Drop Dead Sisters (The Finch Sisters, #1)

by Amelia Diane Coombs

And me? Who knows what they say about me. Probably something like how I’m the Finch sister who never met her potential and whose anxiety coping mechanisms are crying in the bathroom or collapsing in on herself like a dying star.

I was always that kid, the anxious one who hated sleepaway camp and turned down sleepover requests with such ferocity a rumor started that I still wet the bed. In middle school. But I’m an adult now. Even if my brain is its same panicked self, and it gets even more panicky and insecure when I’m with my family.

For so much of my childhood, I was intent on being something other than what I’d been since birth: Anxious, happy to hide in the shadows, the easy target. The one who never, ever fought back. A human doormat.

Because as last night proved, the simple act of being a woman in this world can put you in jeopardy.

I was always the weird, anxious kid—and my family pushed me. As if nudging me hard enough might break me out of my shell rather than send me tunneling in the opposite direction, like a hermit crab.

But sometimes I swear I was just in high school, an anxious girl with a permanent stomachache who, embarrassingly enough, wanted people to like her more than she liked herself.

I slowly lift my head and look miserably at my family, who’re all staring at me with concern in their eyes. “I’m fine,” I croak. “Just dead inside. Carry on.”

Fuck being polite and kind and nice to men who don’t deserve it.

My life ending before anything real and lovely and exciting ever happened. I’m still that kid, kicking out and gasping for air, lamenting a life that hasn’t happened yet. A life I’m too afraid to make happen.

Not all men are terrible. Most men, sure, but not all.

Earlier, the ER doctor—who was, to my fifteen-plus years of Grey’s Anatomy–watching disappointment, not super hot—assured me it was a simple dislocation and fracture and that I shouldn’t succumb to compartment syndrome.

I was obsessed with the thought that I would die before anything real ever happened to me. I’ve been waiting—since that moment—for my life to begin. I’m done waiting, though. I’ll always be an anxious mess, to varying messy degrees, and when it comes to my family, I’ll always be the youngest Finch sister. That’s not a bad thing, though.