June First

by Jennifer Hartmann

But she doesn’t know the psychological toll it took on me. She doesn’t know that it altered inherent parts of me. She doesn’t know that I made a wish that day, standing in my front lawn, begging the cotton-candy clouds for a baby sister. And then I got one. I got June in exchange for my parents, and in the mind of a small, damaged child, it felt like I had caused their deaths. My wish had come true at a terrible price. It was all my fault. So I refused to ever see her as my sister. I refused to see the Baileys as my true family because that would make me guilty. That would have given me the darkest, heaviest burden imaginable, and it likely would have snapped me in two. As I got older, I came to realize that it was simply a tragedy, and there is no logic in tragedy—tragedies just happen—and how we get through them, what we do after, is our only true power over them. But that was how I chose to cope at the time, and even though I understand it now, those feelings have been hardwired into me. There’s no going back.