My Sister's Diary

By Fabian Nickels

"Have you ever wondered what your sister thought of you and the rest of your siblings? What she keeps in that diary of hers? What if something happened to her? In any other circumstance, this would be an invasion of privacy, but right now, I'm trying to find her. The only way I can is if you read my sister's diary."

--Fabian Nickels

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781638812876

Book preview

Initial Entries

Part 1

July 1, 1986

Dear Diary,

My name is Dutchess Reeves. I am the thirteenth child of Professor Howard Reeves of Gordan University in Rowpine, North Carolina, one mile from the Tennessee state line.

It’s nice to have someone normal to talk to, even if it is just ink on paper. I feel like I’m going crazy. You know what? Maybe I am.

Why is that? Well, what if I told you I was a science experiment? How would I know that, right?

Well, Father told me this afternoon.

He explained it all to me like I was his heir apparent. Well, maybe I am. There’s a reason the local townies below call this, Reeves manor, a house of horrors. We shelter ourselves from the outside. Why would we want to leave when we have our own universe right here? This house is more like a castle, like one you read about in fairy tales, especially from the inside. When I read them, I never envision myself as someone who lived in the castle. Instead, I was an animal from the jungle, watching as the humans destroy themselves time and time again.

In order for me to describe the house, I have to describe the people in it.

Like I told you, there are thirteen of us, not including Father (who prefers to be called Professor); Miss Tippole, the house maid; and Garneky, the old man who sleeps in the telephone booths out front when he’s not tending to the gardens. We like Garneky. He killed a python once that was trying to eat Ozzy. I’ll tell you about Ozzy later.

My twin brother, Thaine, and I turn fifteen a month before Abraham turns sixteen. Abraham was the professor’s firstborn, which he is very proud of. He is also an Aries.

All of us have separate birth mothers, and all of us are a different sign in the zodiac. We make up the circle, but according to my siblings, either me or Thaine was a mistake. There’s only twelve signs, they say.

Father says, There are no mistakes. Eternal chaos creates eternal harmony. He told me he had planned on having us since he was our age, that he never dreamed the universe had something like my brother and I planned.

Thirteen, he said, what an odd number.

Come August, all thirteen of us will be going to a public high school for the very first time. That was announced first thing yesterday evening in the dining hall downstairs. Some of us weren’t so happy about it

You’re joking. Trinity laughed, and the smell of bubble gum wafted across the dining table the night Father enlightened us.

He looked all the way down the length of the table at me as conversation broke out between the girls. The boys, as always during diner, were silent. I think they sense it unnatural to converse while devouring energies from the universe.

What did he want from me?

He’s expecting something he always is. Must be an aptitude test of his.

Half of you won’t last the first week. I, however, choose to change the world. I grab the crystal glass of sangria before me delicately in my clutch as a sneer forms over my father’s lips.

Please. You can’t even change your clothes, Amber hissed.

One does not need to change clothes to project the fullest potential of their identity, Ryan insisted.

It certainly helps, Carly chimed in, when one can see themselves.

Erique had to suppress a giggle, but it wasn’t working. His caramel cheeks looked like they were full of jelly. He does kind of resemble a hard candy. Sorry, that was inappropriate. What do you care? You’re a journal.

Anyway, the news still came as a big shock.

The following evening, like always, we were taken in for individual assessment. It was only recently that he got this way, the professor. He’s an incredible father, I promise. He just takes everything so seriously. For a philosophy teacher, his life is a little scripted. I spend three hours every evening in the common room as one by one, my brothers and sisters are taken in for individual assessments. Each one takes exactly fifteen minutes.

The questions he asks are bizarre, but he’s been doing this since we all turned thirteen. I generally play Rummi with Carly and Ryan for the majority of the three hours that I sit there. I often worry about my twin brother Thaine; he sits alone no matter where we go, and according to Howard, he doesn’t even talk during assessments. He just reads all the time, three different novels every week. He spends every moment he can in the library.

Every afternoon when we wake up, we are dressed to impress and downstairs, ready for assessments by five. It’s the one thing that’s mandatory we all attend. Some of us don’t even attend dinner at 4:00 a.m. Our days are our nights. Father says the sunlight is dangerous. Our nights are our days; Mother Moon is our muse.

Everything on the bottom floor is locked until 8:00 p.m. That includes the library, the indoor pool, the gymnasium, the greenhouse, and the west wing, with the exception of the elevator in the dead center of the building. They all unlock after the last assessment. After my assessment. Today is no different as Thaine’s eyes roll away from the words on the tattered copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. He’s read it before. I’m almost a hundred percent sure it’s his favorite. The door to the professor’s office opens, and he slides off the couch to shuffle across the shag rug carpet and slip past Ryan to enter into the almost alien blue lights beyond the frame.

