The Sister's Weapon

The day my brother Victor was born, everyone in our dirtpoor town said my life was about to become a living hell. I was absolutely ecstatic.

Because after years of enduring relentless abuse with no way to fight back, I had finally been handed my first trump card. My parents beat me. They trampled over me.

They tried to snap my spine, expecting me to spend my entire life on my knees as a sacrificial lamb for my little brother. Instead, I fed him my malice.

I taught him to hate them, molding him into a blade aimed directly at their throats. I could drive right back into their hearts.

Years later, whenever my parents tried to teach me a lesson, Victor would snatch up the heavy iron fire poker and level it at them. "You touch my sister again, and I'll bash your precious son's head in!" Afterward, he would turn to me, his chest heaving with frustration. "Hope, why don't you ever stand up for yourself?

Whoever messes with you, you hit them back!" Then his shoulders would drop, and he'd mutter under his breath. "Whatever. I'll just look out for you.

As long as I'm the golden boy of this house, I've got your back." Chapter 1 Ever since I was old enough to form memories, the rule of the house was simple. Boys who cried got candy.

Girls got the back of a hand. My parents beat me. They trampled over me.

They tried to snap my spine, expecting me to spend my entire life on my knees as a sacrificial lamb for my little brother.

My teacher, Miss Miller, had once told me something I never forgot. She said that when a girl is faced with an unjust destiny, she has to pull herself out of hell.

Again, and again, and again. A thousand times over, if necessary. I was five years old when my mother, Gretchen, gave birth to Victor.

It was the first time I ever saw anything resembling maternal love soften the harsh, cruel lines around her eyes.

My father, Harvey, had spent years walking with a hunched back, carrying the shame of a man who couldn't produce an heir.

The moment Victor took his first breath, Harvey's spine snapped straight. His voice boomed through the house.

Victor was brought into this world carrying the suffocating weight of their endless expectations. It was a brutal, bonechilling winter.

I was standing on a crate by the freezing basement sink, scrubbing soiled cloth diapers until my knuckles bled. Through the thin, drafty walls, I could hear our neighbor, Franklin.

He was a retired veteran, and he was barking military tactics at his grandson, Chase. "War takes brains, boy." "If you can't win the physical fight, you don't charge in blind," Franklin continued. "You find the enemy's weak point.

Their soft spot. The one place where a single strike brings them to their knees." "You focus all your fire right there. That's how you win." I stopped scrubbing.

The icy water dripped from my numb fingers. Soft spot. From upstairs, the shrill cry of a newborn pierced the floorboards. The winter wind howled against the frosted glass.

My chest tightened. A pulse of pure, unadulterated adrenaline rushed through veins that had been frozen with apathy for far too long. My enemies finally had a weak spot.

I was young. I wasn't worldly, and I certainly wasn't a genius. But I had a chest full of venom, and it drove me to set the board for a very long game.

After Victor was born, the chores multiplied until there weren't enough hours in the day. I never uttered a single word of complaint.

Franklin had told Chase that to fool your enemy, you first had to fool yourself. If you wanted a payout, you had to make the investment.

I poured every ounce of my agonizingly limited patience into the little brother who shared my blood. I washed his filthy clothes. I measured out his formula.

When he got bigger, I spoonfed him his meals. When he finally opened his mouth to speak, his first word wasn't Mama. It wasn't Dada. It was Hope.

When he took his first unsteady steps, he didn't stumble toward the two parents who worshipped the ground he walked on. He barreled straight into my arms.

I made sure he was always spotless, a stark contrast to the feral, mudcaked boys running around our neighborhood.

As he grew, I whispered the tactical stories I'd eavesdropped from Franklin directly into his ear.

By the time Victor was three years old, he sat at our cramped dinner table and flawlessly recited his first complete story. My living weapon was finally ready.

Chapter 2 Harvey and Gretchen's eyes lit up. That very night, Harvey cracked open his good whiskey, toasting to God for blessing their bloodline.

They finally handed the reins over to me completely. They ordered me to keep Victor away from the neighborhood kids, paranoid he would pick up their trashy habits.

It played perfectly into my hands. I was the primary fixture in his childhood. Just as I planned, his dependency on me deepened like a root system.

Harvey and Gretchen tried to spoil him into a tyrant. I quietly taught him empathy for the powerless. But he was still so young. My reality in that house remained a living hell.

