Free Wherever Grace Is Needed by Elizabeth Bass

earth could she have done?—was completely overshadowed by the fact that she was back now. Apparently for good.
    Lily was rinsing off the breakfast dishes when she heard a rumbling upstairs from Nina and Jordan’s bedroom. (She refused to call the room just Jordan’s.) What was she doing up there? Jordan had been home for two days . . . two days fraught with tension. She had been relatively quiet until now, and careful to stay out of their dad’s way, but it didn’t matter because bad feelings and conflict just seemed to ooze out of Jordan anyway.
    The only positive Lily could take from Jordan’s being back for good was that for good might not be all that long. In two years Jordan would be eighteen, and there was no way she’d want to live at home after high school. So two years was all they had to endure.
    Two years of being known as the sister of the freak with blue hair. The geeky little sister.
    The ugly duckling. She always tried to get that horrible expression out of her head, but it stayed there anyway, dancing around in her consciousness, mocking her.
    In her opinion, Hans Christian Andersen had a lot to answer for. People told that dumb story as if it was supposed to be a source of hope to less attractive kids. As if every ugly person ended up being a swan! A true fairy tale. As far as Lily was concerned, the incredible aspect of the whole tale was that it took so long for the swan—to say nothing of its mother—to figure out that he was an entirely different species. The story should have been called The Stupid Swan, because that poor bird could have saved himself a lot of trouble and heartache if he’d just looked at his reflection and realized that he was in the wrong family to begin with.
    Unfortunately, there was no doubting Lily was in the right family. Everyone said she resembled Granny Kate’s older sister, Jeannie, when Jeannie was a kid. Family photos confirmed this, and it was not comforting. Even as a teen, Aunt Jeannie looked like an undernourished refugee from the land of bad fashion decisions. Her plain, ill-fitting shirts always emphasized her pancake-flat chest, and the tweedy skirts she wore bunched awkwardly around her thick waist. The girl could have had a flashing neon sign over her head: FUTURE SCHOOL LIBRARIAN AND AFRICAN VIOLET ENTHUSIAST .
    Lily shuddered whenever she looked at those photos, because apparently that’s how other people saw her. But that’s not how she saw herself. It wasn’t how her mother or Nina had seen her, either.
    One of her best memories was of Nina, eight going on nine, parading her through the halls of their elementary school to Lily’s first grade classroom on her first day of real school. Other kids had looked at her like she was special, because her big sister—a third grader who already had the poise of a sixth grader—had escorted her right up to the teacher’s desk and announced, “Miss Collins, this is my little sister, Lily. She should probably be in second grade, because she already knows how to read and add and everything.”
    (If only Miss Collins had listened—it would have saved Lily two very boring years until her third grade teacher had gotten a clue and bumped her up to fourth.)
    Nina had waited for her outside the classroom after school at the end of the day, too, and had taken her to the girls’ rest room to help her unstick the two braids that Tommy Dewes had glued together during storytime. “The first day is the hardest,” Nina told her. “Tomorrow afternoon will be better.”
    She’d looked blurry through Lily’s hot tears. “How do you know?”
    “Because tomorrow at lunch, Jordan will punch Tommy Dewes in the nose.” And then, before they left the bathroom, she’d given Lily a fierce, bracing hug. “You don’t even belong in first grade anyway.”
    Nina had always known what to say to her. She’d been her cheerleader, and confidante, and practically her best friend. Her only friend, sometimes. When they got