Isobel left 17th February. On this same day was my 14th birthday. At first I kept imagining that Isobel had deliberately chosen my birthday to leave to spite me and ruin my day but now I look back and I don’t think she even knew that it was my birthday at all. It was me who first realised that Isobel had gone, she wasn’t there on the morning of my birthday, but that wasn’t unusual. Isobel had once disappeared without contact for six days, she had stayed with friends and had bought new clothes and underwear when she needed a change, she eventually turned up at 8.30 on the sixth day and my parents were so pleased to see her that they seemed to forget the worry she had caused them and always caused them each time she didn’t come home. But by now this was normal and they wouldn’t start worrying until at least three days. I realised she’d gone firstly when i found her mobile phone and keys in one of her drawers in her room, I also found a lot of other things missing from drawers. Isobel wasn’t very good at planning when she left the house that to even think of taking any essentials was very out of character but she certainly would never leave her phone at home. I couldn’t tell my parents of these suspicious factors, as they would know I had been in her room and then if Isobel did decide to return she too would find out. It was when I got home after school three days after my birthday that I found my parents sitting in the sitting room, my mother in tears, clutching on to a then creased and damp piece of paper. I pulled the paper from her tight grip but without reading it I knew what it would say, it was a letter written in Isobel’s sloping and slender handwriting and she had gone.
I was so angry with her for leaving us, and that was why I took Isobel’s room for my own. My room was the smallest bedroom in the house. I didn’t see why Isobel’s room should be left for her when she had left us and I, who had loyally stayed with my parents had to stay in the ‘box’ room. I took it and I didn’t care. I didn’t care when I used up the last of her designer fragrances or when I folded the pages of her previously unread books instead of using a bookmark and I didn’t care when adopted her belongings for my own. My parents seemed to notice my presence in the house even less since Isobel had gone, they didn’t care when I walked round the house in her stiletto boots and clothes or drank from the ‘Isobel mug’, they hadn’t forgotten her though, they just seemed to want to concentrate so hard of remembering their Isobel that their didn’t seem to be any room left for Lily. One night, I was sleeping in Isobel’s bed, I woke up and I could see my mother standing in the doorway staring into the room but she didn’t seem to notice I was there and she just stared and in the moons cold light I could see the silent tears that were falling and they glistened in the dark. In that moment I would have done anything to properly be Isobel, not just for myself but I knew that that was what my mother wanted and it wouldn’t have mattered who I was or how much like Isobel I tried to be because I still wasn’t Isobel.
After the police told us the news this morning, I counted the exact number of days since she had left. Three hundred and eighty one days had passed. It was unbelievable that for each day we never knew, never suspected a thing and each day had passed silently, with us floating through life. Another birthday of mine had passed and my parents had forgotten it as the anniversary of my birth. Christmas wasn’t even acknowledged, the child in me had run downstairs on Christmas day but I knew there would be nothing and of course their wasn’t. At the prize giving ceremony at my school my parents didn’t come and after winning two awards for academic excellence, I was congratulated by other people’s parents and even when I framed my certificates myself and mounted them on the dining room wall amongst Isobel’s previous art achievement awards they didn’t even acknowledge them. It was after the prize giving ceremony that I realised that although Isobel had been thoroughly horrible to me and I had been so jealous of her and the clear favouritism and immense love my parents gave her I still wished she was home, it was easier living in a house with love, even if it was for someone else than living in a house which had no love at all for anyone else.
The headmistress took me out of class this morning. She led me to her office where my parents were waiting to collect me. My parents said nothing as to where we were going; we just walked to the car. It was the first time I’d been in the car for months, we hadn’t even been on holiday last summer, and everything had just stood still since Isobel. We drove to the police station where we were led into a quiet and private room and we were met by a policeman and policewoman who told us that they’d found Isobel, the way they said it was as though they had been looking for her yet I knew that my parents had never reported her missing. They’d found her and she had been there for several months. My parents didn’t seem shocked or upset they just nodded and we left. No one said anything on the drive home until we got to a supermarket and my mother asked me to get out of the car and we went in together and she was completely normal, as though Isobel had never been at all. We were even laughing together and she let me choose the dinner and vegetables and fruit and tubs of ice cream and packets of biscuits and when we got home even my father was smiling. We had a normal family meal and we talked like a normal family.
All the time I had been occupying ‘Isobel’s room’, I still referred to it as that but now I went in there and I felt it was mine and our whole family had been freed from the not knowing. Everything around ‘my room’ was mine: the mug of coffee, cold and abandoned on my window sill, the crumpled bed sheets, the clothes and shoes, the dirty laundry littering the floor, the much read books, the papers on the desk. It was my head that had indented the pillow and I wasn’t jealous of Isobel anymore, I felt deeply sorry for her instead. The quiet and younger sister person within me had died with Isobel and I realised that even since she had gone I had become my own person, no longer living in the shadow of a sister. It was very final now though that she was never coming back and as I began to tidy my room to make it how I liked it, I began to think of interesting colours to paint over Isobel’s deep purple walls and the changes I would make. The chains that had bound me to walk behind her had been cut and now I could begin the rest of my life as my own person, as Lily James.
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