“He doesn’t own either of us.”

            She always said that. Always said that my father would never recognize our potential.

“Megan Jones, you can be more than they’ll ever let you be,” I believe those were her exact words.

He wouldn’t even let us be friends. Wouldn’t let us see each other, talk to each other. So we created secret emails, and I would call her cell phone from my friend’s house. All of my friends had liked her, and we all missed her. But she couldn’t come to visit, and three hundred miles is a long way to go when you’re 16 and don’t have a car,

            “Meg! You can drive,” she said on one of our secret phone conversations. “I missed your first driving lesson! If I ever get back home, I’ll come and visit, you can drive down to the Café on Main Street and we can have lattes, just like old times.”

            She made me promise her we would do that. Sometimes when I missed her lots. She had been my best friend forever. She was the first person to hear about my first kiss. I told her everything. It’s not often that a sixteen-year-old and a twenty-year-old can bridge the age gap as perfectly as we did.

            I hadn’t thought about her for ten minutes. My record was fifteen. I stared up at my shadowy ceiling, before rolling over and flicking on the light. I blinked as the daisy-center yellow of my room came into focus. I hung my body of the bed and lifted the duster, ignoring the throbbing that pounded in my temples.

            On the third wooden slat under my bed, written the day before she left, carved in with an old bent butter knife. ‘Megan Marie-13 and Samantha Joann-17- 4ever friends’ it was the ultimate in cheesy, but it made me feel close to her. She was more than my friend; she was like the supreme goddess who I worshipped. Some of my newer friends, the one’s who hadn’t know her, called the dusty lair under my bed ‘the Sam Shrine’ because of the pictures, and the memories, and the long detailed emails that had been printed off before being deleted from my computer. What our father didn’t know couldn’t hurt him. It had been three years since she left. Three years that we hadn’t seen each other in person. I sent her my school pictures; she sent me pictures of Jesse, her three year old. Sometimes Jesse would draw me pictures. They were usually of him and Sam flying with the birds, and in his scribbly three-year-old writing, with Sam’s translation underneath, he would usually write ‘Mommy and I flying to visit Auntie Meg’, which is sweet, because we have never met in person.

            “I will not help you raise a baby,” My father bellowed the night he kicked Samantha out, the night we found out she was pregnant. “You’re poor mother would not stand for this!”

            And so we sat there, and listened to Dad rant about all he had done for us, and how Mom would be turning over in her grave, how he had tried his hard to raise Sam and me right. That some distant relatives in Chicago had wanted to adopt Sam and me because, “You were just 10 and 6 then.”

            “I don’t want you to influence your little sister and make her screw up her life, Megan isn’t strong enough to make her own path, so she’s going to follow yours, and we can’t have that.”

            He declared Sam a failure and me a weakling, and then told Sam she had two days to “Get the hell out.”

            “You’re stronger than he thinks you are. Don’t you ever let him tell you something different. He’ll let us see each other someday, when you’re older only three more years till you’re 18, then you can come and visit Jesse and me.”

            Another whispered phone conversation. She’d just found a good job, and so Dad had stopped sending her money. He’d found her an apartment and had been paying her rent until she found a job that could support her and Jesse. He still loved her; we all knew that, he just wanted to keep me out of trouble.

            It had been three years and eleven months since Sam had left, all that long time ago, and she called me, at the house, OUR house.

            “Hey Meg,” she sounded solemn, she was usually happy, the ultimate optimist, “I screwed up again.”

            “How? Why? When?”

            “That’s none of your business Megan. But Dad’s right, I am a bad influence on you. I love you Meg, but I think we should stop talking and stuff, maybe, someday I’ll call, and we can get together again, ok?”

            “But Sam…”

            “Bye, Meg, I love you.”

            “I love you too Sam.”

            She hung first, and I cradled the phone in my hand until the dial tone buzzed and the annoying machine person told me to hang up and try again.

            Samantha more than my sister, she was my best friend.