Then it hit me. This was the same girl from the picture I found in the guest room while I was cleaning. The reason Aunt Dinah had yelled at me for no reason. I’d climbed out my window and ran into Charlie boy by the taco truck. I knew this girl was related to my aunt; their scowls were too similar. Although, looking into the laughing face of this young version of Aunt Dinah and comparing it to the face of her sister, I couldn’t friggin’ believe it. My great aunt seemed like such a happy person.
What happened?
I looked through all of the pictures on the floor. There were three shots of my aunt’s parents, a beautiful blond woman and a dark-haired man with a mustache and a self-important look about him. The sister was only featured in one other picture. The twins cropped up a lot. But Aunt Dinah was the prominent model in all of them. She rode her bicycle down the street, leaned against a brick wall with a cigarette between her fingers, flashed a peace sign while sitting at the edge of a pool, waved at the camera from the tallest branch of an oak tree, smiled down at her Christmas present, squeezed her eyes shut as she blew out the candles on her birthday cake.
When I’d collected all of the pictures from the floor, I hobbled over to the plastic bins to find more. The first three I opened were filled with puzzle boxes. Not the simple, one-hundred-piece puzzles but the really difficult ones with complex images and up to a thousand pieces. The corners of the box lids were white and scuffed. Whoever had put these puzzles together had done them multiple times. The fourth bin I opened contained toys: wooden cars, tangled Slinkys, green army men, a pair of plastic revolvers, a bag of marbles, an old radio. Mostly things a boy would play with.
Maybe these were the twins’ old toys? But then where were Aunt Dinah and her sister’s old things being kept? And why were they separated?
I moved onto the fifth bin. Inside, I found multiple shoe boxes full of more pictures. The story of Aunt Dinah’s adolescence continued. New faces appeared in these, teenage boys and girls who hung out with my aunt outside of the house. They had familiar-looking lifts to their chins and pride in their stances.
“No way,” I muttered, peering closely at a picture of all four of them. Aunt Dinah casually held a switchblade at her side. The guy with his arm around her wore oversized clothes and had a cigarette dangling from his lips. The next guy had a baseball bat over his shoulder. A girl with a perm stood beside him, arms around his waist.
They looked like a gang.
Next, I found a picture of my aunt sporting a black eye. She was lying in bed in the room I was currently staying in, smiling sleepily at the camera. No, it wasn’t sleep tugging at her features; it was pain. Her lips were split, her arm in a sling. She must’ve gotten into a fight before this was taken.
I dug through the box I’d found that picture in, looking for more evidence, but I came up empty. So I put the shoe box away, closed the plastic bin, and moved onto the final bin. Unfortunately, this one was filled with letters. They were all from the same place, St. Catherine’s School for Girls, written in the distinctive typewriter font and organized by date. The first one was from August 15th, 1949. It was paired with a school picture. My heart sank. It was Aunt Dinah. Wearing a white collared shirt under a dark jumper. Her hair was neatly pinned back. And there was the familiar scowl that drew harsh lines across her face, the one she wore all the time now.
I didn’t need to read the letters to know what had happened. The same thing had been done to me, after all. I’d just gotten shipped off to a distant relative instead of a campus full of strict nuns. I didn’t know what made me turn around. Maybe I sensed someone was staring at me. For whatever reason, I slowly pivoted to face my great aunt. She stood at the foot of the stairs, looking tired and sad—not at all like the happy girl in the pictures or the cold, resentful bitch who’d snapped at me earlier or the awkward but polite woman who’d hosted the Campbells earlier today—but like any other old timer reliving painful memories.
“The nuns broke you, didn’t they?” My voice sounded small and hoarse. I braced myself to be shut down, to be yelled at, to be punished. Instead, Aunt Dinah gave a little scoff.
“No. I just let them believe they did so I could graduate and come home. What broke me…” She gritted her teeth as if pushing through a thick, invisible wall. “What broke me was surviving hell just to find out my best friend had died.”
I thought back to the pictures I’d seen of her with her gang. “Was it the boy with the crew cut?”
“Rich?” she asked with a wrinkled brow. “No. He was only a summer boyfriend. My brother…” Here her voice wavered. “It was my brother, Thatcher, who passed away while I was at school.”
“But the twins were so much younger than you. How could one of them be your best—?”
“Keep up, child!” she snarled. “Who do you think took all of those pictures?”
Understanding made my eyes widen.
