then become rather skilled at the intricacies of parlor room society from all of the pandering and flattering she did in the salons of New York -- a necessary evil of book promotion -- and never gave him the chance.

She drowned herself in work, writing by the day and into the night until her eyelids closed and the candle burned to a pool of wax. Quality was inevitably compromised by quantity. It pained her to read that they thought her writing had lost its spark and to know it was true, but she came to be dependent on it, for when she gave herself over to the woes of her characters, her own were to some extent forgotten. When the words wouldn’t come, she attended afternoon teas and evening dinners with men and women of substantial class but little substance. 

“Who else do you expect to waste their gold on flimsy novels?” As her publisher was so fond of reminding her. 

Amy fell sick after giving birth to her second child. Her parents, already concerned she was overworking herself, kept the news from her until the very end, when a short but curt telegram reached her in the dingy New York boarding house she inhabited.

Come home Jo, Amy’s dying. We’re sorry to have kept the news from you.

Jo’s form, become somewhat hard and wiry in the joyless intervening years, crinkled and crumbled like the paper in her hand. The hard corners and chipped angles of the impersonal telegraph font seemed a personal affront, so much more merciless than her mother’s loopy cursive. A letter would have been too slow. A caterwaul sound of anguish escaped her lips, sending the bonneted head of the gossipy housekeeper poking through the doorway. 

She stumbled upstairs and packed her bags with the same ferocity that she had when she first left home 7 years ago. 

“Where are you going, Miss Josephine?” Asked the housekeeper. For once, Jo did not remark the delicious superiority with which she emphasized miss - she was no author, but at least would not end up an old maid -- nor wrinkle her brow at the woman’s insistence on using her given name.

Amy was bedridden by the time she arrived. She shed her coat hastily and rushed up to Amy’s room,  hair windswept and frizzy from a day on of travel on the train.

“Jo.” She struggled to sit up. Laurie, who had his back to the door, turned. Their eyes met for a moment, and for the first time since that stilted exchange in the attic, Jo looked at him. He was the same Laurie by appearance, brown hair, almost black, hazel eyes, and a stubble dotting his jaw. But the glint of mischief in his eyes had dulled, the point of his nose become more angular than chipped. His lips, before always on the verge of a smile, were pressed into a hard, sewn line. It was natural to attribute such change to the burdens of holding a vigil to a dying wife, but Jo suspected it wasn’t all. There was some dimming of spirit, something more than grief that she thought must be mirrored in herself.

In an instant, he’d turned back to Amy. With a deftness Jo would have scarcely thought him capable, he adjusted the pillows and blankets around her, and with a nod in her own direction, left the room.

“How are you?” Jo asked, knowing all too well the answer, but not knowing what to say.

“I’m well, but I’m worried about Laurie.” She smiled placidly, looking so much like Beth that Jo’s breath caught in her throat. Amy, who she’d thought would cling kicking and screaming onto had accepted her fate with composure and temerity, and it suddenly dawned upon Jo that she scarcely knew her own sister.

“I know you’ve kept your distance these past seven years for me. But you must not keep it any longer.”

“We,” she said, indicating with a tilt of her head the door, where Laurie stood outside, hands in pockets, looking all too much the helpless schoolboy of old. “are lovers.”

“But you,” She turned her eyes to Jo, and Jo was surprised to find them perfectly clear, serenely blue without a hint of spite. Amy had matured, she remarked all too late. Anyone who went on smiling knowing the end was near was like that, she supposed. “are kindred spirits.” She shrugged. “Half the time I don’t know what he’s on about.” She coughed up a laugh, and Jo hastily handed her a saucer of water perched by the bedside. “I love him in spite of it, or perhaps for it, but you understand him.” 

Jo, for perhaps the first time in her life, found herself at a loss for words.

“Take care of him for me, will you?” Jo nodded meekly. 

Amy smiled a radiant, sun-ray smile. That was Jo’s last image of her sister.