It was already eight in the evening; three hours since Jennie left Lisa alone.
Jennie had simply forgotten about her stepsister holding up the shop on her own, too preoccupied spending time with her friends to notice that the sky was darkening outside of the dim PC Room. Only when both Chaeyoung and Jisoo got calls from their parents did Jennie exit the game program and check the time.
"Hey, you okay? You look like you just saw a ghost." Chaeyoung smirked, "Shaking in your pants after I beat you twice in a row, huh?"
Jennie snorted, obviously trying to play it cool as panic rose to the tip of her ears. As nonchalantly as she could manage, she walked out of the PC Room with her friends and waved them off, thankful that they were going the other way and not in the direction of the flower shop. Once Chaeyoung and Jisoo were out of sight and out of mind, Jennie whisked around and sprinted like she was running for the opposite goal. If she didn't run faster, she thought she'd lose sight of it forever.
"Lisa!" she yelled once she got to the empty, dark shop. She wasn't there. She wasn't in the back watering the flowers or organizing the potted plants by color. Even the work apron was gone, and so was the rose bouquet.
Jennie locked the shop as fast as she could and raced down the streets. With a brain like Lisa's, she couldn't have gone very far on her two feet, nor was there a possibility that she could have been kidnapped. She ran to every open store she came by and asked each shopkeeper if they had seen some tall, dumb-looking girl pass by, but they all shook their heads. At a crossroad, she stopped to catch her breath, wondering if she should file a missing person report with the police in case something did happen to Lisa and she was just wasting time looking in the wrong places.
Leaning against the telephone pole, she was seconds away from thumbing in the emergency number when she saw someone tall and dumb across the street. Jennie kept quiet to avoid catching Lisa's attention, so the idiot wouldn't start running across the street without waiting for the green light. When she got to the other side, she noticed that the girl was sleeping on a park bench, the bouquet of roses held tight to her chest. Someone had passed by earlier to put a newspaper over the girl, which made her look even dumber, like some girl who got rejected.
"Lisa," she huffed, "Lalisa!"
Startled, the taller girl stood up with a sway, rubbing her eyes with one hand. With the sleep still crusted along her inner eyelids, she looked overjoyed to see Jennie again. "J-Jennie!"
The smile, however, disappeared when Jennie slapped her hard across the face. "Jennie..." she mumbled softly, lower lip quivering as she held one hand up to her reddened cheek.
"I told you to stay at the shop!" Jennie yelled, the veins in her neck standing straight out when anger took over any amount of pity she initially felt for the other girl, "Are you fucking stupid or something? Do you not understand me when I say to just stay in one fucking place? What if something were to happen to you?!" Then it would be all my fault.
Lisa chewed on her lower lip and cautiously handed the bouquet of roses to Jennie, who threw it on the ground.
"You can't understand anything I say, do you? Well, I wish you were never born." For a split second, her heart wrenched in her chest as she saw hot tears coil in Lisa's eyes. She convinced herself that there was no way she could understand the malice behind her words, and Lisa was only crying like the baby she was because she didn't want to be scolded. Jennie turned around and pressed the button for the crosswalk lights again.
I wish you were never born.
Jennie sighed, staring at the blank pages of her homework as if the answers would magically write themselves down. After Lisa moved in, studying had become a chore. She couldn't concentrate because Lisa always watched dramas in the living room with the volume turned up high. Whenever Jennie said something about how distracting it was, her mother always took Lisa's side anyways.
Tonight, she wasn't here because she had yet a third job to work until midnight, which meant that Jennie had to make dinner and bathe Lisa before bed. She solved dinner with ramen (Lisa only ate the noodles because the soup was too spicy for her), she he wasn't looking forward to bathtime because, ick, she had to bathe a grown woman.
Pulling the door open, she walked out to the living room and found Lisa curled up in a Pororo blanket too small for her, a tub of ice cream held between her crossed ankles. She was watching the drama, Secret Garden, so intensely that Jennie almost felt bad when she turned the television off.
"I'm doing my homework right now and I can't concentrate because of you," she muttered, tossing Lisa her notebook and pencil that were on the coffee table, "You do your homework, I'll do mine."
Thankfully, Lisa wasn't the type to argue, so as soon as Jennie gave her something else to do, she was focused on it.
In the middle of her studying, she thought Lisa had gone to sleep because it was quiet outside, so when she gave herself a ten minute break to drink some water, she found the girl huddled over the table, counting numbers on her fingers. For what it was worth, Lisa had more ambition than Jennie had with studying. Even if she couldn't learn addition so easily, she at least tried everyday until she'd get one question right out of a hundred.
"You're hopeless..." Jennie sighed as she walked past Lisa, "Hey, Lisa, let's take a bath."
Taking a bath for Lisa was like the best adventure of the day, while it was a chore for Jennie to wash her everywhere, and by everywhere, she meant everywhere: behind the ears, between her legs, and under her pits. She wore the red rubber gloves her mother used to wash dishes when she scrubbed Lisa's hair, making retching sounds everytime her hands would slide over a forbidden area.
"Ah, Jennie, soap!" Lisa whined, squeezing her eyes shut when the suds stung them. "Jennieee!"
"Shut up!" she huffed in a thick, country accent, hosing her stepsister's face down until Lisa was sputtering for air. "You have to be thankful you have a sister like me to take care of your stupid ass," Jennie muttered while massaging Lisa's scalp with shampoo, having pulled up a chair behind the tub to make the job easier. She sighed, pulling off the gloves so she could lather her hair a little better with her bare hands. After a while, the strain in Lisa's neck loosened and Jennie figured she had fallen asleep again.
If she was asleep...
"I didn't mean to yell at you earlier," Jennie hesitantly murmured, "I was just so angry that I had to keep worrying about you on top of all the other things I needed to worry about. I thought you were just there to ruin my life. You kind of are..." She trailed off, leaning over to catch a glimpse of Lisa's closed eyelids and twitching lips. She rolled her own eyes. "But you're too stupid to even know what you're doing wrong..."
Her fingers slipped over some fleshy scar right above Lisa's ear, something she happened to miss since she always washed her hair with gloves on before. The scar was long and thick, running from the back of her skull to her ear. Touching it sent shivers down Jennie's spine.
"Clumsy idiot."
After bathing and dressing Lisa, Jennie carried the half-conscious Lisa by her arm, dropping her on the living room couch with a blanket tucked around her. She was so tired that she didn't want to go back to studying, so she closed her textbooks again and turned off the desk lamp. Just when she was about to go to bed herself, she saw a piece of paper wedged under her door, something she had overlooked when she pulled it open before.
It was poorly folded and looked like a page torn out of Lisa's math notebook.
Jumping sideways onto her bed, she rested her head on a pillow and unfolded the thick note to find a message written inside in poor, but endearing handwriting:
Ουπς! Αυτή η εικόνα δεν ακολουθεί τους κανόνες περιεχομένου. Για να συνεχίσεις με την δημοσίευση, παρακαλώ αφαίρεσε την ή ανέβασε διαφορετική εικόνα.
