The Sister Solution

by Trudi Trueit

  “What is it, Jorgianna?” asks my mother, her head bending to match mine.

  People think because my intelligence is well above average for someone who is eleven years, six months, and twenty-three days old, I have all the answers. I don’t, of course—only about 96.3 percent of them. “It’s art, Mom.”

  The lines in her forehead deepen. “Are those wires sticking out the top supposed to be antennae or hooks?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  I walk on. I don’t have to look back to know she is still frowning, but soon she’ll figure out there is nothing to figure out. Or maybe not. Being a scientist in the food industry, my mom deals in facts. Everything must have a reason for being, and that reason must be clearly stated on the label. My dad writes instructional manuals for medical equipment, but he’s also an artist (acrylics, mostly). I know he’ll be able to throw out a few suggestions to make her feel better.

  I pause inside the entrance of the next gallery. It’s a large A-frame room with a shiny bamboo floor and arctic-white walls. Track lights hang from the crossbeams, spotlighting the various drawings, paintings, photographs, and sculptures on display. The smell of fresh buttered popcorn from the lobby drifts in to almost, but not quite, disguise the odor of paint. Parents and kids mill about, studying the artwork done by Tonasket elementary and middle school students.

  The ends of my fingertips are tingling. I know where my sculpture is. It’s in the far corner. I’m not yet ready to find out what the judges thought about it, though. I decide to take my time getting there. I start at the outside wall closest to the door. I study a ceramic sunflower with a broken stem, a vase with flowers on it, and a muted watercolor painting of—oh, please! Not another sunflower. This makes five sunflowers for the night, so far. I stop to look at a sickly unicorn with a pink head, blue body, and a purple tail. Its satellite dish–size head is weighing down four chopstick-thin legs. It’s a miracle the poor animal hasn’t collapsed.

  An older girl is staring too—at me. Grayish-blue eyes widen as she takes in my short, choppy, so-blond-it’s-almost-white hair. I put a lot of spikes in it, especially for tonight. Sammi said all I needed was a big chain around my neck and I’d look like one of those medieval mace balls. I had planned to dye the tips silver, too, but my sister had a fit. Sammi snatched the dye box right out of my hand. “No.”

  “It’s light silver.”

  “No.”

  “You’ll hardly be able to see it.”

  “No.”

  “Why not? You’re babysitting Paisley. You won’t even be there.”

  “Plenty of people I know are going to be there. I’ll never hear the end of it if you show up looking like the tin man. Jorgianna, I don’t want you making an idiot of yourself.”

  “Hardly. My IQ is—”

  “A bazillion and two, I know. You might have a high IQ, but your taste score is, like, four.”

  “It is not! You’re the one with no sense of fashion. All you ever wear is brown or black. Talk about boring—”

  “Temper, Jorgianna.”

  I growled. Why is it every time somebody tells you to calm down it only makes you madder?

  “I love how you manage to somehow squeeze your IQ score into every conversation,” said my sister.

  “It’s not every conversation,” I shouted as she left the bathroom with my box of dye. “Sammi, give me back—”

  “Not a chance.”

  “You care too much about what other people think.”

  “And you don’t care enough.”

  She is wrong about that. I do care. I only pretend not to. I’ve never had a best friend, unless you count Darwin, but he’s a guinea pig. It would be nice to have a friend that’s my own species.

  I gave in to my sister on the hair, but not my outfit—never my outfit. I might do all my homework and ace almost every test to please everybody else, but fashion is for me. I love the freedom it gives me to express myself. Tonight I’ve got on a parrot-green sweater. Dyed-to-match pom-poms trim the crewneck and dangle from the short, puffed sleeves. Below that, I’m wearing a fuchsia poof skirt with white polka dots, white lace tights, and white vinyl Victorian ankle boots. Bright green and pink for a bright girl in a bright mood—that’s me!

  I turn to inspect the girl who is inspecting me. She has on a butter-colored tee with a draped neck and the most expensive Bitterroot designer jeans you can buy (the ocean-blue swirl on the front pocket gives it away). Parted by a thin yellow hairband, light-blond hair falls to her elbows. She is wearing a pair of four-hundred-dollar Sassy Girl sandals, and her toes are painted clear with a touch of glitter. A tiny gold shamrock hangs around her neck, with matching shamrocks hanging from her ears.

