i am not done

Growing up I had a pretty normal life, well as normal as anybodies life can be. I have a mom and a dad, who are happily married, a sister, and two brothers. We all lived in a small town, on an island off the coast of Massachusetts, called Hyannis. Hyannis is pretty much hell. In the place where I live is considered the city, of my little island. I am not sure how many people live in my little nook of the world, but I can tell you that 2 thousand teenagers go to my high school.

Well back to my family. Ever since I was little up until a couple of years ago, there has always been a constant number (6) of people living in my house. That was until a couple of years ago when this little short girl came into our lives. Her name was Angie, and this is her story through my eyes.

When I first met Angie, I was around 8 years old. It was a cold winter night, and I had tagged along with my sister to her Girl Scout trip to see the nutcracker. I thought Angie and her sister were amazing. They we on oxygen tanks and I thought that they were the coolest. I never really talked to them then, because that February, Stacia (Angie's sister) passed away at the age of 10.

Angie and Stacia were twins born with a life threatening disease called Cystic Fibrosis, or CF. it is a hard disease to describe, so I am not going to go into much detail. I will say that the average life expectancy for a child with CF is around 18 years old.

I started to really get close to Angie when she became best friends with my sister Jen. Jen and Angie were attached at the hip for the whole length of their friendship. When Jen wasn't at her house, Angie was at mine. over the years Angie became more of a sister to me then a best friend.

When I was younger, I used to refuse to get into a picture with Angie, because I always told her that her smelly face would ruin my pictures because I was "beautiful". She used to pull my hair in order to get me into pictures with her, and in almost all of the pictures I am in with her my face is red and she has a tight grip on my hair.

Angie always did crazy things. She always said that she didn't have much time to live, so the time that she had she wasn't going to waste it, and she didn't.

Before I entered High School, the middle school took us on a tour of the High School (I did not really see the point of the tour because I forget how to get around by the time my first day of school came around anyways). All i really remeber about the tour was walking down a hall way and having Angie run out of her classroom and shove me up against a wall.

"Ahh!!" I had screamed, not knowing what had happened. Then I looked down and I saw that this little 4 foot nothing girl was pushing me up against the lockers.
"You see this locker here Cat?" She asked trying not to laugh at herself, "next year, freshman kill day, I am going to shove you into this here locker.. you hear me?"
"Yeah yeah, what ever Angie" I had replied back at her.
The whole class could not stop laughing on the way back to my school , they thought that it was hilarious that i was threatened by a little girl. It happens though, and that was Angie in a nutshell.

When I actually made it into High School, I never saw her much, because besides our homerooms, our classes we not near each other. Angie was in a wheelchair that year, because she could not walk on her own. She always made it a point to run over my toes when ever she had the chance, because she thought it was funny, and i thought it hurt.

Angie never made it to the first freshman kill day though. School became too much for her, she stopped going to school right after the homecoming dance of her Junior year. My days became pretty routine after that: wake up, go to school, go home, and then walk over to Angie's to hang out with her. i did the same thing almost every day for about 3 weeks, untill it became too cold to walk over anymore.

Finally christmas time came around though, and we were all singing and dancing, there wasn't a sad face in the house. Angie's family and mine, all cramed into Angies living room to open presents and eat a ton of food. That year Angie and her family gave me a jewlry box filled with gorgeous jewlry, i still have the jewlry box, and I use it non-stop.

As the winter grew on, I had to work longer hours at my job, and I joined clubs at my school, so i wasn't able to see her as much as Ihad hoped. It was alright though, because we would talk on the phone and my sister would go over there.