My heart was breaking.

“It’s been too long, Spud,” I told her. “Were those fake parents of yours trying to keep you away?”

Jaime bit her lip as I put her down, and I felt bad, but only for a minute.

“Hey,” I said, bending low so that I could look her in the face. “Don’t listen when they talk crap about me, okay? The Baileys are a different kind of people from our family. They don’t understand.”

Jaime’s eyes began to well, and she nibbled on her lip. Some things don’t change after all.

“What is it, Spuddy?” I took her waist and wiggled her until she laughed. “You can tell me anything, you know.”

“Even a bad thing?”

“Of course, even a bad thing. And you know, when you tell someone else a bad thing, it breaks in half, so that you’re only carrying a small bit of it. So come on.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Bailey don’t like you.”

What else is new? I’m well aware that they look down their straight, pointed little noses at me, judging with their self-righteous little eyes. That Johnson girl… she has problems. Mental problems… Gasp! Shudder!

“I know. It’s okay. They don’t have to like me. But you have to like me because I’m your sister and I love you. That’s all that counts.”

“They want to keep you away. I heard them talking.”

It took all my self-control not to press her for information right away. Instead, I said, “Oh?”

She nodded. “They say that you’re a bad affluence—”

“Influence.”

“—a bad iff-iffluence, and you should go back to prison.”

Prison. What a nice euphemism for the loony bin.

“Jaime, we weren’t in jail. You know that, right? We were in a kind of hospital getting better after the accident.”

“Mrs. Bailey says that you have to be locked up because your personality is wrong.”

Word for word, Dee. My. Personality.

Is.

Wrong.

I took Jaime’s hands. “My personality isn’t wrong. And I don’t think Carly’s personality is wrong. Do you?”

“No.”

“Mrs. Bailey thinks our personality is wrong because she thinks one of us shouldn’t be here.”

“Oh.”

“I want you to do something for me, okay?”

She nodded, her eyes fixed on my face. I was her big sister. I would make everything right again. I would take a world that had become bent and confusing overnight and smooth out all of the wrinkles. Her hope is a noose around my neck.

“Whenever the”—insert: Dickball—“Baileys talk about me, I want you to close your ears. Close them like you close your eyes, and don’t listen. They don’t understand. They think they do, but they don’t.”

“But I can’t close my ears. I don’t have earlids.”

“Oh, you do,” I said earnestly. “They’re inside your head. If you imagine them closing, they will.”

Jaime considered this for a moment. “Okay.”

“Now, come on, enough about the Baileys,” I said, rolling my eyes. She giggled. “Tell me about you, about friends—everything!”

She wrapped her little arms around my neck, and I helped her onto my lap.

“I started school, and I like it a lot. I have a friend called Mandy, and she likes me and lets me play with her dolls.”

I frowned. School? Already?

“Oh, yeah?” I prompted.

“She has a Bratz doll that has hair that can grow, and a Barbie doll with a tail like a mermaid, and…”

She told me the minutiae of her life, and I felt as though I had never heard anything more interesting or vital in my whole existence. I soaked up every little detail—about her new crayons (green was her favorite), the dresses she got to wear (disgusting, frilly concoctions to make her look like a doll), the shopping trips she and Dickball Mrs. Bailey took into London, and the dollies that Mandy let her play with.

“Do you have a picture of Mummy and Daddy in your room?” I asked her abruptly, because it suddenly occurred to me what the Baileys were doing. They weren’t merely giving an orphan a place to live; they were adopting her, absorbing her as their own, sucking out her Johnson and injecting their Bailey! It explained the dresses, the “keep away from Carly” mission, the “Carly’s personality is wrong” mantra—it explained why she had started schooling so young. Indoctrination.

“I don’t have any pictures from before.” The words slipped out like a bubble, too fragile to resist the destruction of dry air.

It was like a glass smashing against a wall.

“Who do they think they are? They won’t allow you to have a photo of your dead parents? That’s sick!”

“I don’t want one,” Jaime said in a little voice, her eyes already swollen with tears.

I. Don’t. Want. One.

A sledgehammer couldn’t have hit me as hard.

I whispered my reply. “What?”

“I don’t like to remember.”

“Remember them?”

“Remember what happened.”

It was like an electric shock to my head. “You remember the accident?”

She looked away, and although she didn’t nod, I saw the answer in her haunted eyes.

“Jaime… tell me. I can’t remember. Tell me—”

“Dr. Lasny said not to talk about it.”

“Dr.—Dr. Lansing?”

Jaime nodded.

Betrayal. Betrayed. I was betrayed. Dr. Lansing is in this whole thing with the Baileys—working to make Jaime forget me and to never come see me! She only caved when I threw a tantrum and made things hard for her! They want Jaime to forget me!

I grabbed Jaime by the shoulders. “I’m your sister! I’m the oldest now they’re dead, and you have to listen to what I say! You will not forget me!”

She cried out—a small, piercing shriek—and began to weep. I dropped her arms, instantly sorry, and gave her a big hug. She sobbed until she fell asleep, her head padded on my chest. I lay on my bed with her, taking in her little-girl smell (it had changed since living with the fake parents, but not so much that I couldn’t smell the real her underneath).

“Don’t forget me,” I whispered in her ear, holding her hand—a tiny version of my own.

We lay together for an hour or so, and I thought about how things used to be. Carly discarding me in our room, always the same. Cuddling up with Jaime in her bed for a while, reading her a bedtime story—always “The Frog Prince”—and then going out into the night after (maybe) a brief chat with Mum. Looking down at Jaime sleeping beside me now, I felt the loss of that normal all over my body like an ache. I could have stayed like that forever, but she jolted awake, dizzy and confused.

“Where am I?” she asked. She was shivering.

“With me in my room, silly,” I told her.

She gave a couple of sleepy grunts. “It’s too cold in here. I don’t like it.”

I glanced at the window—it was shut firmly. And Jaime was still in her fluffy coat.

“It’s not cold,” I said, touching her cheeks, which were warm.

“And it smells funny.”

I sniffed the air. Nothing.

“I don’t like it,” she said, eyes shadowed.

It was weird. Jaime loves everything, and when she doesn’t, she doesn’t moan about it. Those Bailey shits have got into her head.

“Come on, Jaime. It’s just a room!”

“There’s something bad in here.”

What could I say? The Baileys have been turning her against me for months. Not in an obvious way, of course, but in subtle ways. And there’s nothing I can do about it. It makes me crazy.

“I have to go,” she said, climbing off my bed. There were duvet lines across her cheek, and sleep was still heavy in her eyes. “Mrs. Bailey said she would wait for me at the end of the corridor.”

“Jaime?” I said, as she turned to go. “Don’t let those dickballs tell you things about me.”

“Okay.”

“You know me better than they do,” I added.

She nodded. “Okay.”

As the door was closing behind her, I thought of something.

“Wait—Jaime?”

Her little head popped back. “Yeah?”

“Have you heard from Carly lately?”

“Yes.”

“She sound… normal? I mean, did she sound okay?”

She just shrugged. “I have to go now.”