“Mom says to come down for breakfast.” A young voice calls out and echoes through my room.

“Mmmm five more minutes… Just give me five more minutes…” I smile gathering the comforter up closer to me stopping it just below my chin.

“Okay, then I’m going to eat your french toast.” The smell of maple syrup is in the air as the steam hits my face. My eyes open as the plate is pulled away from me and my eyes focus their way up the hand, arm, shoulder then the face of someone who looks so familiar to me but I can’t place him.

The young boy plops himself on my bed and stabs at the plate with a shiny fork. “Mas Mone!” He taunts me with his mouth full of syrup and french toast. “Mmmm.”

“You! Jerk!” I yell out as he jumps off my bed and runs down the hall, plate and all. Presumably to Mom again. The little scamp! I drag myself out of bed, rubbing my eyes and stretch out my arms. My robe awaits me on the chair at the far corner of the room which I pull on as I head into my bathroom. A quick shower then I wrap the towel around myself and another one for my hair. I grab my robe from the bathroom and walk back to my room throwing my robe back to my chair.

He’s standing there again… Staring at me. I’m still in my towel. “GET OUT OF HERE!” I yell out. He’s not moving. Is he checking me out? DID YOU HEAR ME, YOU PERVERT! I yell at the top of my lungs. A voice from downstairs calls back “Xander! I just told you to call your sister down for breakfast! Not to gawk at her in the process!” There’s a sense of deja vu. I dress and walk downstairs, the runt is gone. As I expected, there's a plate of french toast waiting for me there.

Somethings wrong… This already happened. But not to me… I’m standing there in the kitchen. This already happened. “Mom?” No answer. “Mom?” “Dad?” No answer.

“They’re not here.” A voice calls out from nowhere. “Why are you here?”

“I live here. Where should I be?”

“Why are you here?” The voice calls out again

“Carla?”

An apparition emerges sitting at the table across from me. “It should have been you.” She stares up at me. “They wouldn't have been able to do to you, what they did to me.”

“What?”

“You heard me.” Her voice angry now. “They did things to me, because they could. Things they couldn't do to you… Instead, you got to be the daughter. You got Mom’s love. You got to be Daddy’s angel. What did I get? Raped, everyday for seven years. You got to live the life of a princess. I got the life of a beast of burden. You were…are… weak and pathetic. A spoiled little girl, who had everything. What did I have? Seven years as a sex slave.”

“It wasn’t my fault… I…”

“It was your fault! And you reaped the benefits of it! YOU GOT MY LIFE!!!”

“Please stop! It wasn’t my fault. Please. I didn’t know this would happen to you.”

“Then, you took my place, didn’t you! If you weren’t a skeavy little pervert!”

“I’m sorry…”

“No! You think this all ends with you saying ‘I’m sorry’? I am never forgiving you. YOU HEAR ME! I AM NEVER FORGIVING YOU. So wake up little girl! WAKE UP!”

***

I wake up in my room in a cold sweat. The lights are on as I look around. Daddy’s sleeping in Mr. Nibbles’ chair. My heart is pounding in my chest. My stiring causes him to wake from slumber. “hrumm… Princess? Angela? What’s wrong pumpkin?”

“It was horrible…” I’m frazzled and dripping with sweat. He looks over at me, and rushes over to me.

“Shhh! Baby girl it’s alright. Shhh.” The clock on my wall says 4:40. He kisses me on the crown of my head and rubs my arms.

“You had us worried, Princess. What’s going on with you? I haven’t seen you like this in years. Is it Carla?”

“l don’t know, Daddy. I just want her to be… I just want her back.”

He pulls me toward him. I lay my head against him as he puts his arm around me. “It just takes time, Princess. She’s in good care. She’ll come back to us, when she’s ready. In the meantime, you just have to be patient with her.”

“This is not how it’s supposed to be…”

“What’s that, baby girl?”

“She was supposed to come back and… and we’d be a family again.”

“That’s a whole lot to ask. A lot has happened to your sister. It would have been a miracle if she made it through her ordeal without being…Well it’s a miracle she’s alive anyway.”

"Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure thing, baby girl”

“How do you do it? How do you go through each day, knowing your daughter is broken.”