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” she says, “it’s just . . . I mean, I was wondering—”

  I roll my eyes. “Yes, I know Halloween is seven months away, and no, I am not joining the circus, and yes, my mother knows I left the house looking like this. Did I cover everything?”

  “I . . . uh . . . guess so.”

  I lean in to take a closer look at the skinny unicorn. I can feel myself start to relax. I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings, but the third degree gets old. Also, my sister is right. I do have a bit of a temper. Okay, more than a bit.

  “I don’t blame you for being defensive,” says Shamrock. “All I meant . . . I mean, what I was going to say was I think your outfit is amazing to the tenth power.”

  I eye her suspiciously. Technically, there is no such math equation.

  “Your hair, too. The spikes are edgy but not over the top.”

  I exhale. “Thanks.”

  “Your style is so fun.” Shamrock stands back to study me as if I am one of the art exhibits. “It’s cool, yet with a touch of Alice in Wonderland. Very quirky but also—what’s the word I’m looking for?” She snaps her fingers. “Chic.”

  Did I hear angels? Someone in this town, finally, gets me.

  “Thanks,” I say again, this time with real feeling.

  “I really like the way you’ve put all those colors together,” she says. “That’s where I have trouble. I never know what goes with what.”

  “You can’t go wrong with complementary colors,” I say. “Those are the ones that are opposite each other on the color wheel.”

  “Color wheel? I think we have one hanging up in my art class at school, but I can’t remember which colors are opposite each other.”

  “Yellow and purple. Peach and navy.”

  She motions to my outfit. “Pink and green?”

  “Right.” I grin. “My dad’s an artist. He says complementary colors bring out the best in each other.”

  “I’ll remember that.” She gasps. “Is that an X.O. Minxx sweater?”

  “You know your clothes! It took me six months to save for it.” It is one of the few designer pieces I own that didn’t come from the Helping Hands thrift store. I have a scout on the inside scoring me some cute clothes at great prices, otherwise known as my grandmother. She volunteers there every Wednesday and Friday.

  “The pom-poms are adorbs.”

  “Thanks.” I move my arm, making the pom-poms on the sleeve wiggle. “My sister says I look like a human sombrero.”

  “Your sister is wrong.”

  I like this girl.

  “Sorry if I seemed a bit hostile earlier,” I say.

  “Huh?”

  “Mad.”

  “No big dealy woo.” Shamrock glances at the creepy unicorn between us. “So what do you think?”

  “All that’s missing is a rainbow,” I say. Dang! What was I thinking? What if the hideous pink sculpture is hers? I scramble to add, “But the . . . uh . . . head is . . . unique.”

  “For sure. I’ll bet that thing bites the dust in an hour.”

  Whew! It’s not hers.

  “Check it out.” She points to the red ribbon tacked to the side of the display case. “My Little Mutant Unicorn here got third place. Leave it to Mrs. Vanderslice and the judges to reward
cliché.”

  “Mrs. Vanderslice is judging?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I’m doomed. Mrs. Vanderslice is our school superintendent. She usually wears polyester pantsuits in the same color scheme as the M&M’S they sell around Easter time. She’s under five feet tall, but her beehive bun adds about a foot to her height. It leans at about a seventy-degree angle, but can tip farther if wind speeds hit more than ten miles per hour. Mrs. Vanderslice is looking for art that matches her style. Old-fashioned. Sweet. Pastel. What was I thinking? I should have done a butterfly sculpture. Or a charcoal self-portrait. Or a sunflower anything.

  “Come on.” Shamrock latches on to my arm. “There is one piece in this place that gives me hope for our generation.”

  She leads me across the floor. I hesitate when I see we are headed to the far corner of the room, but her grip is firm. We stop at the side of a display stand holding a wooden cube about two-feet tall by two-feet wide. The geography of Washington State is painted in oils in one continuous landscape around the four vertical sides. A few three-dimensional landmarks carved in wood have been attached: the Cascade Mountains, the Space Needle, and a little schoolhouse in Tonasket. On the back side a flat, wooden, doglike tail is attached to the cube with a hinge. The upturned tail has been painted a deep sapphire blue to match the water. The top of the box is open.

