My Sister’s Wedding by Hannah Goodman (iUniverse, 2004) is a young adult novel that addresses alcoholism among family members and high school students from the point of view of a younger sibling who realizes her family is denying her older sister’s alcohol abuse and she is doing the same thing in a relationship with a boy from school. The following three excerpts highlight the conflicts and desires of the main character amidst her peer group and her family.

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Excerpt 1

I can’t sleep that night. I lie in my bed with the window open. I feel a slight breeze, warm for this time of the year. I hear crickets and smell the remaining flowers from my mother’s gardens. The corpse feeling has stayed with me. My eyes are opened so wide they hurt. What am I waiting for?

“Maddie? Maddie?”

The top of someone’s head bobs up and down outside my window. Maybe I am dead.

“Maddie, please come outside. Please.” It’s Justin.

I push myself up and lean against the screen to peer down at him. “Justin,” I say, my nose against the screen. “What are you doing? Aren’t you supposed to be in jail or something?”

 “You heard about — ”

“Yeah.”

“Just come outside, please.”

“Why? So we can fight over another stupid thing you’ve done?”

He looks away. “Please, I need to talk to you.”

I try to take a deep breath, but I can’t. I feel tight inside. “Okay.”

I roll out of bed and slip on my blue slippers and robe and hurry soundlessly down the hall and to the back door. I open it quietly and step into the mudroom, then close the door to the rest of the house behind me. I slip out, leaving the mudroom door open, and scurry around to other side of the house. Justin is still standing under my bedroom window. The moon is high and bright, lighting up the yard. The low hum of crickets lets me know how late it really is.

He walks over to me right away and tries to hug me, but I am stiff and motionless. A walking corpse. He pulls away. “Maddie, they didn’t find anything in my locker. They just suspended me from school for a week and want me to see some drug counselor.”

He continues to look at me, waiting for me to soothe him and tell him everything is okay and we’ll all be fine. For the first time, I really don’t feel like saying that. I keep my face and body rigid and stonelike. He comes closer and starts to kiss my face and whisper. “I love you, Maddie, please don’t leave me. Please, give me another chance. I need you.”

I continue to look past him, cold as a statue.

“Maddie — ” He starts to kiss my mouth and push on my nightshirt. I shove him away, really hard.

“Jesus, Maddie! Damnit!” He’s trying not to yell. “What do you want from me? I’m not perfect. Is that it? I screw up — a lot. So what?”

I finally look at him. “I screw up too, Justin.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Are you going to see this counselor?”

He lets out a jagged, annoyed breath. “That’s what this is all about? You know, Maddie, your sister drinks a lot. What’s the big deal? She likes to have fun. I like to have fun. You never say anything to her, do you?”

I freeze again. We have never talked about Barbara’s drinking. He knows nothing about what I feel or the new feelings or anything. No one knows. “You don’t know anything about my sister,” I snap back at him, “and it’s really none of your business right now.”

“Oh, that’s a nice thing to say to your boyfriend.”

“Before I can stop myself I say, “You’re not my boyfriend.”

He ignores that. “This is about the other night. Drinking or no drinking, I still want to — you know, go further and stuff. I haven’t changed, Maddie, I have just gotten to be fifteen. This is normal. I’ve grown up. You haven’t — you and Susan and Peter.” He says their names in this sarcastic, mocking tone.

“So, drinking and sex — that makes a grownup? This is the same bull you said the other night. You know what? I’d rather stay a kid forever.”

We both look away. For a long ten seconds. The crickets crank up the volume.

“You know what, I am tired of trying. You don’t like me the way I am then — well, let’s just end this or whatever.”

He didn’t even hear me say that he wasn’t my boyfriend. He is so out of touch.

We stare at each other, expressionless, like strangers on a subway.

Then I turn and walk away.

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Excerpt 2

In the car Sean turns on the radio. K-Rock is playing twenty-four hours of Led. My father introduced me and my friends to Led Zeppelin when we were kids. When my mother was out of the house, he blasted “The Ocean” and “Ramble On” while we played air guitar and jumped around like crazed hippies from the seventies. Justin and I played Led Zeppelin after school, background music at first for doing homework and later for making out. Now the music is one more sign of the past, like a final goodbye.

“So you liked the play?” Sean asks.

“Huh? Yeah, it was cool.” How obvious is it I’m on another planet?

A moment of silence. Then Sean pulls over to the side of the road. “Madeline?” He looks down at his hands and speaks to the steering wheel.

“Yeah?” I am still far away.

“I know that I only know you from when we were little, and it’s not like I’m expecting anything from you. But you seem like you don’t want to be here. You seem like you didn’t really want to go out with me tonight.” He is still talking to the steering wheel.

“Well, I…uh…” I can’t think of anything to say. I am so tired. I just want to go home, have a nice cry, wake up, and start over. I steal a glance at Sean, to see if he’s completely pissed off.

He catches my eye. “You know, you seem sort of sad. But I don’t think you’re a sad person. You’re just sad right now.” The faint, spicy scent of Sean’s aftershave floats between us, and I think, yeah…I am. So. Sad. And so tired of feeling alone. The bass chords of Led Zeppelin drum in my ears, and the combination of music and melancholy makes me dizzy. We look into each other’s eyes a moment too long. Sean’s eyes aren’t just brown, but warm, Hershey’s Kiss brown. Chocolate, liquid. I yearn for some comfort for my loneliness.

