Page 2 of Striker’s Rebel

I release her wrist before this becomes another thing she has to pull away from.

Eliana and I have been sisters since I was thirteen and she was eleven. Nobody signed anything. We don’t share parents, genetics, or a last name. We were two unwanted girls dropped into the same foster home, sleeping in twin beds pushed against opposite walls of a room that had belonged to half a dozen girls before us.

That was enough.

I had already been through four homes by then. Eliana had been through three.

Neither of us unpacked properly for the first month.

You learn things when you grow up like that. Keep your important stuff somewhere you can grab quickly. Never get attached to a bedroom. Don’t believe adults who say forever until forever has lasted at least a few years.

And learn how to read the people responsible for you.

Especially when they drink.

Our foster mother looked perfectly normal when the caseworker visited. Nice clothes, clean kitchen, framed Bible verses in the hallway. She remembered birthdays. She baked at Christmas.

She also drank cheap vodka after dinner.

By fourteen, I could tell what kind of night we were going to have from the way she put her purse on the counter.

Eliana never got as good at reading her.

Maybe because I made sure she didn’t have to.

The pale lines cutting across my left forearm are from a broken beer bottle our foster mother swung during one of her worse nights. She’d been coming toward Eliana.

I stepped between them.

The bottle broke against the edge of the counter before it caught my arm, and Eliana spent the next hour sitting on the bathroom floor with me, pressing a towel against the cuts while I told her I was fine.

I wasn’t.

But she needed me to be.

Maybe that’s why looking at her now makes something inside me feel small and powerless again.

“You don’t have to protect him,” I say.

Her head jerks up. “I’m not protecting anyone.”

“Okay.”

“Jamie didn’t do it.”

“Okay.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“No.”

She lets out a frustrated breath and starts putting glasses away harder than necessary. “Then why even ask?”

Because sometimes people need to know somebody noticed.

Because sometimes the first time you ask, they lie.

And the second.