Jamie was a lot of things besides my fraternal twin. He was the only person who could make me smile when I wanted to cry. He was the distraction I needed whenever looking at my parents passed out on the couch, or the empty vodka bottles scattered across the stained beige living room rug became unbearably depressing. Always cracking jokes or making inappropriate comments, Jamie was the goofy, hilarious, ever-cheerful part of my day. He was the reason I got out of bed every morning.
He was also a cancer patient.
When Jamie was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, we were fifteen and I couldn’t even spell the name of the disease to type it into a damn Wikipedia search, let alone comprehend how much his diagnosis would alter the course of our lives. In fact, at that point I didn’t know much of anything. The only thing Ididunderstand with absolute certainty was that my parents could barely pay the mortgage each month, let alone afford all the expensive tests and treatments Jamie’s illness would require.
MRI. Chemotherapy. Radiation. Surgery. Drug therapies. Hospital stays.
I wasn’t a doctor – I wasn’t even a legal adult – but I’d still known that treatments like that came with a hefty price tag. And whether thirty thousand or thirty million, any amount of money was light-years beyond our budget.
By the time we were seventeen – the year I met Sebastian and everything changed forever – we were so far in debt that most days I skipped lunch, and I was on a first name basis with Shelby over at the collection agency. She called every few months or so, when the phone or electricity bills were inevitably late, to let me know they’d be shutting off our power again.
Some people aren’t built for struggle or hardship. My parents did the best they could, I honestly believe that. But they just weren’t able to overcome their own demons, to pull themselves out of the depths of the bottle long enough to sort out the lives of their children, which were rapidly falling into chaos.
Someone had to take responsibility – even if that someone was a seventeen-year-old girl with five dollars in her pocket and a long-overgrown haircut.