Without planning to, I lean toward Sean as he leans toward me, and we kiss gently. I pull him toward me more and we kiss with more intensity. As soon as warmth spreads over me, I start to see Sean as the tippler and remember how sad I feel. It’s as if I have to finish feeling the sadness before I can move on to feeling good. As if I have to let all the sadness out.

I stop kissing Sean and slowly pull away. Tears stream down my face. I don’t bother rubbing my eyes or straightening my clothes. I don’t want to stop this gush of feeling.

Sean doesn’t say anything. He pulls me back to him, not to kiss me but just to hold me and stroke my head. I bawl like a baby. We sit this way for a while, and eventually the tightness in my body drains away, leaving me warm and exhausted.

Still, Sean stays silent. It’s as if he accepts that this girl he took out is having a total breakdown and that’s okay. It’s just life. Wow. What a cool person.

I pull away and smooth my hair and use the back of my hand to wipe my face. Sean rummages around, finds a Dunkin’ Donuts napkin, and gently wipes my eyes. He doesn’t give me the napkin — which would have been sweet enough — but he wipes my eyes. Unreal.

I break the silence. “Thanks.” Sean just smiles and continues to pat away my tears.

“Whoever he is, he did a number on you,” he says, as he tucks the napkin into his cup holder.

“What do you mean?”

“Someone broke your heart. Some guy, probably. Right?”

I nod, then shake my head no. “It’s not just about him. It’s like recently my whole life has been…it’s like everything in my life is not really the way I thought it was. Like some Twilight Zone episode.”

“Suddenly?”

“No…gradually. I just took awhile to really ‘tune in,’ if you know what I mean.”

He nods. “Yep, I know. Been there.”

But he doesn’t launch into his own sob story. He stays focused on me. He seems too perfect to be real.

“Sean, you’re a pretty incredible guy. First I kiss you like a maniac, and then I cry like a five-year-old. And you take it all in like it’s a normal way for a girl to be on a date.” Even though I feel too tired to laugh, I manage a few chuckles.

“What do you mean? Most girls cry after they kiss me.”

We both laugh weakly.

“Well….” I’m not sure what to do next. I just want to go home and rest. Sleep for a long time.

Sean is so awesome that he knows this before I say it. “Listen, I’ll take you home. We can go out another time. You probably just need to sleep. It’s seems to me like you were holding that in for awhile.”

I lean over and kiss Sean on the cheek. “Thank you.”

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Excerpt 3

My eyes fly open around two o’clock. I have to pee. As I stumble into the bathroom, I hear a sigh and the tinkle of glass. When I leave the bathroom, I hear it again. I freeze and listen. Again, the noise. All the rooms on this floor open into each other and we have cathedral ceilings, so you can hear everything. I follow the noise into the hallway, then through the living room, dining room, kitchen.

In the tiny library off the kitchen, Barbara is smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer. She is sitting on the couch, the window next to her open, with a Vogue in her lap.

What the hell is this? From the doorway of the TV room, I watch smoke form spirals around Barbara, making her look ethereal.

I feel annoyed, angry, and confused. “Barbara?” I whisper.

She turns, the haze of smoke settling, and stubs the cigarette out on the top of the can of Rolling Rock, then drops it into the opening. The light reflects in the window and on two empty cans and a pack of Marlboro Lights. I grope for something to say into the thick air. Barbara’s eyes are red, her hair matted to her head.

“Barbara, what are you doing?”

She gives the weirdest laugh. “What does it look like? Isn’t this what you expect? Isn’t this what you all expect from poor Barbara?”

She tosses the can on the floor. “Listen, Maddie, you’re the ace in the family and I am the fuckup. I am sitting here awaiting my doom.”

This drama is the last straw. I have had it with Barbara, and I don’t care if I wake up the whole damned house. They can come and see her down here drinking and being the bum she is.

“No, you listen to me. You are not going to sit here and pull this shit in our house. Mom was right. You don’t live here anymore. I don’t even know why you came here tonight. And I’m sorry you’re all messed up and you feel whatever — rejected or alone or separate or whatever. But you can’t drag us down any more. Mom and Dad and I have let everything go, excused it away, but it hasn’t helped you one damn bit. You want to destroy yourself? Do it alone.” I feel like Wonder Woman. Like it’s us against her.

“I’ve already destroyed myself, Maddie.” She says pathetically.

“What happened to getting your drinking under control? What happened to the deal you made with Michael?”

“He’s basically gone every other weekend. Working. Conferences. It’s hard to be alone.”

Her whiny voice makes me want to shake her. “What do you think I have been going through since you moved out? I have no friends and no sister.” I stop for a moment, realizing that we both feel lonely. “Barb, I’m lonely too. I wish you could see–” I stop again, remembering Bubbie’s advice: To deal with myself and stop trying to change Barbara.

“I thought you were glad I was gone.” She pushes her hair out of her face. “You don’t have to take care of me anymore.”

I look at the beer cans and Barbara’s mournful face and feel like I have hit a wall. I am not a superhero. I can’t even deal with my own problems.

“I’m pregnant,” Barbara bursts out.

The wall collapses and I sit down beside her. She grabs my shoulders and weeps in my arms.

That’s why she came home.