By sixteen, Maddie felt less like a friend and more like the sister I had picked out for myself.
My older brother, Ryan, drove us to camp that year in our father’s old station wagon.
Dad had been gone two years by then, and Ryan, only nineteen, tried hard to fill that space.
“You two behave,” he told us at the drop-off.
“We never behave,” Maddie said, grinning.
“That’s what scares me.”
Ryan drove us to camp
I remember the bonfire on the last night.
Maddie pulled me aside and whispered that she needed to tell me something important in the morning.
I remember Ryan standing at the edge of the firelight, watching us, his face unreadable.
Morning never came for that conversation.
Maddie was gone.