Standing in front of her was never a burden I carried.

It was a privilege I was given, the privilege of defending something genuinely good in a world that so often could not recognize goodness when it was standing right in front of it, clapping its hands with delight at a kickball game.

I did not protect my sister because she was weak.

I protected her because she was precious, and because too few people could see it, and I have never in my life regretted a single moment I spent as her wall.

Chapter 2 — The One Boy Who Never Flinched

There was one boy who never flinched.

His name was Gabriel, and he lived right down the street from us, and from the very beginning he looked at my sister and saw what I saw: not a diagnosis, not a burden, not an object of pity, but Gemma, a person, funny and warm and worth knowing.

I have thought a great deal, in the years since, about how rare that was, and how much it mattered.

Children are not born cruel, but they learn cruelty easily, and they learn it most easily toward whatever is different, because difference frightens them and cruelty is a way of managing fear.

Most of the children in our schoolyard managed their fear of my sister by making her the target.

Gabriel simply never seemed to feel the fear in the first place.

“Gemma,” I used to tell her, holding her hand on the bus ride home while she pressed her forehead to the window and watched the town go by, “you’ll always have Gabriel and me.” I said it softly, and I said it often, over months and then years, until it stopped being a comfort I offered and became a fact she simply knew about her own life, as solid and unquestioned as her own name.

You’ll always have Gabriel and me.

When the other team captains rolled their eyes and muttered under their breath at the thought of Gemma on their kickball team, Gabriel picked her, first, without hesitation, and stationed himself beside her in the field so that every ball hit her way became, somehow, a triumph they shared.