My little sister turns 13 tomorrow, but a week ago she didn’t exist [PART 1]

I’m at my wit’s end. I don’t know if I’m witnessing some kind of freaky paranormal phenomenon or if something is seriously wrong with my brain and I’m genuinely terrified.

It started two days ago. Well, I guess it started a while before that. My mom got diagnosed with Alzheimer’s about a decade ago when I was in middle school. She was lucid enough for the next few years, but by the time I was graduating high school, days, names, and faces were all blurs that she had a hard time keeping together. Now, with my college graduation just a few months away, she’s at the point where she can barely string words together. I think she can still recognize things in some kind of carnal way. She smiles when she sees me, at least. It’s heartbreaking and I could go on for hours about how much it sucks, but that isn’t why I’m writing this.

Two days ago, I got a call from my dad. He wanted to know if I was coming home for the long weekend. I told him I wasn’t planning on it, and I could tell right away that he was upset. He said something about how she was really hoping I’d be there for the party and she’d been talking about it all week. That hit me like a brick. It was totally unlike him to use my mom as a bargaining chip or guilt trip. I told him, sure, I’ll be there, I wouldn’t miss it. I didn’t really know what *it* was, but if it was important enough that my dad would talk like that, it was important enough to go to (and important enough that I should have known what *it* was without having to ask). I was supposed to go upstate with my friends for the long weekend, but I told them I had to cancel.

I pulled up to my parents’ place on Thursday night. My dad’s car wasn’t in the garage, so I figured he was down the street at a friend’s place. He used to take my mom to stuff like that to try to keep her social, but in the past few years she’s gotten really frustrated and intimidated by crowds, so I expected she’d be in bed.

I opened the front door as quietly as I could. My mom had always been a light sleeper, and these days she got really upset if she got woken up in the middle of the night. I tiptoed down the hallway, going extra slowly past the room on the right side of the house where she slept. It used to be my dad’s office, but we converted it into a bedroom for her so she didn’t have to go up and down the stairs.

I turned the corner into the kitchen, then the next corner into the living room, then flipped on the light.

I screamed. I literally screamed. My mother was sitting on the couch, staring at me, smiling. “She’s so excited,” she said. Her voice was so weak these days. It’s honestly really hard for me to hear it, and I was still on edge from seeing her here in the living room, but the sight of her smiling always helps to calm me down. Like I said earlier, she smiles when she recognizes someone who she loved before her mind started to wash away. It’s comforting, like a piece of my mom is still there.

But why was she smiling before she even saw me? And why was she in the room at all? I didn’t think too much about it. I helped her back into her room, tucked her into bed, then went upstairs and collapsed into bed myself. I’d been planning on watching some TV until my dad got home, but after the long drive and the near heart attack, I was beat.

The next morning, I woke up to the smell of bacon. Naturally, I zoomed downstairs. My dad was all smiles. It always amazed me how much he’d taken to things like cooking and cleaning once mom wasn’t able to do them. He asked me what time I got in, I said not too late. I asked him if he was at Lou Wilkinson’s place last night.

He looked at me funny. “Lou’s? Come on, Mark.”

I shook my head and smiled. “Come on what?”

Dad frowned. “It was your sister’s recital last night. You better not act like you forgot, she’s gonna talk your ear off about it when she wakes up.”

I shot him a quizzical look, but he’d already returned to pushing bacon around in the pan. I guess I didn’t really think much of it. Some weird slip of the tongue? I didn’t know. I swung around into the living room, plopped on the couch, and grabbed the remote.

Then, I saw something.

“Hey, dad?”

He leaned his head over into the living room. “Hmm?”

“Who’s that?” I pointed to a picture to the right of the TV. Judging from the swoopy haircut and the My Chemical Romance shirt, it was from a while ago, probably just a year or two after my mom’s diagnosis. She looked happy, a huge smile and bright eyes that reflected the world around her. She still smiled when she saw me, but not like this. Mid-laugh, probably right after she’d made fun of the way my hair looked. I loved seeing her like that.

But I didn’t recognize the picture. Or, well, I did — it was at the 4th of July barbecue down at Hanscom Pond — but some little girl was standing on my dad’s shoulders.

