THE BABY SISTER I LOST AT THE YARD SALE

E Spellman, 12th - Oakland, CA

For years, all I wanted was a baby sister. I’d heard somewhere as a child that if you looked at a star and clenched your eyes shut while thinking about something you wished for, it would come true. So every star became a wish for a baby sister.
When Chanukah came around, I had the clever and endearing idea to erase every single item from my wish list and replace it with one thing: Baby Sister. Mama rubbed my back knowingly, with a quiet sadness I couldn’t understand back then.
 “I know, love. I know you want that,” she said, tracing soft circles on my back.
Then came the yard sale, on a foggy afternoon. I sat on the porch, my long legs swinging off the top step. The air smelled like cardboard and old plastic boxes. I saw piles of old jeans, forgotten toys, things that hadn’t mattered in years.
A woman with short black hair sifted through a box of sweaters. Her toddler son was toddling across our lawn, crumbs stuck to his mouth. She held up a red sweater. A maternity sweater with a gaping looseness in the belly. PREGNANCY, the box read. The box that had been tucked away, half used, in the basement. 
“This is too cute for Christmas when I’m pregnant again!” she said to another woman beside her, laughing.
I stared at the red sweater for a long time. I knew then — Mama wasn’t going to be pregnant again.
I felt something inside me drop, slow and heavy. It felt like a dream had died in that moment — like I stepped into something heavy, something I wasn’t ready to feel. I didn’t cry or say anything. I just watched the woman, her little son, and felt my dream shift from my reality and into the little boy’s. The memory etched itself into me. Even now, years later, I can still close my eyes and see that red sweater in the black-haired woman’s hands. The way the material hung loose at the middle. The weight of the realization that I wouldn’t ever get a baby sister - no matter how many stars I wished on.
That realization lived in me. I carried it with me before I could even process what it meant or why I remembered that moment so well.
I’m sixteen now. I’m in a striped tank top and old jeans, crouched on the bed of my new room in Mexico, wet hair dripping onto the bedspread. Everything feels different and unfamiliar, with a rhythm separate from the one I was used to. 
The separation made me look back at my life, my childhood, my memories from a wider lens.
And the sweater moment came back to me. The dream that slipped quietly from my world into someone else’s. And I felt the feeling fully, consuming me like a cloud I couldn’t escape. It was rooted so deeply in me that feeling it again shifted something in my whole being.
I cried big, full tears splashing onto the sheets. I leaned over a white spiral notebook and let it spill out, pressing my pen hard into the page as tear drops blurred my fresh sentences. Mama wasn’t there to trace circles on my back. 
I was grown now. I had to wipe my own tears, to tuck my own hair behind my ears.
 I know everything happens for a reason.
But I don’t know why God thought I could hold this, my mind echoed.
I closed my eyes and let the tears sting my cheeks.
This is it. So I have to come to terms with it.
There had been a spit sample I sent to a lab when I was in middle school — something I’d completely forgotten about. And then one random night in high school, I checked my DNA test account out of curiosity. And I got the notification that I had a sister. 
A sister.
All that time since the red sweater — she had existed. She was real. With my same hair. Same eyebrows. Living in another city.
All those stars I’d wished on as a kid - I was wishing for someone who already existed.