Brother, This April Fools’ Day Is the Last One – It had been less than five years since I came back, and Oliver Vance and Lily Vance had already made every April Fool’s Day unforgettable. The first year, my sister Lily decided she hated my curls. She used the holiday as an excuse and held a lighter to my hair. “Think of it as your initiation,” my brother Oliver told me. By the second year, they’d started planning ahead. They handed me an outfit and told me to wear it to the school assembly. The fabric turned completely see-through under the stage lights. The whole school saw right through it. The third year was almost mild by comparison. They laced my drink with pure capsaicin, and it burned my throat raw. The fourth year, my parents came home. They found compromising photos of me with someone else, and gave me the beating of a lifetime. This was the fifth year.
Oliver told me the oven was broken. He asked me to climb inside and see what was wrong with it. The second I was inside, the door slammed shut behind me. “Happy April Fool’s Day!” Lily screamed. But the oven wasn’t broken. … I pounded on the glass. Lily wouldn’t stop laughing. She was clutching Oliver’s arm, doubling over with laughter. “She’s going to freak out! She doesn’t know the oven has been dead for years, it won’t actually hurt her.” “I don’t get why she’s so scared,” Oliver said. He glanced at the indicator lights on the oven. The display was blank, so he crouched down and looked right at me through the glass. But I could already feel the heat building inside the oven, slow and unmistakable. Nothing they’d ever done to me had terrified me quite like this. I kept hitting the glass, mouthing the same words over and over: the oven is heating up, it’s on, it’s on.
The oven wasn’t broken. I was going to die in that oven. Blind panic set in. But Oliver looked at me through the glass and smiled. He pulled Lily away. “Come on. Let’s check out her room, I’ve got a surprise for you.” My room? After everything they’d put me through, I’d started locking my door. No one got in, not even my parents. But earlier, when Oliver called me out, I’d left it unlocked. I wasn’t thinking. What was he going to do in there? What kind of surprise could he possibly have planned in my room? Then it hit me. No. He couldn’t go in there. That was the only thing I had left. I screamed until my throat was raw, but the oven was built too well. Every sound I made died behind the heavy glass. Oliver walked Lily into my room and jammed a flathead screwdriver into my drawer lock. The lock hit the floor with a clatter. He pulled out the journals, years of them.
They weren’t diaries. They were everything I’d never told anyone. Oliver started reading out loud, loud enough for his voice to carry through the house. “I still remember that night. The way Mr. Miller told me to take my clothes off.” “Mom told me to forget it ever happened. Said it was shameful, said it would ruin our reputation.” “But Mr. Miller was their friend. I Googled it, I could have called the police. So why was I the one who got punished?” “It hurt so much, and Mr. Miller acted like it was nothing. He’d joke about it right in front of Mom and Dad.” “All I got was Mom slapping me in front of everyone.
Then she shipped me off to boarding school in Oakville and told me never to come back.” “They said I was disgusting. That I was the sick one.” They read every word in fake, trembling voices, imitating my voice, turning the worst thing that had ever happened to me into a performance. They couldn’t stop laughing. Lily feigned a gasp, putting on her big-eyed innocent look. “She’s the one who threw herself at Mr. Miller. And then she actually ran and told Mom and Dad? Mr. Miller said she begged him for a MacBook, and when he wouldn’t buy her one, she threw a fit.”