“Who’s who?” my dad asked.

“That girl,” I said, pointing to the picture.

He looked, then squinted his eyes. “Which picture?”

“What?” I asked, dumbfounded. “This one.” I got up and touched it. I came home from school every two or three months, so I knew which pictures were up in my parents’ house. I’d never seen this one before. Not on the wall, not online, not in photo albums. “This is at the barbecue, right?”

Dad nodded, then returned to his bacon. “What was that, 2005? 2006?”

“2007” I said. My shirt was a Black Parade shirt, and I know my MCR enough to know that the album came out in late 2006.

“That’s right,” he said. The frying pan hissed as he flipped the bacon. “That’s right, your sister was three. That was the first 4th of July after she was potty trained.” He laughed. “Every time you and your sister would get on my shoulders, it was a game of Russian roulette as to whether or not my neck would become your bathroom. Yeah, she was definitely 3 in that. It’s funny the things you remember.”

“Yeah,” I said distantly. In case you need the context, here it is: I don’t have a sister. I never did. Apparently my mom’s pregnancy wasn’t great, and after giving birth to me, the doctors told her that she both couldn’t and shouldn’t get pregnant again. Of course, she tried (I didn’t hear the *specifics* of how my parents tried to get pregnant, but I’d heard the story enough to know that my parents were ferociously going to pound town in the early aughts to try to give me a little sibling). But nothing took. She’d never be able to get pregnant naturally, and we didn’t have the money for IVF or adoption. And so, it was just the three of us, me, my mom, and my dad.

I had no idea what my dad was talking about. But by the time I decided I wanted to ask him what he meant, the bacon was ready and I got distracted by sizzling pork and buttered toast. It wasn’t until I was nearly done with breakfast that I heard thumping upstairs. I looked at my dad.

“The hell was that?”

“*That* is a very tired little 12 year old,” he said with a laugh.

I shot him a *what are you talking about* look.

“The dance recital,” he said. “She’s not usually up that late, and she’s definitely not up that late dancing and prancing around a stage for two hours. I was hoping the bacon would wake her up, but, hey, better late than never.”

Again, I wanted to ask him what he meant, but before I could, bounding down the stairs came a very bubbly little girl. The same girl from the photo.

She squealed when she saw me. “Marmar!” She flung her arms up and sprinted towards me.

I jumped backwards. I was just as terrified as I was the night before when I saw my mom. Who the *fuck* was this little kid, why was she in our family photo, and why was she sleeping in my parents’ house? When I jumped away from her hug, she looked at me as if I’d shot somebody. My eyes were wide as dinner plates, but off my dad’s appalled look, I bent down and gave the girl a hug.

“Heyyy,” I said noncomitally. I tried to think of what to say next, but my mind drew a blank. “Hey,” I said again.

“I wish you had been at the recital Marmar, it was so fun! Everyone in class says that Alicia is the best at ballet, but Mrs. Dawkins says I’m the best at modern, and I think that ballet is for people who are a hundred years old, so who even cares about it.”

I nodded at her and tried to keep a grimace from blossoming on my face.

“Hey,” I said to my dad, “I’m not feeling great, I’m gonna head upstairs.”

“What’s the matter?” he called out, but I didn’t turn around. I darted down the hall and up the stairs, then leapt into my room, closing the door behind me.

I don’t know how long I was up there. An hour? Five? I went through pictures on Facebook, pictures on my phone, pictures on my desk. There she was. In every family picture, she was there. Pictures of the two of us laughing and smiling, pictures of her when she was younger climbing all over me. I looked at my own Facebook account and saw that I listed myself as having a sister named Brie DuBois. I clicked on her profile and, sure enough, there she was.

I went to all of my cousins’ pages. They were all friends with her, and they all had pictures with her, too. What was going on? I wanted to send messages to them, but what was I going to say? Hey, long time no see, *do I have a sister*? I didn’t really want to send out an alert to my entire extended family that I was either a total asshole or a total crazy person.

Crazy. I don’t like using that word. 100 years ago people would have called my mom crazy. The realization hit me that Alzheimer’s is genetic. But I was barely 20. There was no way that I had just *forgotten* that I had a younger sister. The thought that my brain was already crumbling like that was nothing short of horrifying.

