Their Game of Family

Before our family’s Thanksgiving dinner, my younger sister, Raina Kirk, suddenly offered to braid my hair. I had barely sat down when I heard a sharp snip behind me. Seven years of growing my hair out, gone in one cut. She’d chopped it off right at the roots. Raina froze for two seconds, then burst out laughing, collapsing onto the couch. "Oh, shit, I cut off too much! Hahaha! You look like a man who just escaped prison!" Mom saw the piles of hair scattered across the floor and started laughing too. "What’s so bad about it? You walk around with your hair all over the place like some banshee anyway. At least now you’ll save money on haircuts." I clenched my fingers into fists, my throat tight. Dad, however, impatiently urged me to come eat. "Hair grows back. Why didn’t Raina cut anyone else’s? Because she’s close to you. You’re the easiest to tease." My eyes instantly filled with tears. I turned to look at my boyfriend, Zayne Herring, only to find him looking down as he transferred money to Raina. "Two hundred bucks. A bet’s a bet." When he noticed me staring, he waved his phone. "Raina bet you’d cry in one minute. I bet three. Come on, you didn’t even give me a chance to win!" The whole room erupted in laughter again. I stood there, frozen. For the first time, I suddenly felt so tired of all of it. When I was sixteen, Raina wrote "Dumbass" on the back of my school uniform, and my entire class mocked me for the rest of the semester. When I was twenty-one, she hid my glasses and caused me to miss my college graduation defense. Every time I got angry, they would laugh and ask, "Why are you such a sore loser?" All these years, I hadn’t been their daughter, their older sister, or even someone’s girlfriend. I was nothing more than a toy they used to keep Raina entertained. But this time, I didn’t want to play along anymore.