July 2085: how to make castles

Paige Roberts is 11.


It had rained all night, and the morning of her eleventh birthday, a heavy fog settled over the neighborhood. "We can do whatever you want later," Paige's mom said. "Do you want to go out for dinner? Or I could take you to the mall?"

“Can I ride my bike?”

“Not now, maybe later if the fog clears.”

“Can you drive me over to Tara’s house?”

“Sure, I'll drive you over when the fog clears.”

Her mother liked everything to be safe. Her mother liked to see where everyone was and that they were okay.

"Why don't you go try out your new barre for a little while? Your daddy spent a whole night installing that for you."

"I know," Paige said. "I like it."



Paige went to dance in her room for a little while.


Paige was going to be a big sister. She was also going into junior high. And she had to wear glasses too, because her doctor said her weak eyesight was the reason she was getting headaches. It wasn't cancer. Her mother cried when they'd found out it was just ordinary bad eyesight, and not something worse, like a brain tumor. Or leukemia. Her mother cried and she said, These are happy tears, sweetheart. I'm just so happy you're okay. 

Paige never heard of anyone being so happy someone had to wear glasses. Kids got teased for wearing glasses.

The last time Paige had been over at Tara’s house, Tara had told her, “Some of the kids at Lakeside Secondary have mustaches, and stinky armpits, and boobs. I heard some of the kids sneak into the auditorium to make out.”



Paige wondered if Miranda had ever made out with a boy, or what she'd wanted to be when she grew up. Miranda had been too sick to have boyfriends, her mom had told her. She'd been sick for a couple of years, and before that, she was too young. But Paige knew she probably hadn't told their mom everything. Girls never tell their moms everything, like Paige didn't tell her mom that for the whole last month of fifth grade, she'd taken off her glasses and put them in her backpack before school started and only put them back on before she walked home, because she didn't want to get called "four eyes".  

Miranda never needed glasses. Paige had seen pictures of her, and Miranda had been so pretty, with bright eyes and a big smile. Miranda must have had a boyfriend, because pretty girls always had boyfriends. Especially pretty girls who were fun and nice. Paige hoped she looked like Miranda when she was older, and she wondered if that would make her parents sad if she did? Or sad if it turned out she didn't?  

There was nothing to do, so Paige found her old scepter, which had been lost underneath her bed when they moved, so she climbed up on a chair in the office nook to play queen of court. She’d lost her old crown and she felt too big for the chair, but a tiny glimmer of joy filled her as she gave her speech, a crownless queen. With glasses.

Then she felt like such a freak, so she stopped.

Who wanted to start junior high with four eyes? Paige didn’t want to go to junior high at all.


Her mom was standing in the hallway. “You don’t have to stop, I was just walking through.”

“It was dumb anyway,” Paige said.

“You still haven’t said what you want for your birthday.”

I want to be ten for one more year, she thought, but that wasn’t a present she could ask for. She didn’t know why a play table came to mind. “What ever happened to that old turtle table I had?”

“It’s in the nursery. I thought you wouldn't mind giving it to the baby. I didn’t think you wanted it anymore.” Her mom said it like an apology. Pretty much everything she said about this baby seemed like an apology.

“I don’t,” Paige said. She shrugged and her mom smiled.

“Well maybe I’ll just take you to the mall later and you can pick something out.”


Paige ducked into the nursery, the new baby’s room. This room was never hers as a baby. When she was a baby they lived in a different house, a two-bedroom apartment, and she'd shared a bedroom with her sister. Miranda always wanted her own room, but they couldn't afford it then. They used to be a lot poorer than they were now. Her mom had been sixteen when Miranda was born. You'll be a smarter teenager than I was, she'd said. You'll do it all right.

But Paige had so many questions. She wanted to ask Miranda if she'd ever had a boyfriend. She wanted to ask her what it felt like to grow boobs. She wanted to ask her if kids in junior high were mean. But she couldn't.


The new baby would be a boy, and she'd heard her mom saying that she was glad. Having another girl would have felt like something to apologize for.

Paige remembered this turtle, the blue plastic frame, building castles out of blocks, watching them rise, making them fall. She swore in some of those memories her sister was there, so Miranda must have been a teenager at some point, playing blocks with her little sister, showing her how to build castles.

She gathered the blocks in her hands.


Paige was going to be a big sister and she was going to junior high. She didn't know if she was going to do it all right, but she was going to try. And when her baby brother was born, she would show him how to make castles.

—

other July birthdays:
2: Tara Lind (10)
6: Jim Centowski (34)
7: Phillip McCullough (44)
11: Claude McCullough (14)
25: Scott Buchanan (3)
29: Lou Michen (66)

—

notes: I just felt like writing about Paige, even though technically, this family belongs to so many of my other stories, the timelines make my head spin, lol! As Paige remembers it in this dimension, Miranda died of leukemia when Paige was five and Miranda was fourteen, so she really doesn’t remember much about her sister at all. It was leukemia, we’ll say, because geeze, how she dies in the SLH books is not appropriate for a Sim story! :o 

And how she dies in SSA is sort of metaphysical and hard to explain. 

And now I’m trying to think of all the dimensions and horrific ways that poor Miranda dies, lol! She does get to live in one story though, by the way, and she gets a really awesome life.