There aren't any servals in the zoo.

Have you met my older sister Kayla? She’s short with light eyes, and she’s full of wisdom.

“When you sit down to do something, you’ve just got to do it,” she says, with determination. She’s a stubborn one. At some point she decided to have a garden of petunias and pansies, and she did it, didn’t she? They bloomed up all purple and velvety. We like to sit out there with the flowers and have tea.

You can count on Kayla to say what she’s thinking.

“There are demons inside of you,” she says at our tea party today. One of the things she likes to do is to scare me. Isn’t that what older sisters are for? To take away a bit of childish wonder. Kayla will sometimes linger in the dark hallway by the bathroom and one time I was walking to the bathroom and just saw her body there and slowly felt her to see if she were real, and she said “boo!” What a terror. Older sisters are the worst.

“I believe you,” I say, about the demons. I feel the demons inside of me sometimes, eating porridge for breakfast and having tea RIGHT NOW with us. They are restless! They make me restless too, doing everything too quickly and walking around the house without slippers on.

“How do I get rid of them?” I ask. “How do I get rid of these demons—they’re driving me crazy and they all have odd first names and no middle names or last names.”

When Kayla thinks, she tilts her head to the left, like a puppy.

“Do you want to get rid of them?”

I spend the rest of the day doing two things: thinking about demons, and dead-heading petunias. It’s good to lead a contemplative AND active life. Kayla likes gardening but she hates dead-heading petunias, so I’ll sometimes do that for her. You dead-head a petunia when the flower is all shriveled up. You can either cut off the head, or you can cut off the entire branch (if the entire branch is dead).

“It’s like cutting your hair with split ends.” Kayla is good with similes. “If you cut off the entire branch,” she makes a scissor motion with her fingers, “more will grow.” I like the way she thinks. She’s very practical and spells things out for me.

WHO AM I WITHOUT MY SISTER?

“There’s a little green leafy part under the bloom, and you have to look for the little star thing to cut it off,” Kayla keeps explaining it to me—“there will be a little pod in the center of the star and there can be a bunch of seeds in the center of the pod.”

There they are! How charming.

Sometimes I eat the seeds just to see what they’ll do to me. Maybe petunias will spring up in my stomach and make me beautiful like Kayla. This world, friends, is full of different types of beauty. Like, if you’ve ever driven through the States then maybe you can compare Arizona to Massachusetts, how one of them is orange like the sky and the other is red like a brick. Then just think of the different types of beauty of people. You could talk to a Wisconsin beach boy wearing no shoes and just chillin’, or you can talk to a fat Californian woman eating a hot dog, and maybe you can find elements of beauty in both.

Kayla says “both” like “both,” with a not-long o sound. I say it with a long o sound (we are very different people).

Kayla hears me practicing piano on Tuesday (I only practice piano on Tuesday because my piano lesson is on Wednesday right after school). She drifts into the practice room and says, “slow down, punk! If you’re going to do anything well in this world, you have to do it slowly.”

Often, I don’t know what to say to Kayla, so I just believe her, but she doesn’t even play piano! She gave that up ages ago. Now I have piano arms, and she wears her arms with long flowing dresses, high heeled shoes with miniature spikes on them, and a very very long neck.

My sister is odd like a piece of paper that has been torn in half,

Or like a string of commas on a necklace

,,,,,,,,,,,,

Isn’t that strange? And a little self-indulgent of me to be thinking in abstract like that, but I don’t care. Kayla taught me to be self-indulgent. She taught me to “not care.” She is always chewing gum. Once I watched her put a piece of gum in her mouth and she ate it so slowly, one bite at a time. Another time she only ate half the piece of gum and put the rest of the stick back in the little cardboard box.

Disgusting! My sister is disgusting. She’s a strong rock climber and that’s just weird.

I’m not strong, in comparison. Maybe I’m jealous. I really need to work on upper body strength. I can really see how weak my arms are when I’m practicing piano, because there’s a mirror right next to the piano. Today when I was practicing, I held my arms away from myself so I could see them—I wish I could pull them out of my body so I could hold one arm entirely in the other and examine it. Woah—there’s a little freckle on my pointer finger that I never noticed before. What are freckles anyway?

This is on my list of things to figure out. I wonder—how do things like freckles see the world? And then I rethink it—freckles don’t see the world, freckles are dead, and have never been alive, and sometimes have very long, dark hairs growing out of them and have never been taught not to use the word dark, and those are moles anyway, not freckles.

Dad killed a mole the other day. We have mole problems in the yard, so sometimes he sets traps and such, and talks to the neighbors about how many moles he has killed recently. He once showed me a dead mole.

“Gary,” I name it. I take a picture and send it to Kayla because she’s upstairs, probably sitting in front of the fireplace even though it’s summer. Kayla hates summer and in the summer she wears this one horrible shirt that says

Rosy cheeks

Hot cocoa

Mountains

That’s a lie, I actually love that shirt, and I have the same one, and it’s so great that she wears it in the summer.

Shut up, demons.

I see myself in the mirror by the piano practicing the same chords over and over again and again and again but my hands cannot remember them and my mind is tired. I cannot slow down these chords because the demons are rushing me, those little blighters.

Frustrated!

“Slow down, punk!” I hear in my head. Kayla’s voice is clear almost like a book on tape or something. It sounds fake.

“Here’s an idea,” I sit by the fireplace in my room and introduce my idea to Kayla—“If I live slower, maybe I’ll live longer.”

“Whatever, sweetie.”

Kayla has a way of telling people what she thinks, instead of lying to them. She told me recently—“I’m tired of being nice. The world has done me too much wrong to be nice”—and now she’s not nice anymore but at least she’s honest. This honesty is like going into church and instead of praying, you write poetry. Instead of going to the zoo, where there are tons of screaming children, you look up pictures of servals on the internet.

