"In my first memory, I am three years old and I am trying to kill my sister. Sometimes the recollection is so clear I can remember the itch of the pillowcase under my hand, the sharp point of her nose pressing into my palm. She didn't stand a chance against me, of coarse, but it still didn't work. My father walked by, tucking in the house for the night, and saved her. He led me back to my own bed. "That," he told me, "never happened."
As we got older, I didn't seem to exist, except in relation to her. I would watch her sleep across the room from me, one long shadow linking our beds, and I would count the ways. Poison, sprinkled on her cereal. A wicked undertow off the beach. Lightening striking.
In the end though, I did not kill my sister. She did it all on her own.
Or at least this is what i tell myself." (page,3)
"The first time i gave something to my sister, it was cord blood, and I was a newborn. She has leukemia -APL- and my cells put into her remission. The next time she relapsed, I was five and I had lymphocytes drawn from me, three times over, because the doctors never seemed to get enough of them the first time around. When that stopped working, they took bone marrow for a transplant. When Kate got infections, I had to donate granulocytes. When she relapsed again, I had to donate peripheral blood stem cells." (page,21)
They don't really pay attention to me, except when they need my blood or something. I wouldn't be alive, if it wasn't for Kate being sick.
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