Katherine placed a restraining hand on her husband’s chest and looked at her nephew with a wounded expression. “Why did you say such horrible things, Jack?”
Jack knew, in that moment, his aunt had chosen her side, but he felt a surge of confidence. He stared defiantly at his uncle. “I thought you wanted the whole world to know that I’m a short-stringer.”
The campaign manager deftly intervened before Anthony could respond. “Sir, we really need to get moving. We have three interviews lined up, and we’re already running late.”
“Fine.” Anthony practically spat the word out, before scowling one last time at his nephew. “But I want him out of here. Now.”
Amie
Amie had never felt so alone.
Her fight with Nina was the worst they’d ever had, the longest they’d gone without speaking. A month had passed since that night in the kitchen, Nina’s wedding creeping closer on the calendar, and Amie wished she could talk to someone, anyone, to explain her side of the story. But she was too ashamed to divulge the details, especially to her parents, who could look past the tragedy and see the gift they’d been given: their eldest child had found a great love and was loved greatly in return. Luckily, it seemed that Nina hadn’t told anyone, either, since no family members asked Amie why she had been disinvited from the wedding. （Nina had spent Thanksgiving with Maura’s parents that year, leaving Amie alone with their cousins.）
As she sat behind her desk at school, Amie kept hearing her sister’s words. In the hours when she wasn’t teaching, her classroom felt airless and claustrophobic, and she couldn’t eat anything without her stomach lurching. She felt like something was gnawing at her from inside, and she wished that it were simply the remnants of anger from the fight, but she knew that it was more.
It was guilt.
Even after the insults they had hurled at each other, Nina was still her only sister, her oldest friend, her greatest confidant and adviser. And now she was getting married. And Amie wasn’t going to be there.
How could she live with herself, knowing that she had missed one of the most important days in Nina’s life? Knowing that she had ruined it with her words?
She remembered the day when Nina came home crying from school and locked herself in her bedroom with their mother, while Amie sat on the carpet outside the closed door, leaning her back against the wall, waiting for her sister to emerge. She had clenched her eyes shut, praying away Nina’s pain, imagining revenge on all the girls who had hurt her.
When Nina finally calmed down that night, Amie told her that she didn’t have to say anything.
“All that matters is that you’re my sister, and I love you,” Amie said. “This doesn’t change anything between us. It just makes me sorry that you had to go through this alone, and that this might make life harder for you . . . I guess it already has.”
Nina’s skin was red and puffy, but her face looked composed, resolute. “Maybe it will be harder,” she said. “But at least it’ll be right.”
It was so easy for Amie to support Nina then, to stand on her side without any doubt. Why couldn’t she do that now?
Maybe Nina’s accusations were right, and this wasn’t really about her. Maybe the guilt that Amie was feeling had more to do with Ben.
She had let his final letter go unanswered for weeks now. Ben must hate her, she thought. She wanted to write to him, desperately, but she didn’t yet know what to say, and she feared rushing her response, marring whatever connection they had.
Amie tried to remember all that she had demanded of Nina: Are you sure about this? Have you considered the pain? Is it worth it?
Perhaps there was a reason why the questions flew so quickly off her tongue.
She had already asked them all of herself, after reading Ben’s confession.
But Amie couldn’t even begin to make sense of her feelings for Ben while her fight with Nina still loomed so heavily, so painfully, in her mind.
In between classes, Amie opened her laptop and scrolled through her email, surprised to see that one of the teachers had forwarded a YouTube video to the entire staff: “21-Year-Old South African Student Gives Rousing Speech About Strings.”
Amie wasn’t sure, at first, if she should watch. The strings had already scrambled her life, threatened to divide her from her sister. But she clicked on the link and saw a young woman standing before a crowd on what appeared to be a campus. The clip had already garnered nearly three million views.
“Here in South Africa, and around the world,” the girl said, “we have moved past the era of formal segregation and apartheid, but we have not shed our habits of prejudice and exclusion. Inequality has simply donned a new mask. Injustice has merely changed clothes. And, decade after decade, the pain feels the same. But what if we could break that cycle?