Pink Clouds

When I was nearing my tenth birthday, my older sister Ingrid had just turned sixteen. She attended the school across the street from our church, where the teachers allowed you to call them by their first name and art was an integral part of the learning curriculum. I practically begged Ingrid to show me her homework, and after teasing me for being a dork, she would pull pages upon pages of beautiful sketches and colorful paintings out of her book bag. And once my mother had tucked me into sleep at night, I would wait to hear Ingrid give a kiss and hug to my parents before going into the room across from mine for bed. Some nights, it took what seemed like hours for my parent's to go to sleep, but every time they did I would tiptoe over to Ingrid's bedroom and crawl in her bed.

"Show me!" I'd say, and Ingrid would sit up and rub her tired eyes before finally moving over to her desk and flicking on the glowing lamp.

And along the ceiling of her room, she had designed puffs of clouds that floated over her pink bed like magic. Every night, it became more and more beautiful.

"Tell me how you made it again?" I would ask.

"Magic, Rach." She never told me the real answer.

On my tenth birthday, Ingrid drove herself to the school I wanted to attend so badly, and she walked inside as if it were any other day. I sat in my classroom all day wondering what she was doing in class. If she was making beautiful art or singing in the choir. And once Mrs. Maloney had told the class it was my tenth birthday, she asked what I was going to do with the next decade of my life.

"I'm going to the art school. The one across the street from the church." I said proudly, standing in front of my classmates. Mrs. Maloney nodded with respect.

"I think that's a very good way to spend the next decade, Rachel." she said.

I followed the sidewalk all the way home, stomping through the shallow puddles in my polka dot rain boots and humming my favorite song. As the rain started the pour faster, I began to run home as quickly as possible.

"Mom! Dad!" I yelled as soon as I opened the front door. The house was silent. "Ingrid?" I called as I walked into the foyer. Huh. Usually Mom and Dad would come home early from work for our birthdays. I took my rain boots off and left them at the foot of the stairs, something my mother would usually scorn me for but today was my birthday. Today I had the best excuse.

"Ingrid!" I sang happily as I raced up the stairs, barging into her pink bedroom.

And there was my sister, her dark hair covering her pale face that starred with freckles. Her blue eyes were rolled into the back of her head, and she was dangling from the ceiling by a rope. I screamed before moving towards her, trying to pull her down. Her skin was cold as ice. The floor of her room was covered with her paintings, yet not the ones she ever showed me. Dark, harsh eyes of black and red acrylics swept on every canvas, looking at me. It wasn't the art she had given the world. It was something much uglier with a cruel intention.

When I was nearing my twentieth birthday, the ten year anniversary of my sister Ingrid's death was nearing. My parents had divorced not too long after she died, and my mother demanded I be sent to a boarding school for troubled children. I never did get to go to the art school like Ingrid. But now I was older, older than she would ever be, and I still didn't understand why. She was the girl with the artist's vision. She was the girl who let her little sister up past her bedtime so they could look at the clouds. She was somebody to more people than she knew. And I was always going to be that stupid ten year old girl who left her rain boots by the stairs and believed that magic did great things. She left both of us there. Not a day passed when I thought what our family would be if she would have just made the decision to live. Or maybe if I had found her sooner. If I had danced in the puddles or hummed my songs and just marched straight home. My sister would be alive. She would be alive if she would have acknowledged that I cared; that so many people cared.

And I sat in my apartment, staring up at the ceiling. My roommate sat across from her, staring at the same ceiling.

"Pretty. How'd you do it?" she asked, reaching out to grasp the large pink cloud.

"Magic." I said.