Back when I was ten years old, and my sister Paige had just turned fourteen but looked older, our summer vacation was interrupted by a spider at the window. It was a thick bodied brown thing, speckled, smallish, with spindly legs. It made its web close to the frame in the upper-left corner. It wasn’t too threatening and we decided, with our faces pressed close to the glass, that it was a girl. I wanted to name it “Charlotte” because it was the only nice spider I’d ever known, but Paige didn’t want to. She wanted to name it “Killer” or “Rogue” or a hundred other names along that line. I suggested “Spiderella” and was immediately shot down, and I let her.
         A week later we still hadn’t decided and our mother got a letter from the school board saying that Paige had done dismally in her school year. For her to enter high school next year, she would have to go to summer school. Our mother and father certainly weren’t pleased, though they weren’t surprised since Paige hated school and failed to present them with her report card this year. That year we missed our family vacation to Jamaica, but I didn’t complain. Paige tried to use that as an excuse for not going to summer school, but she would have been held back a year. “Fight the power!” Paige would exclaim, calling out to her parents to have backbone and stick up for her.
         During the time before summer school started, we watched the spider. It started its web small and expanded, slowly, further across the window. Days passed by and it continued to work diligently and it didn’t seem to ever stop or do anything else. It’s legs were always casting that shimmering thread and gliding over almost invisible cables to plot more structure. Unlike the other spiders we had encountered, whose webs started tightly but became loose rectangles as they became bigger, this spider worked small and so was always able to continue with a tight formation. As our arachnid friend was nearing the halfway point, a new spider made it’s way to the window. It was big, fat and black bodied-the kind where you can see the fangs and the hair on their legs. This invader spider made a web in the bottom right corner of the window. I hated to look at it and Paige didn’t want him around our spider. She was brave enough to tap the glass under his body to make him leave, but he didn’t flinch. Days moved on and the spiders continued to make their webs, threatening to meet one way or the other. I asked Paige why didn’t our spider leave when that scary one crept in, and she just shrugged. “Some things are just too stupid,” she said.      
         Paige didn’t want to go to summer school, if that wasn’t obvious-she was determined to run away, work at a fast food joint, work up to management, and eventually marry rich. I wasn’t sure where she got her ideas, but I reminded her that she wanted to know what was going to happen to our spider. She thought for a moment and grunted and stalked off. By this time, the webs were about to meet, with our smaller spider dominating the window, and it was the last night before she went to summer school. She procrastinated all night, turning over the thoughts of running away in her mind. She laid on the oval rug in her room all night and read comic books and listened to music with her headphones. I can imagine her laying there with all her clutter around her, fuming.
         When she got up in the morning, she had overslept and ran to catch the bus. It was long gone, and I imagine that she was afraid to confront our parents. She knew it was a thirty-minute car ride to the next town where the school was. The police said Paige was walking along the highway when a man in a brown, late 80’s truck stopped and got her in the passenger side, probably on the premise of driving her to school.
          When I got up that morning I noticed that the spider web was torn apart, and only the invading spider in the corner remained, spinning its web farther over the window. The majority of the morning was spent crying on my sister’s floor with her comic books. Eagerly I awaited her return so I could break the terrible news to her and we would cry together, and she would forget about her day. But around noon I heard people coming in downstairs through the rarely-used front door, talking, and my mother crying. Beyond the spider web in the window I could see my dad driving frantically onto our front yard-the driveway was packed with cars I knew to be various family members’. I watched my dad rush from the car into the house, leaving the driver side door open. Downstairs I found all my aunt and uncles huddled together, whispering. They saw me with a tear stained and flushed face and immediately they began to hug and kiss me, and I loved every moment of it.
        “She’s gone, she’s gone…” they whispered.
        “Yes,” I replied. “I’m going to miss her in my window.”
Two police officers came in through the front door and my mother was there, shaking violently and blowing her nose. The photo albums were strewn on the table and stacked on the floor, pillaged of recent memories. These snap shots went from my mother’s hand to the police officers’, and they shook their heads. And before I knew it, I was no longer a brother, but just a son.