There aren’t any servals in the zoo anyway.

           

It’s Kayla’s birthday. She’s twenty-four now which is her favorite number. Growing up, she always said, “My twenty-fourth year will be my best year!” But when she said that you could see the uncertainty in her very pale eyes. They’re almost like fish eyes they’re so pale—the kind of eyes that you can see through. The thing about Kayla is that she acts confident because she’s not confident. She’s out of control.

            Sheeee

            Is not quite sure of anything, and is like a city without walls—one that welcomes ghosts because ghosts are more honest than most living people are, but not as honest as creatures like dogs or coi fish or dead-headed petunias.

How can you tell if a ghost is honest or not, anyway? You’ve got to just let all of them in and offer them a warm place to stay, and give them shirts that say:

Rosy cheeks

Hot cocoa

Mountains

            “Happy twenty-fourth”—I tell Kayla today, on her birthday. “If you were a Muppet character,” I say over a big cinnamon roll pancake—“You would be Animal, because Animal is my favorite and you’re my favorite!”

            She looks at me with big eyes and says, “That’s stupid, punk,” but I know she appreciates it. I've told Kayla multiple times, perhaps when we were both drunk, but I have told her anyway—“If the rest of the people in this world are lying, cheating scum, you can count on me.”

            To be honest? Or to be lying, cheating scum? I guess I didn’t make that clear, did I? But I move the conversation on anyway.

            “You can’t just say that twenty-four is the best year,” I confront her in the backyard with cream cheese cinnamon roll frosting, “because what happens when you’re twenty-five, huh? HUH? What happens?”

            I throw some frosting at her and she laughs silently.

“Chuck it over into the preschool,” she dares me, so I do.

For the rest of her birthday we have a food fight in the back yard and then clean it up and then watch episodes of “The Office.” There’s the sun waving goodbye through the skylight in our room (we share a room, which can be annoying, but whatever) and we yawn and post pictures of the cinnamon roll pancake on Facebook so that all our friends can see that we’ve had a nice day.

This is twenty-four for Kayla. This is a big day. I’ve decided that it’s nice having an older sister to take care of me. She reminds me sometimes:

“Go brush your teeth, you little demon,”

“Can I use your cinnamon toothpaste,” I ask, but it’s more of a statement than a question, because sisters let sisters use cinnamon toothpaste. But then we stand in front of the bathroom mirror together like so many years ago and like now, foaming at the mouth with pink foam. I mutter—“I don’t like this toothpaste. I don’t want to brush my teeth with red toothpaste, Kayla,”

            “Then don’t brush your teeth, get rotten teeth like me!” She spits and opens her mouth wide enough so I can see the golden tooth on the right where she got a cavity filled last month.

            “Wow,” I say, “pretty cool!”

            “Yeah it is.” She’s smiling now—more than I usually see her smile. We both sleep well that night. People tend to sleep well after a lot of jolly laughter.

We don’t go out on the town often, but when we do, we live it up.

“Wear this dress,” she orders me, so I put on “this dress” even though it’s too short, because Kayla is SO short, but she says it’s stunning anyway. This dress is green, and sparkly, and I feel like a wizard lizard, or a mermaid sloth, or some kind of mystical creature who doesn’t quite make sense.

In the city we spend a lot of time pointing at certain people and saying—“Aren’t you glad you’re not that fat guy or that bald guy or that person who looks miserable.” Although let’s admit it—we’re both fond of these folks (but when we’re in the town we like to make fun of the town and everyone in it, because we’re sisters and it’s us against the world! People say that about close friendships—they say it’s you against the world, and that every morning you should wear pajamas bravely out into the street, buy donuts for yourselves, and dream about riding in red mini coopers.

Of course, it’s different for everyone. Maybe friendships aren’t like that for you. Maybe

you see a different color mini cooper than I do. That’s fair. But for us, at least, Kayla and I admit that we’re selfish. One time I refuse to leave the room so that Kayla can take a call, and she says,

“You’re selfish.”

“I know,” I say.

“Am I selfish?” Kayla asks.

“Sometimes,” I say. At least I’m honest.

            I believe that at the end of the day, whether or not they’re selfish, sisters will say to each other: “I will always be here for you,” and mean it.

My birthday is on September 14^th. That’s today. I’m turning twenty this year, which is a great age for a whole lot of nothing. What a horrible year. Twenty.

            I like to think that the year doesn’t really matter. People like Indians never even keep track of birthdays, right? Isn’t that right? Besides, I’ve always thought that on birthdays, people should celebrate their mom more than themselves, because moms are the ones who do all the work to give birth. Then they take the time to raise you and all of that shit and they change your diaper and all of that shit and there’s just a whole lot of shit.

            “Hey, Mom, thanks for giving birth to me,” I say on the phone.

            “I love you, sweetie,” she says. “You’re my life.” She says it like that because she’s so cheesy. But every year on my birthday, I remember overhearing my dad. He was out on the patio with his closest friend, and he was mostly drunk and weepy and definitely thought I was asleep. Butmy window was open and I was not asleep. I was hearing the wind and the rain and the lack of entering into lunacy. I heard him say—

“You know, Paul, we were gonna have an older daughter. We thought about naming her Kayla, but then we decided it wasn’t time. Had it taken care of.”

 There was silence for a while as Paul thought about this. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  I don’t hold it against Mom or Dad, but sometimes I wish that I were not an only child. For a while now I’ve been thinking about Kayla, and the things that we do together when she’s here, and how beautiful it is when sisters say to each other, “I will always be here for you,” and mean it.

            I think that Kayla is short with light eyes, and full of wisdom.

                        

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