Chapter 1 — The Tiny Wall

I was seven years old the first time I understood that my sister was different in a way the world would decide to punish her for.

Gemma was six, exactly one year behind me in school, and to me she was simply my sister: the person who laughed at my jokes before I finished telling them, who saved the marshmallows from her cereal because she knew I liked them, whose whole face lit up like a lamp being switched on whenever someone said her name with any kindness at all.

That was the thing about Gemma that the world so often missed.

She noticed kindness the way other people notice sunlight, and she gave it back tenfold.

But kindness, I learned early, was not what most children offered her.

They pointed at her in the schoolyard.

They mimicked the way she spoke, and laughed at the shape of her joy, and teased her until her eyes filled and spilled over, and something in me, something that has never once quieted in all the years since, would rise up hot and furious, and I would plant myself in front of my little sister like a tiny wall, my fists balled at my sides, daring them to get through me to get to her.

I was not a big child.

I could not have stopped anyone who truly wanted to hurt her.

But I could stand there, between Gemma and the world’s cruelty, and I could make it clear that to reach her they would have to come through me first, and I would spend, I did not yet know it then, the rest of my life in more or less that same position.

I did not understand, at seven, the word that the world would attach to my sister, or the long catalogue of things it would decide she could not do because of it.

I understood only that she was mine to protect, and that a great many people were going to need protecting against, and that I was prepared, small as I was, to be the wall.

I have wondered, sometimes, whether it was fair that a seven-year-old should have appointed herself her sister’s bodyguard against the world.

But I have come, over the years, to see it differently.

Gemma did not make me her protector; the world did, by being what it was to her, and once I understood what she was up against, I could no more have stopped protecting her than I could have stopped breathing.

And here is the thing the world never understood about my sister, the thing all its cruelty was built on missing: Gemma was not a lesser person who needed to be endured.

She was a fuller person than most of the children who mocked her, more honest, more loving, more incapable of the small meannesses that came so easily to them.