A brother and a sister.
One is the captain of the hockey team in a small town while the other aspires to be the best figure skater out there. But what happens when they cross paths after a year of being apart, and everything has changed.
One doesn...
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| Annalise Lauren |
"My Biggest Competitor"
All my life, I had always been compared to someone. Whether it was my older sister, or it was the girl that had beaten me at a competition, I was always compared to someone. I was never good enough for anyone. Not my coaches, not my friends, not my family. No one.
But now, that I looked back on my life, the biggest competitor I had was the girl that I believed was my sister. I didn't understand and I never will understand, how our lives became a game with one another. Who had the prettier dress on or who had more time out on the ice, practicing with a well known coach.
I don't know when it became like that. It felt like it had been my whole life, and maybe it had. In all reality, my whole entire life, my existence, had been a complete lie, and no one had the decency to tell me that. No wonder it felt so right to call the people that were supposed to be my parents, Hannah and Jameson. They were not my parents, as far as I was aware.
So all the slaps on the cheek and the wrist, all the cat calling and words that have been said over the years, it was all for nothing. There was no purpose, as I was never even there daughter. Now I had nowhere to go. I was just sitting here, while the only person I kind of knew, was dead asleep, high on drugs from his surgery last night.
Looking down at my big brother from my sitting position that I had managed from having his arm wrapped around my waist, made me gather an understanding of who he was. Of the boy that I had grown up knowing was always going to be better than me. That he would eventually have the slightest chance to take over from our parents obsession with our dead siblings. But now, they weren't our siblings, as they were the true Laurens, not us.
To some degree, everything made a little sense. I don't know how we were roped into it all, but I had gone from watching River and Riley being the stars of the shows and games, to it being myself and Aiden, but we were never good enough. We weren't the originals, so we were always compared to them, as we were just filling in for when they would never come back from the dead.
I was only a fill in for what they had lost and knew that they would never get back. That was all I was made for. Taking a closer look at my brother, I realized just how peaceful his breaths were. The slow rise and fall of his chest, as his lips were not in a smile nor were they smirking. His eyebrows weren't furrowed, as his face looked entirely relaxed.
For a long time, I was finally seeing my brother having some peace in being relaxed. He wasn't running, he wasn't running from something or someone. He was just here, sleeping beside me, as his chest rose and fell, while nothing seemed to matter to him. And maybe nothing mattered right now, but I knew that when he woke up, it would.
I always knew him as someone to always be on overdrive. Hearing him leaving and coming in early and late, training his body into the ground. If he wasn't home, he was out at a game or he was down at the local gym, usually alone. If it was the offseason, he was running the football pitch, gathering speed, or he was running laps around the yard.
