Confrontation

I've always wanted a garden.

Ever since I was little, I wanted nothing more than to be able to grow my own plants, but everywhere we lived, we never really had the space.  Especially since mom and dad kept having babies ;) 
Until now.

Kyle and I built a greenhouse on the opposite side of the living area of the place we're renting to own here in Hidden Springs.  And, well, I finally have my garden! 

And the best part is, it's thriving!  
Kyle helps when he's not at the fire station :)  He gardens too, in fact his lifetime wish is to have a Perfect Garden.  So he knows a little bit about plants. 

Even found some loose wild seeds that I had to identify.  Turns out they're death flowers! 

Two weeks after Sierra's confession, I was in my makeshift stable scattering hay for Traveller to eat while  Kyle had already gone into work at the fire station.  And my mind traveled back to that night. 

The night I found Sierra.

I'll never forget that moment as long as I live. My little sister was wrapped like a pig in a blanket outside of the campus movie theater on a chilly night, cold, tired, and dazed. I knew it was her because I knew her yellow-blond pixie haircut. Sierra's worn her hair short since the day after she turned teen, when she took a pair of scissors and chopped all of it off.

It was her but it wasn't her.   She was completely someone else, somewhere else. 

I said to myself, Sage, calm down.  Don't get upset. 

To be honest, I'm not as unflappable as I look.  To keep from breaking into tears that night, I took hard, deep breaths.

I walked up to Sierra and I simply told her we were going home and she was going to be okay.

The very next night, Sierra was arrested for simple vandalism.  She was fined a thousand simoleans, and the morning after that, my parents went to the campus and met with the university president and her court-appointed psychiatrist.  They decided it was best for her to spend some time 'away.' 

Away, of course, meant a psychiatric facility.  And mom and dad are spending serious coin for this treatment facility.

It's the psychiatric hospital at Rudolph Vanderburg Memorial Medical Center in Hidden Springs. 

None of us wanted her to be committed, but we had no choice.

The things Sierra was doing forced our hands. It was no longer about technicolor hair, all-black, spiky clothes, a bad attitude or even the repeated visits by the police. It was now about falling asleep in odd places, muttering to herself, wandering off in all directions, and a strange story about being abducted by aliens. It was about an admission she made about hacking into Fort Starch's computer system (Mom still doesn't know about that one!) and her complete lack of remorse about it, about being arrested on campus for vandalism, about something (not sure what) happening between her and AJ's girlfriend, about her 'bucket list' that she wrote that had some stuff in it that made all of us shake our heads, about her book collection which includes such titles as "Silence of the Llamas" and "Why do Vampires Suck?" and about Sierra basically being the pistol she is.

Frankly, she's a scary individual right now.

I was surprised when Kyle accompanied me to RV. I had thought he wasn't going to go but he whispered, "Sage, she's your sister, I understand that you love her."

I took a deep breath before walking into Sierra's hospital room at Rudolph Vanderburg. I didn't know what to expect.

.

Sierra looked in good spirits, good at least for her. She was wearing her hospital gown and an expressionless face.

"Sierra," I begged, "this has got to stop. You're killing mom, you're killing dad, you're killing AJ, and you're killing me. Most of all, you're killing yourself."

"Why should you care, Miss Perfect?"

Miss Perfect?

"So I didn't make straight A's in school and didn't win art contests and didn't ride horses and didn't have mom and dad fawning all over me.  So I like girls and I like sports and science and comic books and got into trouble with the law --"

"None of that matters, Sierra.  What matters is that I love you, and you need help. I don't want to come visit you behind an iron curtain. I don't want to bury you, Sierra. The way you're going, that's where you're headed. You're going to be in jail or dead."

Sierra shrugged. "So?"

So?  Does she have that little regard for herself? 

"Walking around as a ghost seems like it might be cool, you know, being able to walk thru walls, seeing everything, only coming out at night --"

"Well," I retorted, "maybe I want a living breathing Sim for a sister, not a ghost." Sierra must have rooted through Mom's treasure trove of paranormal books.  "I can't hug a ghost."