The moment it shuts, Ryan makes his way down the hall. The warm glow of the flickering fireplace before me draws my attention. Every day I look at that fire alone as my brothers and sisters all walk off to breakfast generously provided by Miss Tippole. Every day I sink deeper and deeper into the unsettling feeling that my life isn’t normal. This isn’t normal.

We’ve been around our cousins, and even they say we’re all odd. They call us the Wild Society because when we show up, we kind of become the environment. All of us are musically inclined; some of us sing, some of us dance, most of us prefer acoustic instruments. Once a month since our eleventh year, a woman from a federal bureau has come by to witness what we are. Some of the things we all can do together so naturally seems to baffle the media.

That’s as scary as it sounds. I feel like a fish in a tank sometimes, and not just because the walls in my room are a literal fish tank. What even are these things? It never moves. It only looks like it’s slowly dying, and it makes me sad to think about.

The only person in this place with his head screwed on straight is Ryan. He’s a hippie stoner who plays his guitar, always singing about how he wants to get out and travel the world. Father tells me the Aquarius and the Pisces are very similar; they both see the system, but only the fish understands that they are a part of it, which I still don’t get, but whatever, you know?

I was startled from my thoughts when Thaine said my name. Dutchess. His timid quiet voice made him all the more mysterious. He scared the others from time to time with his disconnection, everyone except me, Ryan, and Elliot have difficulty associating with him.

Elliot scares me. The way he watches me makes me skittish. He is a Gemini. Apparently, they represent intelligence. Elliot wants to become a doctor. I honestly think he just likes the idea of slicing people open.

Howard looked worried sitting down behind his computer. His office was like that of a man in the early 1800s—the only light coming from the candles around him, a quill resting in a black ink jar on his chipped wooden desk, parchments of paper scattered across the flat top, with scribbles littering each one that I just couldn’t make out from where I was seated.

I gave him the weird smile I always gave him when we started. The look that said, I’m here…what now? Only this time, he didn’t smile back. I couldn’t help but feel awkward as I ran a hand through the back of my short pixie cut hair and blinked, looking down at his calloused hands. Before he was a teacher, he was many things, things he didn’t want to talk about…

Dutchess, may I ask, have I ever seemed like I wasn’t involved in your life? He began with a question much different than the ones I was used to.

No…why? What is this about. It was the truth. During the falls and winters, he organized us as a choir, he taught our English courses, and he had a bad habit of designing mysteries for us to solve that somehow weirdly pertained to the situation going on at the time. Whether it was something as simple as one of us not being able to keep up with our studies or something big like the time Ryan, Elliot, Erique, and Fabian went from wanting to kill each other to having a considerably inappropriate bond because Howard left clues that led them to find out how they were predicted. We’ll get back to that later…

As you know, this year you and your siblings are going to Gordon High. He clasped his fingers together, which he never did. Usually he was jotting down information with the raven’s feather he used as a pen. I only nodded. Well, the students there are going to be a little…shocked. He had this look in his eye. He was about to tell me something important, I just knew it. He stood up. Come with me…

The last time he said that to me, Thaine was in the room. That was ten years ago, the day we met our surrogate mother, Britney Rose. She had been Howard’s friend for a long time. Before she entered his program, she was a respectable woman who waited tables at a restaurant in some nothing town. The money that the professor gave her, she used to open her own coffee shop in a slightly bigger town just before the Tennessee state line.

We never saw her again. The others can see their moms daily if they choose, even stay at their homes a night or two a week. As for me and Thaine, we have no clue if Mother is alive or dead. All we have is a picture of some beat-up van and written on the back it says, To start again, one must retrace. I have no clue what that means, but the way my brother’s eyes light up as he reads the photograph, not only the first time but every time he looks at it, he knows.

We reached the elevator. The way Jay and Fabian were looking at me made me feel like I was in trouble. I guess he never really does this. I stepped in first, then he followed, making sure to tell Ms. Tippole in the hallway that he needed her upstairs as soon as she was available. In the dormitories? she asked. He only shook his head no, and I watched our maid shudder in fear. The doors shut, and the light came on as it always did.

I stood where I was supposed to, my black spot on the floor. We all have one that flashes on when the soles of our bare feet meet the glass. Mine is a purple shimmer, the universe. Sometimes I think about how that makes me feel. To be