They Kicked Me Out, Now They Beg Me Back

"Miss? You don't look so good. Your face is pretty pale." My driver's worried voice snapped me back to reality. I—Margaret Gilmore—opened my mouth, but my throat was too dry to speak, so I just shook my head to let him know I was fine. The car pulled away, and that smug, gloating voice slowly faded behind us—but the words I'd just heard kept spinning around in my head. She said, "To be honest, I've always been jealous of Margaret. She got good grades, and she was pretty—like everyone in the world liked her. No one even saw me. After the guy I liked confessed to her, I got so angry. That was when I finally decided to make her disappear for good." With a smile, she continued, "So I pretended to depend on her. I made sure she never saw it coming. I also made damn sure everyone knew I loved Margaret more than anything—so that later, when I lied and said she'd hurt me, they'd believe every word. And even after she'd been dragged through the mud, she still wouldn't leave. So I had to completely destroy her." She smiled. "On my birthday, my family threw me the biggest party. And her? She got kicked out with nothing, and no one knew where she'd gone." Without thinking, I rolled down the window and looked back. And there she was—my younger sister, Krystal Gilmore—covering her mouth with that smug, delighted smile. I hadn't seen her in years. My stomach turned. I clamped a hand over my mouth and barely managed to hold back the nausea. Back then, I couldn't understand why everything had suddenly fallen apart—no one believed me, and no one even wanted to hear my side of the story. I was in so much pain. I begged. I searched my parents' cold, indifferent faces for just a trace of regret, a hint that they still cared. But there was nothing. They threw me out without a second thought and didn't even give me a cent to get by. Later, I was expelled from school and barred from taking the SAT. I couldn't get into college, and ended up sleeping under bridges and in parks. When I got hungry enough, I ate out of trash cans. There was a time I thought about jumping off an overpass—just to end it all. But someone reached out and pulled me back. After that, my life slowly started to come together. And the blinking numbers on my phone told me it had been seven years since they kicked me out. "Man, those girls were saying some really nasty stuff. How can anyone hate their own sister that much?" My driver's voice—full of disbelief—pulled me back again. "And honestly, if the family fell for something that easy, they couldn't have really loved that Margaret in the first place, right?" I froze. Then a quiet laugh escaped my throat. It was that simple. Why couldn't I see it back then?