“It’s easier now—to find hope in it all.” his answer surprises me.

“How?”

“Time… it just takes time. Well, that and the patience to let her find her way back to us.”

“How do you know that she will ever be better?”

“Because you did it first.” I give my dad curious look. “What? You don’t think I know how strong my daughters are?”

“I’m not strong at all… There is no way I could endure all that Carla’s been through.”

“I doubt that. You were strong enough show us who you really are… my sweet, beautiful daughter who fought for her place in the world. Now, how can I doubt that my other daughter has that same strength and spirit within her as well?”

I look up at him and give him a kiss on the cheek and a smile. “What’s that for, baby girl?”

“For being you…” I nuzzle back into him and drift back to sleep.

***

In the weeks that followed, I fell into a routine. School, work, home, nightmare, scream, cry. Lather, rinse, repeat. Mom and Dad would take turns to visit her in the evenings during the week. The weekends, I spent them visiting with Carla. I was, 'the sad, pretty girl' that would come to visit her. I had given up correcting people that I was her sister. Carla would always insist that she didn’t have a sister. Soon, I was really just known as Carla’s friend, Angie.

I’d visit and she’d ask me about my life and I'd share what I could. The hardest part was when she would tell me that I should meet her parents, because of 'how wonderful they are'. “My mom would love you! Maybe your mom and my mom could be friends too! Wouldn’t that be great!”

The first time I heard that, I began to cry. After the fourth or fifth time, I’d just nod and say “I’d like that.”

When I asked about her life, she’d tell me about what she would like to do when the doctors thought she was ready to go home.

She never asked me when she was going to go home. I’m not sure if she wondered why she stayed there in the first place. It was pleasant enough. They fed, bathed and clothed her. The nurses all thought of her as pleasant and cheery. I had over heard them joke that the wrong sister was in their care.

“Oh Angela, Carla is in her room today.” One of the nurses says to me as I was about to enter the community room.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know where her room is.” I had never visited her room. The nurse walks me down a corridor of rooms, much like you’d see in old hospitals and points me towards a door. I open the door slowly and peek my head in.

“Angie! You’re here it’s good to see you. Are you here to spend the day with me again?”

“Yes, Carla” Her room is drab though there are several cards on the window sill. The room is small with a pair of uncomfortable looking chairs that may be as old as the building itself. The bed is a hospital bed. There are no nightstands just a table which looks like it’s suppose to cantilever over the bed so one could eat while in bed. There is a closet and a bathroom which are at the far corner of the room. The lights come from a series of fluorescent tube lights which hang down from the ceiling. Her room gets the sun in the morning. The view outside her window is the street though safety glass reminds you of whom would typically call this place home.

Carla is still in her bed. She’s not in a hospital gown, I don’t know why had expected she would. She wore a light blue sleep shirt which had a print of sunflowers on them. “It’s nice of you to visit. Do you visit with all the other people here during the week?”

“No Carla, I just come to visit you.”

“Me, I’m nobody special. There's a lot of people here that need cheering up. I love seeing you, but I hate to think that I’m keeping you all to myself.”

“Would you like me to brush your hair?”

“That would be nice”

I pull my brush from my purse and sit beside her on the bed.

“You do the same thing that mom does when she visits.”

“Oh and what’s that?”

“She love brushing my hair too. If you come during the week you could get a chance to meet her. What’s your mom like?”

“My mom is pretty and so is my sister.”

“You have a sister?”

“Yes, though I wasn’t always great to her. She was my Big Sister.”

“I wish I had a sister. Its just mom, dad and I. I had a brother though I think something happened to him after I was taken.”

“Really? I don’t have a brother, just the sister. What do you think happened to your brother?”

“I don’t know, mom and dad never talk about him. It’s like he never existed. At least they have me back, right?”

I continue brushing her hair. It keeps her from seeing the tears in my eyes.

“So are you and you sister close?”

“Not at first, I’m hoping she’ll want me back in her life again.”

“How can she not want you in her life. You’re so sweet, you’re caring and you’ve been great to me. How can she not want anything to do with you. She’s crazy not to want you as a sister. Any girl would be lucky to call you their sister.”

“Coming from you… That means alot to me.”