In the late morning sunlight I sat on the little couch dressed up for work, my little sister—I say little, but she’s almost eighteen—sat on the big couch to my left. We were watching TV, but what we were watching I couldn’t tell you. She walked the fifteen steps to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and complained, again, that she didn’t see anything she wanted to eat. This annoyed me, seeing as how she didn’t live there but was always over and eating everything in the house: “You don’t need to be eating our food anyway.”
“I’m driving you around today. I can eat whatever I want.”
I hate Laurie’s voice sometimes. She comes across as snottier than those girls from that show The Hills that annoy me. It amazes me how she has much less money then them, and yet somehow has turned out twice as spoiled. Sometimes she needs reminding of her place in life. I relish that responsibility: “Um…and who was it who was driving you around two weeks ago after you totaled your truck? ‘Cause I could have swore, yea, I do distinctly remembering… that being… me.”
My sister has picked up her bags and I can hear pissed off footsteps heading down the hall.
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t have to take this shit from you. I’m leaving.”
“Like hell you are. You have to take me to work today.”
“No. I don’t.”
Her feet continue, loudly, down the hall. I am quicker and head through the kitchen to stand, blocking the front door. She starts yelling at me to get out of her way. At this point I start ignoring her words—this is not particularly hard seeing as how I’ve been doing it since about the time she hit puberty, declared she didn’t care about politics, religion, art, or really anything that actually had substance in a conversation and then started dating all of my male friends in high school. Traitor.
Laurie’s frame is more curvaceous and stocky than mine. Out of the two of us she definitely has “the body.” She has the pretty plump build that big tall guys love. And somehow she seems to have been able to build up the curvy muscles in her arms by merely pressing buttons on the remote control because God knows she hasn’t been outside doing anything else since she was a kid.
I don’t care though, I am still able to proudly stand a whole inch and half above her, thus, I win. From my higher vantage point I look down at her and glare.
She thrusts her curvaceous arms at me and almost succeeds in pushing me out of her way, but not quiet. I swish my hips between her hand and the door knob, blocking her escape.
We are little girls again, fighting ruthlessly. She hits me with the palms of her hands as I begin kicking at her shins, trying to keep her away from the door. I am able to advance on her as she backs down the hall. Different parts of our bodies keep coming together and then apart quickly, constantly.
A difference between our younger selves and now is that neither one of us bites our nails anymore. Hers are prim, manicured, rounded at the ends, and fake. Mine are weaker, but real, filed down to sharp points. You never know when you will have to defend yourself and nails can be a woman’s best friend in times of need, so I grow mine out long and shape them into perfect little daggers with which I thrust all over her face and arms.
At some point in our battle we are back in the living room. She has me between her and the wall next to the TV. I begin to taunt her. She has always been stronger than me but my words have always been able to hurt her far worse than the bruises she forces on my body. Words begin issuing from our mouths back and forth between us, slashing gashes in our skins far deeper than our nails.
“I’m tired of you acting like a little girl. You treat everybody like shit. You treat mom like shit. You treat me like shit. If everyone doesn’t bend over for you, you act like such a spoiled brat. No one owes you anything, you’re not worth anything. You sit their and play mom and dad against each other and you know it. You’re a spoiled little girl that can’t do anything for herself. I can’t wait till you’re older and you realize you can’t even take care of yourself.”
“At least I’m not still in love with somehow who doesn’t give a shit about me.”
“Excuse me for actually loving the man I was with instead of just being with someone because I have no self-esteem and need the constant reassurance that I’m actually worth a damn. Cody’s an ass and you don’t even love him. You’re both just using each other. Everybody hates him anyway, and you hate me because everybody loved and still loves Will.”
She slaps me in the face. I stop struggling and look at her. Her make-up does nothing to hide the disgust that lines her lips, jaw pushed upwards, teeth locked. She looks almost like an animal. Her eyes dart back and forth at me trying to see what I will do next. I look at her cheek and she has something on her face, some little black fleck. I didn’t know what it was then, and I don’t know now. I do know that it struck me as funny, which knocked my concentration off for a moment. This just made me angrier: “you have something on your face,” I say, and then I slap her cheek harder than she slapped mine.
When we were younger I would just let her slap me, but I was older and could never do something like that back to her. I was an adult. I could be held accountable. Years later, I am an adult, and I don’t care. It felt good to hurt her.
Her eyes are what gave her away. She didn’t think I’d dare to do it back. I could see the fear in her eyes so I backed up against the wall away from her and she dropped her hold on me. I let her run out the back door, into her brand new truck, and out of the drive way.
I walked around the living room looking pissed off at the couches. The living room and hall looked virtually the same, the blue walls giving off calmness but I wasn’t having any of it. My sister and my bodies had been locked against one another up in opposition to these walls and they were no longer the same.
I stormed upstairs, ripped open the bathroom door, flicked on the light, and glared at myself in the mirror. My skin was whiter than usual which is saying something. Whenever my blood-pressure rises, my cheeks grow flames and this time was no exception. When I am happy my eyes turn a blank blue, almost grey, almost the color of the walls in the living room. When I cry, they turn green—I don’t know how, they just do. Now they were the color of ice, which was ironic because I swear that’s what my heart transformed itself into enabling me to hurt my little sister.
After a few minutes of heavy breathing, I straighten my hair, pulling it back into a pony tail. This always makes my chin stick out, giving my entire face a look of defiance. I grab my make-up bag and attempt to use cover-up on the scratches that sit on my face. The concealer stings as it sinks into my skin. I readjust my clothes on my body and walk downstairs. I fix the TV stand that my sister nearly knocked my body over, and head back over to my spot on the little couch. My legs instinctively curl up underneath me, and I begin flipping through the channels as if nothing had happened, as if my sister hadn’t been there the entire morning, and instead of her getting up and walking to the kitchen it had only been me, and I had just returned finding nothing in the refrigerator with which to quench my appetite.