But it was less horrifying than the alternative.

I spent of the day in my room, despite my dad’s insistence that I come down and hang out with Brie. I gave him every excuse I had. I was tired from the drive yesterday, I had a paper to write, my stomach wasn’t feeling good. It was all bullshit, of course, but I couldn’t tell him the truth. Either I was a monster who had forgotten that I had a little sister, which was impossible, or… Or, well, that little girl downstairs was a monster who had invaded my life. Not must my life, but my *history*, as if she’d somehow dipped her fingers into the timeline and played cat’s cradle with it. I mean, there were pictures, *pictures* of the two of us together all the way from her “birth” in 2005 through this past fall.

I went to Google like duck goes to bread crumbs. I tore open ancient Reddit threads, paid a visit to the darkest corners of 4chan, I even had a lengthy discussion with ChatGPT. I searched for any trace of other people who had experienced the same thing that I was experiencing. Of course, there were plenty of short stories on the subject. Creepypastas, SCPs, all that. I exchanged a few DMs with someone who claimed he had a dog who had similarly appeared in his life with no context, but a bit more digging revealed that he was a known YouTube prankster. I closed my laptop and rubbed my eyes.

Eventually, my dad banged on the door. He said dinner was ready, and that he didn’t know what was going on wtih me but my little sister was about to have a conniption because her older brother won’t play with her. “Dad,” I started, not exactly sure what question I wanted to ask, “Is Brie… Is she okay?”

“Well, she’s not happy, I’ll tell you that much, and that’s a pretty big accomplishment considering how happy she was last night. As excited she was about the recital, the thing she was most excited for was to tell you about it. And you’ve been up here for God knows how long doing God knows what.”

“I– I’m sorry, I just–“

Dad sighed. “Listen, I get it. You’re nearly twice as old as she is and college is this whole other world, it sucks you in. I get it, I was your age once, too. Just, do me a favor. I gotta head out tonight, but I got pizzas for the two of you. Just, I don’t know, watch a movie or something with her, okay?”

My heart skipped a beat. “You’re heading out tonight?” I said, my voice trembling. I didn’t know what was going on, but I knew that I didn’t want to be alone in a house with whoever, *whatever* that thing downstairs was.

“Yeah, there’s this whole community thing happening at the church, I said I’d go–“

“Don’t,” I blurted out. “Don’t go. Stay here. Please.”

My dad stepped back. “Woah, relax, kiddo. I’ll be back later tonight. You’re not gonna starve, the pizza’s already downstairs.”

“Please stay,” I said.

He shook his head. “You okay, Mark?”

“Yeah,” I said, my voice still trembling. “Yeah.”

“Mhm.” He gave me a final look before turning around and heading downstairs. A minute later I heard his car start and peel away.

I looked around my room. Childhood trophies, legos, and stuffed animals occupied every inch of shelf space. I wondered what in this room was actually mine. *Mine*. Nothing felt mine anymore, not when my history had been rewritten by “Brie”. I gulped. It didn’t make sense. A person can’t just appear. It wasn’t some elaborate joke, not with how many pictures there were of her online. It wasn’t some reality warping monster, because obviously it wasn’t that. The only other possibility, the thing that scared me more than anything else, was that I was turning into my mom more quickly than I ever thought possible. I shuddered, but, despite myself, I went downstairs.

Something was wrong. The air was thick, like I could have carved it with a knife. I called out for my dad, just in case he was somehow still here. Silence. I moved through the kitchen. I could smell the pizza, but there was also something else. Something sweet, something so blatantly decadent that it made my eyes water. I blinked and squinted and pushed through, making my way into the living room.

For the second time in 24 hours, I screamed.

In the living room, calmly chewing on a slice of pizza, was my mother. Sitting on her lap and whispering into her ear was her. Brie. When she heard me scream, she turned to look at me. She smiled, big and bright and ear to ear and absolutely, heart-stoppingly horrifying.

“Marmar!” she said, her face barely moving. Her mouth was frozen in that smile, her eyes lit up brightly with nothing at all behind them. “I’ve got so much to tell you. There’s so much to be done before my birthday party.”