I miss your eyes deep with story, your dimpled cheeks, the gap between your teeth. You were the new girl, the child-woman, a foot taller than any sixth grader. A warrior goddess reincarnated, striding down the halls of my elementary school.

Your mother, donning an apron, waving me inside her sunlit kitchen. “Taste!” she’d insist, in her Greek accent, slicing me a diagonal of fresh baklava. I watched the way your gold cross gleamed against your neck as you led her to a chair, her legs rippled with veins from working the school cafeteria.

One day, playing jacks, I confessed to cheating on a test. You listened, like an older sister. Showed me how to cross myself even though I was Jewish. We laughed, made a few prank phone calls, crossed ourselves again. And when I insisted on trying my first cigarette, you clapped me on the back as I coughed, ashes stinging my throat. “I told you,” you said, and I believed.

And when we walked shoulder-to-shoulder down those frosty school hallways, it was like the sun burst inside my heart. I could feel the weight of your eyes as we passed the girls who used to snicker, snap gum in my face. The way they stared, stepped back against their lockers at the force of you.

Every day after school I’d wait in front of your house full of questions. Was it a sin to French kiss a boy? To receive Holy Communion during your period? What did you confess to your priest? You indulged me for a few months but I could tell you were drawn to the tough girls, the girls whose fathers’ stopped paying child support, who wore too much eyeliner, who smoked weed behind the dumpsters.

By junior high you dropped by my house less and less. I’d sit on the floor of my bedroom, replaying your husky voice on my tape recorder, the one where you pretended to be my fake boyfriend. I’d see you after school by the pizza shop, gossiping with the girls in black leather jackets, who dated high school boys with motorcycles. Once in a while you’d see me across the street, nod, pass a joint to your new best friends.

One brave afternoon I marched into the pizza shop. You quickly steered me away, your hand on my shoulder. “You don’t want to be hanging with those guys,” you whispered. When I protested you said, “You’re a good kid. Don’t change who you are.” Back then I couldn’t see your fourteen-year-old wisdom. Only the pang of losing an older sister who left me to be me.

I watched trouble follow you. Your brother in a gang, stolen pills in your backpack, your suspension from school. You saved your confessions for the tough girls. Maybe they needed you more than I did. To me you were more than a brazen sinner, a wounded rebel. You were a saint who needed saving. A saint who saved me.