They named me Hope. Not hope for a bright future, but Hope for a son. They made sure I knew it. When the beatings started, they would lock Victor in his bedroom.

I took the blows in the hallway while he sobbed against the other side of the door. Neither of us had the muscle to stop it.

Afterward, he would slip his hoarded candy into my bruised hands. I never hid my injuries from him. I let him see the purpleblack swelling, the split lips.

At night, I lay awake, staring at the ceiling with cold detachment as he jolted awake from nightmares, gasping for air.

As Victor grew older, he learned to manipulate their blind adoration. He would throw tantrums or feign fullbellied exhaustion just so I could scrape the leftovers from his plate.

He shadowed my every step, a tiny, tense bodyguard waiting for the next strike. When Victor was five, Harvey caught me alone.

He dragged me to the rusted tractor out back, whipping me with a leather belt. Victor came home early. The usually loud, rowdy kid did not scream.

He turned on his heel, sprinted straight for the county creek, and hurled himself into the freezing rapids. Harvey and Gretchen lost their minds.

Victor ended up in the ICU with severe pneumonia. When they finally brought him home, the glare they shot me was pure, unfiltered venom.

But they did not lay a finger on me for months. I knew my little trump card was finally showing its teeth. The real war between my parents and me had officially begun.

The year Victor turned six, a shockwave hit our town. The mayor's daughter, who had been living with relatives in the city, got accepted into an Ivy League university.

She became an overnight legend. The whole town fawned over her.

The same bitter housewives who constantly preached that girls were nothing but financial burdens suddenly suffered collective amnesia. They kissed the ground she walked on.

It was the first time Victor realized a girl could command respect. So, he waged a monthlong war inside our house. He shattered plates. He refused to eat.

He weaponized every ounce of their toxic obsession with him. And he won me a seat in a classroom. I will never forget the morning of my first day.

Victor's small, warm fingers clamped around mine, his grip unyielding as he marched me down the dirt road. "Hope, I am going to make sure you go to college too," he declared. "When you get into college, they will never be able to hit you again." Our town had buried seven girls named BringaBrother and five named HopeforaSon.

Half of them never even lived to see adulthood. You could count the number of literate girls in a fiftymile radius on one hand.

Let alone an elevenyearold girl, stepping into a firstgrade classroom years too late. Chapter 3 I had always brainwashed Victor about the absolute necessity of studying.

Originally, my plan was simply to hijack his textbooks once he started school.

Years ago, a girl from the Miller family couldn't stomach the brutal beatings anymore and made a run for it.

But because the girl couldn't read, she couldn't decipher a single road sign. She asked the wrong people for directions and walked right into the hands of human traffickers.

By the time the cops dragged her back, she barely looked human. The very next day, drowning in the vile, spitting curses of her own family, she threw herself into the local river.

The realization hit me like a physical blow. My lungs seized. My throat clicked shut. If I ever wanted to escape this hellhole, I had to become literate.

I just never expected I would get to walk through the front doors of a real school in broad daylight.

I stared at the back of the little boy marching stubbornly ahead of me, then lifted my gaze to the rising sun.

The dawn bled across the horizon, casting golden threads over the mountains, wrapping the harsh landscape in a soft, steady heat.

A sliver of blinding light had accidentally fractured the absolute darkness of my life.

Behind us, the neighborhood elders were muttering under their breath. "This town is going straight to hell…" If a worthless girl named Hope could go to school, the other girls would start demanding the exact same thing.

Soon, there would be an epidemic of disobedient daughters. The delicate, patriarchal peace of our town would shatter. Oh, the absolute horror. Girls with half a brain.

Victor and I both heard them. Neither of us bothered to turn around.

Up on the ridge by the dirt road, Franklin was belting out his favorite old military cadence. "Pour the whiskey, boys, the victory is ours!

We don't stop until the mission's done…" He was decked out in his faded army greens, leaning heavily on a wooden cane.

One side of his slacks was pinned up, flapping empty in the wind, but his spine was as straight as a rifle barrel.

The local elementary school was a charity project, funded by some deeppocketed hotshot from the city. Before Victor was born, I used to sneak over here to find Miss Miller.

Miss Miller was the first person in this godforsaken world to ever throw me a lifeline.

Whenever I was beaten and sobbing by the dirt road, she would pull me into her home, physically blocking out the chaos of my reality.

