(Don't You) Forget About Me by Kate Karyus Quinn Read Free Book Online

ITS THORN
    Four Years Ago
    I NEVER FELT LIKE THE ANNOYING LITTLE SISTER that you didn’t want around until you started seeing Elton. He changed everything. He changed you. And since we have always been connected, he changed me too.
    Changed for the worse. I want to be clear about that, although I don’t know how there could be any doubt. He ruined us. He ruined everything.
    Elton had arrived earlier that year, right around the time when Daddy was first beginning to show his age. It wasn’t a dramatic change—no graying hair or stomach paunch. There wasn’t one specific thing that you could point to, but rather several small cumulative shifts that made him seem older. Daddy no longer looked fresh and young and just barely twenty as he had for at least two decades. Now he looked, not middle-aged exactly, but on the brink of it.
    He combated the change by doubling down. More women who weren’t Mom. More languid strolls down Main Street, where people had no choice but to love him. More town meetings where Daddy sat at the front of the room like a king holding court, allowing the peasants a chance to kiss his ring.
    In response Piper and I started spending less and less time at home. When Daddy was away, it was terrible to listen to Mom wail and moan, sick with missing him. Even worse, though, was when he wouldn’t come home for several days. She would go quiet, her cheeks would burn bright pink, and her whole body would radiate heat. You could see the fever on the brink of breaking, but Daddy—using some sort of sixth sense—would return and she would succumb to the love sickness once more.
    In warm weather, you and I roamed from one end of town to the other, measuring it with our bare feet. During the sharp winter days, we curled together under a pile of blankets in the shed out back. It also helped when Chance would curl up between us, and his furry body lent us a bit of extra heat. An extension cord gave us a single line of power that we used for a hotplate. We kept warm by filling our stomachs with cans of soup and hot cocoa. Sometimes you’d bring different books from the school library and read them aloud. You loved poetry then and would recite the same ones over and over until we’d both committed them to memory. Your favorite was “Mad Girl’s Love Song”by Sylvia Plath. Do you remember it, Piper? I can’t recall much of anything anymore, but that one line that repeated over and over throughout the poem sticks with me: “I think I made you up inside my head.”
    The way you said it—sometimes spitting the words out like they were burning your tongue and at other times exhaling them as if you were forming smoke rings that only you could see—still haunts me.
    Perhaps it haunted Elton too. You recited that poem for him. You brought him into our little shed, saying there was room for one more, and when it turned out that it was in fact a little too crowded, I was the one who was told to go. It was only pride that kept me from sitting outside the door like Chance did, whining until I was let back in.
    You had a crush on Elton before I even knew he existed. Later I learned he was a teacher at the high school and the number-one crush of every girl there. It was hard to believe you were just like the rest of the girls. Although, in the end you weren’t. They wanted him, but you actually took him.
    Later you told me that on his first day, he had asked you for directions when you were sitting on the front steps reading a book. “Follow me,” you’d said, and he had, chatting with you all the while. He asked what you were reading and you both discussed the poems of Emily Dickinson. “She was so alone and sheltered, you’d think she wouldn’t have much to say, but the exact opposite was true,” Elton said, and in that exact instant—between one footstep and the next—you fell in love with him.
    I don’t know why. It