Read The Truth Commission for Free Online Page B

stared into the dark above my bed. “She just wanted to know how you are.”
    â€œThat’s so sweet. I just don’t feel ready to talk to her. There’s so much to deal with.”
    â€œYeah,” I whispered.
    Keira lay down and I drew up my feet.
    â€œOur last talk really helped me,” said my sister. “It helped me to realize that what happened wasn’t my fault.”
    â€œOf course not,” I said. The mattress beneath me grew warmer. I read somewhere that if you put a frog in a hot pan, it will jump out. If you turn the heat up slowly, it will keep trying to adjust until it dies. As Keira resumed her story, my skin prickled in protest. I wondered how much heat I could stand.
    My emotions turned end over end. Anxiety about what she was about to say got tangled up with happiness that she was talking to me, just like in the old days when she used to take me into her confidence. When I was a kid, I loved listening to my sister. Whenever I caught sight of her out in public, I felt a pride so sharp, it was painful. People paid attention to Keira, and she had this way of not noticing. Specialness was a particulate cloud that seemed to float around her.
    One summer when we were both in grade school, my parents signed us up for an art camp. Keira was with the oldest kids. I was with the youngest. Our groups met in different rooms so I didn’t get to see her very often, but news of the extraordinary girl in the Picasso Blues spread even to us little ones in the Da Vinci Squad. The other campers talked about her in hushed voices. The camp leaders did, too.
    â€œKeira Pale is your sister?” asked the Da Vinci Squad’s head counselor, a thin, faux-hawked college student home for the summer from Emily Carr University of Art and Design.
    I nodded, feeling lucky that Keira was, in some way, mine.
    â€œThat must be intense,” he said. “Living with a genuine prodigy.”
    I didn’t know what a prodigy was, but I loved the sound of the word and whispered it over and over to myself.
    I even got a little bit popular at camp, a completely new experience, because everyone wanted to know all about my sister.
    â€œIs it true she taught
herself
to draw like that?”
    â€œIs it true that her first cartoon was published in the newspaper when she was only ten?”
    â€œYes,” I said proudly. “It’s all true.”
    â€œI love her hair,” sighed one boy. “It’s like a painting.”
    â€œI love her voice,” said a girl with too many braids in her fine hair. “It’s totally fascinating.”
    My sister’s hair, which rose in a teeming mass,
did
look like a painting. As for her voice, people were always surprised that a body as small as hers could produce a voice with such a deep and intimate rasp. She always sounded like she was telling a secret. And her enormous brown eyes seemed to see things other eyes didn’t.
    The best was when she actually spoke to you. She would sidle up and say, “What’s
your
favorite shade of green?” You’d want to give her the impression that you’d spent a lot of time considering the issue. No matter what your answer—the green of arbutus leaves, the green of your favorite gym shorts—she’d sigh and say, “Yes!” like she agreed with you absolutely. She made everyone feel like they’d just inspired her.
    What a thing to inspire a real artist! A prodigy!
    When Keira started working on the Chronicles, she was fourteen and I was eleven. I knew she’d been paying close attention to what went on at home. Even closer than before. I could not have been more excited. I told everyone that my sister was working on her own book-length comic, and that me and my parents were
in it
!
    Then came the fateful day when I met myself in graphic novel form. Keira left neatly hand-bound photocopies of
Diana: Queen of Two Worlds
on each of our breakfast plates. My dad