In retrospect, I suppose I was too hard on my sister Andrea. It just irked me that she'd graduated from high school two months before and she hadn't done anything in the time since. She was eighteen and she not only didn't have a job, but didn't seem interested in going to college either. She was just a purposeless lump on the couch to me.
I wouldn't have minded her laziness as much if she was spending all her free time with friends, but she barely had any at all. I knew her being a bit overweight had contributed to her shyness and problems in school, but if she didn't try to make things better for herself, who did she have to blame?
At one point, I was so angry that I told her she'd be masturbating forever if she didn't put in the effort to find herself a boyfriend. It was wrong, but I just wanted better for her than a life rotting in front of our parents' giant TV. I know it was mean, and for that matter I shouldn't talk--I hadn't had a boyfriend in six months myself. In fact, outside of work the person I saw most was Andrea, who had taken to visiting my apartment regularly since I'd broken up with my last boyfriend, Brad. Pot, meet kettle.
It was on a night that she was supposed to visit that I saw the teenage girl waiting by the door to my apartment building. She was standing there when I came home from work. She looked like she'd been crying, and as I approached I recognized her. She was one of my little sister Andrea's few friends. It took a moment before I remember her name was Tammie.
"Sue? Please, you have to help me," she said.
"What's wrong? Is Andrea okay?"
She looked at me as if she was in pain, and then she started crying. Something horrible must have happened to her; she was in an awful state.
"She's fine, I'm the one with the problem," she told me, looking down and sniffling.
I tried to calm her down, but soon her crying built to the point that she was sobbing. I unlocked the door and took her up to my apartment, wondering what she was crying about the whole way.
**********
We sat by my little kitchen table, and I got her some tissues and a glass of water. When she had calmed down enough to talk, she began. "I need your help. You've got to make her stop. I can't take it any more."
"Make who stop?"
"Your sister! She's making me into her slave!"
"What?"
"She makes me do things. And I can't stop her."
"Andrea?"
I thought of my sister's plump, innocent little eighteen year old face. What was Tammie talking about? How could my shy little sister make her do anything? None of it made any sense at all.
"Yes, Andrea. Please, you have to help me. You're her sister, make her stop. You have to!"
"I don't understand, Tammie. How could my sister make you do anything?"
"It all started when she hypnotized me. I don't know how long ago that was, she made me forget it happened. She could have been doing it for years, for all I know. But lately I've started noticing things. Times where I can't remember things we did when we were together. Times that I have strange feelings around her. Like, I've started letting her make all the decisions. When she tells me what to do, I-I . . ." her voice trailed off and she started to cry again.
Andrea hypnotized her? The idea was silly. There was no way my lazy sister, who didn't even plan to go to college, knew how to hypnotize anybody. So far, what Tammie was describing sounded more like she had some kind of perverse crush on Andrea than mind control.
"Go on," I managed to say.
"It's so embarrassing. When she tells me what to do, it uh, it makes me horny. The more demanding she is, the more I get turned on. And sometimes she makes me do things, humiliating things, it gets even worse. I get so hot that I can't resist her. I just do whatever she wants."
I looked at Tammie, a much cuter girl than my fat little sister. Could she really have so bad a submissive crush on my sister that she really thought she'd been hypnotized?
"Tammie, if my sister could hypnotize you and makes you forget about it, how would you ever find out? Wouldn't she just make you think you liked doing things for her?"
"I know because she told me."
"Andrea told you she hypnotized you?"