I have to turn this in so PLEASE PLEASE give me good honest criticism. I can take it. I really don't know where to go from here. So pretty pretty please read and review.
She was never anything like me, but a mirror image of my father. Don't ever say that to her. My sister is three and a half years older than I: a taller, tanner, and skinnier version of myself. I've always been the jealous type. Her hair is a thin honey-brown, draping her broad shoulders and running down to her jutting shoulder blades, even though she always loved thick, cascading locks. She always wants what she can't have. Her eyes are a soft hazel, accompanied by lips that resemble Angelina Jolie's, and her cheeks are puffed out with bitter words like a snake's venom stored for a kill. She is gorgeous and I'm almost positive that she loves me.
During childhood she was my idol and my fiercest competition. Each day was a brutal war for my father's affection: dangerous and fixed. I was already daddy's little girl, and I loved to rub it in. At some point before my father's death we had one of many arguments, which I never won. However, this time I had my own form of revenge- a blue sharpie stab at her vulnerability, "Daddy loves Olivia more than Jolee." Finding the right buttons to push was always her specialty, but this was just too easy. The next day my father called me into the garage and asked me if I wrote in blue on his white tool bench. "No," I insisted. He had a smile on his face. One I can barely remember.
Jolee was always the strong one and when we had to move, she picked up all the papers from around the house, shoved them into secret closest and under beds- cleaning before the showings. At 15 years old, she wanted to help, to be self-sufficient, she didn't want to need any one and she didn't.
By this time, my family was quite dysfunctional. My father had an inexplicable hatred of my sister, a mean streak; one that I never experienced. She used to cry to my mother that he backed her into a corner, towering over her dainty body. Jolee wanted to please him more than anything, at first. Eventually she ignored him and disregarded his disappointment. I used to listen to my mother and father scream her name at each other, and I was convinced it was her fault. I shot her dirty looks when we head from the screaming in a cluttered closet behind our big screen TV. She held my hand. How much better my life would be without her.
My mother was not the protector either. She fought with my sister too. Like I said, my sister knows how to push buttons, and push she did. My mother threw my sister's bedroom door open so hard that the mirror cowering behind it shattered. It laid in pieces on the floor and my mother cried. I remember that my mother cried. My sister eventually outgrew my mother's brittle bones and her fear of being slapped. Jolee always had a high pain tolerance anyway, and boy could she hold a grudge.
The first and last time I got my mouth washed out with soap was her fault; of course through provocation I could not prove. A few years later I opened her door to see also her belongings packed in plastic grocery bags and her strong legs straddling the two-story windowsill as she waited for my mother's arrival. Jolee got the reaction she was looking for.
She taught me how to lie. When I didn't brush my teeth, she questioned, "Why didn't you just tell mom that you did?" I couldn't keep a straight face like she could. Mom can always tell, "I know you're lying," even when I'm just faking sleep. Jolee is a different kind of liar, one with out remorse. "I didn't go into your room, Olivia!" She insists with such vivacity that I reconsider my experience. "Okay, fine." A few days later, before she returns to college she admits, "I was in your room that night, you know?" "Crap," I respond, "I knew it! I knew it!" What I know is irrelevant.
She is a foreign creature. Her room stays locked and her voice has only one defensive tone. "Can I come in?" "Who is it?" I can hear the remnants from the fight with my mother in her voice. The hostility lingers and catches on my skin. "Olivia." "What do you want?" Jolee begs for affection, then shoves it away, opposed to accepting someone elses first move and unwilling to make her own. She creates her own impasse, and I'm too lazy to decode her desires and cross it.
We have done the sisterly fights; stolen each others make up, worn the others clothes and threatened hatred. But I am the one that keeps us apart. My loyalty is to my mother and it always will be. I'm a tattle tale, a manipulator, and vicious; the first to remind her that she has less friends than I do, that daddy loves me more, that I am willing to spill her secrets for leverage. But I do it for protection, to have no loyalties, to keep her at bay. I am bent on hating her because I don't know how to love someone I can't understand.
I have given up on our relationship; forfeited due to impassible differences. She wants to keep trying. "It's important," she says. "I love you," she says. I don't know weather to believe her.
