Mom, Dad, I Won’t Be My Sister’s Gravestone Anymore

For as long as I could remember, I had known I was a replacement for my dead sister.

The day before I started elementary school, my parents took me shopping for a backpack.

“The blue one or the red one?” Mom asked with a smile. “Which do you want?”

I chose blue. Her face changed at once.

She gripped my shoulders and screamed, “Why didn’t you choose red? Jiajia would only choose red!”

Seeing that I had set Mom off, Dad slapped me across the face.

The blood that ran from my nose was red, too.

After that, whenever I had a choice, I only dared pick the red things my sister would have liked.

One day, while I was playing with my classmates, some modeling clay got stuck in my braid. My teacher kindly cut the braid off for me, but when Mom came to pick me up, she went wild.

“Jiajia has long hair! You’re not my daughter!”

She pushed me off the back seat of her electric scooter.

I ran after her, crying. It took me half an hour to get home.

To avoid upsetting her again, I began copying my sister in everything.

Then I took the gaokao, China’s national college entrance exam, and earned the highest score in the province. Mom still insisted that I apply to the vocational college near our home.

“That’s the school Jiajia got into! You have to go!”

My teacher called to reason with her. Mom shut the conversation down with a single sentence.

“If Jiajia hadn’t died, Lin Sijia would never have been born. She wouldn’t even be here to get the highest score!”

Watching her scream, I suddenly couldn’t see the point of any of it.

If I had to copy my sister in everything, then I couldn’t miss this part, either: she had drowned at eighteen.