Her hand would gently smooth down my hair, grounding me, as she read me stories in a soft, steady voice.

She used to steam the expensive cured bacon she had been hoarding for herself just to feed me. Once Victor was born, the endless chores suffocated me.

I never had the time to go find her again. When school finally started, I scoured the building for Miss Miller, but couldn't find her anywhere.

I ended up asking my homeroom teacher, Julia. Julia's face fell. She pulled a worn photo album from her desk and handed it to me. "Miss Miller moved back to the city.

She left this album for you to remember her by." "She told me about your situation.

Leaving you behind was the hardest thing she had to do," Julia murmured. "Hope, you have to study hard. Get out of this town one day.

Don't let Miss Miller down." I flipped the album open.

Julia pointed to the glossy pictures: the Capitol building in Washington D.C., the Brooklyn Bridge, and the sprawling, ivycovered brick of a toptier university.

Those photos dropped a lit match straight into my chest. From that day on, the city and college became more than just words. They solidified into hard, physical targets.

The desperate need to claw my way out of this town dug deep into my bones. When the firstgrade finals rolled around, I scored perfect 100s on both exams.

Victor brought home two absolute zeros.

Yet he was practically vibrating with more excitement than I was. "Hope, if you keep getting perfect scores every year, that means you can go to college, right?

Don't even worry about it." "As long as you get in, I swear I'll pay your tuition!

But hiding my scores from our parents was about to become a war!" Chapter 4 He thumped his small chest, his eyes burning with absolute certainty.

A suffocating wave of gratitude washed over me. It was so potent I almost considered letting my hatred go. Gretchen and Harvey's love for him was real, and he loved them back.

He was just a kid, desperately hoping we could all play happy family. But my love for Victor was tainted.

I was just using their golden boy as a meat shield, positioning him on the front lines to fight the monsters I couldn't yet defeat. Guilt crawled up my throat.

Clutching my perfect report card, I made a silent vow. All I needed was to escape this town and start over. That would be enough. I would drop the grudges.

The affection my parents withheld, my little brother had compensated for in spades. Victor dragged me through our front gate, skipping over the dirt.

The impact came before the sound. Gretchen's open palm cracked across my cheek. My vision flashed white.

Harvey moved with practiced speed, hooking an arm under Victor's ribs and hauling him backward. Gretchen's fingers clamped like a vice around my wrist.

A second slap snapped my head to the side. I kicked. I shoved. I thrashed wildly against her grip. Nothing worked.

She delivered slap after brutal slap, her chest heaving until her sick rage finally plateaued.

Pinned against Harvey's side, Victor screamed bloody murder. "Who told you to hit her?! Why are you hitting my sister?!" "Let me go!

Let me go!" Harvey clamped a heavy hand over the boy's mouth, smothering the noise. Gretchen caught the pure, unfiltered fury in her precious son's eyes. It acted like gasoline.

She twisted her fist into my hair, yanking my scalp back, and rained down another frenzy of blows.

When she finally ran out of breath, she snatched a rusted butter cookie tin off the patio table. "I didn't realize you were a thief, you worthless brat," she spat the words, shoving the tin in my face. "Look at the other girls in this town.

Which one of them gets to go to school?" "You ungrateful little bitch, stealing my hardearned cash!" She popped the lid.

Inside lay a neat, crumpled stack of bills and a handful of loose change. The largest bill was a crisp fifty. A massive fortune for a kid in this neighborhood.

The neighbors, drawn like vultures to the noise, started squawking from the fence line. "Gretchen, I told you sending Hope to school was a mistake.

She's getting too big for her britches." "Stealing that much? She probably has some boy on the side paying for things…" An elevenyearold with a sugar daddy.

The sheer, breathtaking stupidity of this town never ceased to amaze me. "You better watch her, Harvey. Today she robs you, tomorrow she robs us," another voice chimed in.

Victor stared at the cookie tin, his eyes bloodshot. For the first time in his life, his cherubic face twisted into something feral.

He sank his teeth directly into the flesh of Harvey's hand.

Harvey hissed, loosening his grip. "You're lying!" Victor shrieked, his voice tearing. "That's the tuition money I saved for my sister! It's my Christmas money!

My allowance!" He choked on a sob, his small frame trembling violently. "I hid it under her bed. I was going to surprise her after she got her report card today