Linda was the most popular girl in high school: tall and fashionable, with flashing green eyes that could dismiss you with a glance. She had blue-black shoulder-length hair that flipped up perfectly at the ends. My hair was chestnut-colored and flowed past my waist: my “crowning glory,” my mom called it.

Linda and I never spoke, but sometimes she’d catch me looking at her, and I’d turn away quickly when our eyes met. Secretly I would have given anything to be one of the popular crowd, but I acted the part of the rebel instead, wearing black clothes, too much eyeliner, and a military-surplus jacket.

In the middle of my junior year, I started to blossom. I got the lead in the school play, began dating the captain of the football team (cute, but dumb), and was asked to rush the Chantells, an illegal off-campus sorority. All the popular girls were members, including Linda. I wondered why they’d asked me. Clearly I wasn’t their type. Maybe they wanted a little diversity, or maybe they thought I was a diamond in the rough. No matter. This was my chance.

My interview went well. All the sorority sisters were nice to me. I thought my transformation from fringe-dweller to popular girl was complete. I hung out after school the next day, hoping one of the Chantells would find me and we’d celebrate. Instead I got a call at home that night from a sorority sister who said sorry, but they’d decided against me. No reason given.

Crushed, I became even more of a rebel. I marched in antiwar demonstrations. I stopped dating the football captain and started dating a James Dean type. I smoked pot, read Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Ram Dass, and did yoga and Transcendental Meditation. I pushed the pain of the sorority rejection to the back of my mind till I almost forgot about it. Almost.

At my thirtieth high-school reunion, I spotted Linda at the bar, surrounded by her old sorority sisters. When Linda saw me, she came over to my table, still looking pretty and trim, black hair hovering just above her shoulders.

“I’ve owed you an apology for thirty years,” she said. “I was the one who blackballed you from that sorority in our junior year. I made up lies about you. I’m really sorry.”

“But why?” I asked. “What did I ever do to you?”

“You were my rival,” she said, not meeting my eyes. “You were the rebel. Nothing stopped you. You got the lead in the play, and you were good, not afraid in front of all those people, like I would have been. You marched against the war. You did all the things I was afraid to do. You were my hero.”

“Your hero? Why couldn’t I just be your friend? Why did you have to make my life hell?”

It was my hair, she said. Hers wouldn’t grow past her shoulders, no matter what she did to it. It was thin and brittle. Mine was so long and thick. She was jealous, that’s all. It wasn’t fair that I should have it all.

Alexis R.
Marina del Rey, California

I was born just one year after my brother, and I grew up as the little sister in his shadow. In school he left a trail of dazzled teachers behind him, many of whom asked me outright, “Are you as smart as your brother?” I became a perfectionist and an overachiever, afraid that if I didn’t excel, I’d simply disappear.

In high school my brother wrote a witty column for the school paper. The journalism teacher pestered me to follow in his footsteps, but I steered clear and instead chose photography, a subject in which he’d never displayed any interest.

I continued taking pictures after I graduated, but it was a decade before I showed my photographs in public. A friend who owned a coffee shop cajoled me into letting him put some of my images on the walls. I began to participate in open studios and group gallery shows.

Then I noticed my brother taking a few photos on a family vacation. I’d never seen him with a camera before. It was unsettling. Before I had the chance to wonder what he was up to, he had begun exhibiting at prestigious galleries. He was invited to join an artists’ collective and introduced himself at parties as a photographer. My modest little coffee-shop shows suddenly seemed contemptible. After nearly two decades, the joy I’d found in photography simply disappeared. I put my gear in storage and tore out my darkroom to make space for my husband’s office.

After some time, I began to write. I had always fantasized about being a writer but had avoided it because of my brother’s past success. As my stories began appearing in magazines, I held my breath. I lived in fear that my brother would disappear to use the bathroom and come out ten minutes later with the Great American Novel dashed off on a roll of toilet paper. He hasn’t yet. I’ve decided that even if my brother picks up a pen, I won’t put mine down.

J.P.A.
Oakland, California

Louise was my father’s secretary. She wore jeweled glasses, had the raspy voice of a chain-smoker, and was unbelievably petite. When I was little, my sister and I played hide-and-seek at our father’s law office, and Louise let me squeeze under her desk. One time she took my sister and me to New York City, to the Hawaiian Room, where we sipped Shirley Temples out of coconut shells and spent so much money that we had to scrounge change to pay the parking-garage fee. Louise was fun. She was the antithesis of our mother, who was dour and sad and away in the state mental hospital.

Around my twelfth birthday, I started to notice that Louise and my dad were spending a lot of time together outside of work. Many Saturday nights Louise would show up at our house, and my dad would coat the rims of two cocktail glasses with sugar and make sidecars for them both. Soon they’d be laughing in the kitchen, boiling lobsters on the stove, even though neither my sister nor I would eat seafood. I began to realize that Louise was more than a secretary to my father.

I spent my teenage years locked in silent combat with Louise. I glared at her across the dining-room table and answered her questions with grunts or monosyllables. In return she ignored me or made hurtful remarks about me to my father. “Your daughter eats like a vacuum cleaner,” she said one night. He did not rush to my defense; in fact, he barely acknowledged my presence whenever Louise was around.   

Fed up with waiting for my father to divorce my mother, Louise quit her job and moved to Hawaii at about the time that I was leaving for college. After she had been gone a year, my father apparently met her terms, because Louise moved back and reclaimed her place in the front of my father’s office, and in his social life.

By the time my father divorced my mother and married Louise, I was living a thousand miles away. On my annual trips back home, I found that my father was showering his new wife with gifts: expensive jewelry, a new house, trips, even a mink coat. During one of my visits, my father and Louise took my husband, Bob, and me out to dinner. Louise worked her charms on Bob, and I sat there fuming as my traitor husband fell under her spell. Later, when I confronted him, he dared to suggest I was being too hard on Louise. Didn’t he understand that she had stolen my father away?

When my father died suddenly a few years after that, I saw no need ever to speak to Louise again. It didn’t occur to me till much later that I had focused my anger on her because I didn’t know how to express my rage toward him.

Marylu Green
Madison, Wisconsin

Because our fathers owned rival drugstores in our small town, Melissa and I weren’t exactly friends. We fought about which ice cream was better: Sealtest, which her father sold, or Borden’s, which my dad served. My family’s store displayed Hallmark cards; her family’s store sold American Greetings. We were both certain that the valentines we gave out at school were the best.

In junior high we became part of the same straight-A crowd, and we put aside our petty differences. Some days the gang would meet at my dad’s drugstore for Borden’s best; other days we’d meet at her dad’s store for Sealtest. Though Melissa and I still were not bosom buddies, we got along.

In high school I had a boyfriend from another town. I was so in love with Dave I almost couldn’t stand it. When I was a senior, he gave me a diamond ring. Melissa, who didn’t yet have a boyfriend, wrote in my yearbook: “You and Dave are a beautiful couple.”

When Dave and I broke up, I was devastated. I cried half the night and later told all my friends the sad news.   

Not long thereafter, Dave called Melissa and asked her out. She told me about it over a Coke in my dad’s drugstore. “I said I wouldn’t go out with him, because of you,” my old rival explained, and she reached across the table and patted my hand.   

We’re both in our sixties now, and still good friends.

Ann O’Neal Garcia
Hillsboro, Oregon

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