Little Sister

I lived with a girl who walked in her sleep. She was seventeen and I had never seen someone with no fear. That isn’t quite right. She had fear but I had never seen life spilling like mercury out of someone’s laugh. I walked into the Moseley Sports Center in August of 2001. I was going sea kayaking in Prince William Sound. This is a theme that would reoccur in my life. But all I could think about was getting back to Kenai and seeing the boy I had been playing tonsil hockey with all summer. He was mysterious and completely wrong for me which meant that he might as well have been rolled in chocolate. I couldn’t get enough of him.
It took ten minutes for me to realize the girl sitting next to me with the black-tipped hair was my new roommate. She was still in high school but taking college classes. Her home in Palmer was far enough away that the demigods of campus life let her take up residence in the cinder block walls of Suite 301 in South Hall. Soon to be dubbed the “hot suite” thanks in part to the impetuous nature of my roommates.
I had nor have never been as wet as the first week I spent with her. It rained everyday of our trip and when we set up our tent the first night, we had to sponge standing water out of the bottom. She sat there uncertain and slightly beaten down. I was quick to stand in and try to take charge. But keeping up with her was like herding cats. You just can’t bottle a hummingbird. I had my first taste of a little sister. We were marooned together after a storm sank one of the kayaks fifteen feet off our beach. That was the theme of our year -marooned together in this magical, dysfunctional world of Alaska Pacific University.

“Casey – no! Wait! I can’t believe you are doing this.”
“Why not?”
“You can’t go around shooting people with tampons or your dart gun.”
“I did not shoot Kyle in the nut sack.”
“You shoot him in the nut sack!?”
“No, the dart just stuck in his jeans. He is such a whiner.”
“Oh my God, Casey. You kill me”

She would answer the door in her underwear. I think Buck and Carl would knock just to see what color boy shorts she was wearing that day. My door would open at 2 am and she would tumble next to me – crowding us both into a twin bed. Her nose crinkled when she laughed. She wanted answers about love and I was too young to know that I was woefully under informed and in no position to give any opinion. But she stayed. Probably because she knew that I would have backed her up in a bar fight – if we were allowed in bars at that age.
You couldn’t help hoping that nothing would ever change her. That every risk she took, she would pull off. Flirting with the edge of disaster and laughing at herself the whole time. She would never be self-conscious or jaded. I see her almost slipping in the cafeteria line, grasping the edge of the stainless steel counter and flopping half her torso onto it. Hoisting herself back to vertical and yelling, “Don’t worry, I’m fine.” I had never seen someone make constantly stumbling look so graceful and euphoric.
She drove down to California with me a month ago. She got sunburned waiting for me and didn’t complain. She talked with me about God and I hope that these conversations go on till I am an old women. God loves her desperately and she is dancing toward him. She still laughs like the world is her own private joke but that the object of her mirth is completely worthy of the laugh. We got our rental car up to 120 miles an hour to see when the governor would kick in. It never did. But that is Casey. The governor never seems to kick in when I am with her. All my fears thin out into a fine sheen of wisdom. There are a few battle scars that make her a little less compulsive and harder. But she will always be my little sis and now that we are allowed into bars I am sure there is a fight in our future. Casey will keep twinkling and I will feel a little more alive just seeing it.