Babysitting An Ankle Biter

(I am twelve. My parents go away for a weekend together while my older sister watches me at home. Saturday evening she decides that we shouldn’t sit around inside doing nothing and tells me we are going for a walk. My lazy preteen self doesn’t care for that, but I know better than to argue with her and go upstairs to get dressed. On my way back down, I trip, tumble, and end up hitting the first floor hard. It quickly becomes apparent something is wrong with my ankle. My sister helps me get to the couch, where I sit shaking and sniffling with an ice pack on my foot, while she hurriedly gathers our things to take me to urgent care.)

Sister: “You know, if you really didn’t want to go for a walk, you could have just said no!”

(All the way until we saw the doctor and I got a soft brace for my torn ligament, she talked about my “melodrama” to keep me laughing. “Just say no” became a family joke for a while after that.)