RACHEL – ABOUT EMILY

I curl up almost fetal like against Nicole. Her arms safe and tight around me. Her lips on my hair. My eyes leaking. My voice flooding.

I hated her. I thought I was the only one. I was so relieved, Nicole, when I discovered how much Em hated me.

When I got to high school, my parents hired someone regular. I went out on my first date. My parents said we are all going to do this together, so they went out too. Can you believe it? We were scared shitless to go out. Well, when my parents got home, that incompetent bitch was asleep and Em pee’d all over her bed. Pee was nothing compared to a seizure. From then on, I only went out if my parents didn’t need a break.

My weekends were harder than anything I ever had to do during week. Okay, except for cramming for history. On days when my friends are sleeping in until noon, I am up, bleary eyed anyway, to take care of Emily, after my mother had been up every few hours to turn her. We couldn’t go anywhere or do anything without making arrangements for someone to take care of her. And the arrangements basically made going out not worth taking. I can tell you this, Nic, I don’t want kids, ever. I don’t think I can deal with the burden. Totally selfish but I don’t think I’d ever have anything to give to a baby.

I went to my prom without a date, but that was okay. I had a few outcast type friends. My parents gave me a whole day spa treatment with a massage before the prom. The woman worked on my arms and shoulders, working the muscles that work hard to lift Emily, but which I never even really noticed. I never knew that even my hands and fingers hurt until she massaged them. I remember she pressed both her hands over mine after she kneaded my palms, holding them still for a few seconds before massaging between each of my fingers. I was almost eighteen, and nobody, and certainly not a guy, ever held my hand or touched me. And then I just cried and cried until she finished.

Em, Emily hated me too. I found her stuff. Stuff she must have meticulously wrote, with agonizing slowness. She wrote about how much she loved me. How much she hated me. Her anger, like mine. Her frustration, different from mine. More honesty than I ever want to face.

But still, Em and I, we were The Team. She had all these learning issues, but when I lost it and couldn’t see the words on the page in front of me, Em was the one to focus me. She got me through AP Euro. She got me through high school and college apps. We made a deal. I was going to go to college first. Finish. Then she’d go. And wherever she went, I’d get a job at that college. Maybe in the admission office, whatever. But work there and take care of her, so she’d get her degree. Then we’d both get real jobs, get an apartment together.

In all the times when I imagined CP was not real, that there will be a cure, fantasized that I was an only child, I never pictured a future without Emily. I never imagined this. That Em wasn’t a part of this life, this reality.