  An elbow nudges me. “You have to get really close to see all of the detail. See, there’s Mount Rainier. And Seattle. There’s even a little 3-D Space Needle. Look, over here is Tonasket. It must have taken forever to paint.”

  “I’m sure it didn’t—”

  “Oh, wait. You have to see the best part.” Shamrock hauls me around to the back of the display where a small set of stairs has been pushed up against the stand.

  “Go on up. Look inside.”

  “It’s all right—”

  “You must look.”

  “Okay, okay.” Hurrying up the three white steps, I peek inside the cube. It’s painted black and filled with trash—syringes, latex gloves, pop cans, plastic bags, lightbulbs, batteries, hot dog packages, junk mail—all resting on a bed of sand and broken seashells.

  Shamrock is waiting for me at the bottom of the steps. Her hands are clasped. Her eyes are wide. “You get it, don’t you? See, we are slowly ruining our planet with dangerous chemicals, toxic junk, and wasteful packaging. We bury it under the surface and try to pretend nothing is wrong, but it’s still there, destroying us from the inside out. But it’s not all doom and gloom. As long as we are alive, there’s still hope we can turn things around. That’s what the dog’s tail means.” She moves the tail back and forth on its hinge. “At least, I think it’s a dog’s tail. What do you think?”

  “I think—”

  “It looks like a Labrador’s tail to me and they are always happy dogs, right?”

  “Maybe not always, but—”

  “I like that about it, don’t you? I like it when environmental art is . . . oh, you know . . . what’s the word I’m looking for?”

  “Optimistic?”

  “Yes!”

  “Let’s hope the judges do too,” I mutter.

  “I’m sure they do. It won its category, so it’s in the running for Best in Show.”

  “It is?” I hurry around to the only side of the stand I haven’t yet seen. A blue first-place ribbon hangs next to the artist identification card. My heart is pounding so loudly I can barely hear Shamrock, who is still jabbering away. “. . . and see how the water glistens? It’s like you can almost see the waves hitting the shore. I wonder how the artist got it to sparkle like that.”

  “Pearlized powder added to the base paint.”

  Gray-blue eyes look at me, then the cube, then me again. “How do you know?”

  “It’s . . . sort of . . . I mean . . . It’s my piece.”

  She slaps her cheeks, making her clover earrings swing. “Oh man. Are you kidding? I dragged you over here to look at your own sculpture!”

  “It’s all right.”

  “How dumb could I possibly be?”

  “Really, it’s okay.” I should have confessed sooner, but I didn’t want to frighten her. That’s what I do. I scare kids. When you’re smart, kids assume you want to use your intelligence to make everyone else in the class look bad. But you don’t. You can’t help having a high IQ. It happens to you, like having a second toe longer than the first or being allergic to strawberries.

  I need to change the subject, to get it off me. “Do you have a piece in the show too?”

  “Yeah.” She crosses an eye in. “It’s not nearly as good as yours.”

  “A sculpture?”

  “A photograph. It’s in the last—”

  “Jorgianna!” Mrs. Vanderslice’s voice fills every inch of space between the floor and the rafters. The superintendent is heading toward me. She is in a spearmint-green suit and matching pumps. Her tall spun-cotton-candy beehive is only a few degrees off its vertical axis. Four adults are in formation a few steps behind her; two on the right and two on the left. Everyone is carrying clipboards and looking stern. Did I get disqualified?

  “Y . . . yes?” I gulp.

  Mrs. Vanderslice throws open her arms and, suddenly, I am engulfed in the eye of a mint-green tornado. She starts to squeeze. Gasping for air inside her marshmallow clinch, I hear a muffled “Well done, my dear. Well done.” A second before one of my lungs ruptures, the superintendent releases me. Someone calls, “Smile,” so I do and several camera flashes go off, creating a haze of fireworks. With patriotic dots still floating in front of me, I catch a glimpse of a ribbon the color of ripe eggplant. The words BEST IN SHOW are stamped in gold letters in the center of the rosette. This is . . . for me?

  I turn to Mrs. Vanderslice. “You liked it?”

  The Leaning Tower of Vanderslice sways. “Very much.”

  “I was worried. I thought you wouldn’t—”

  “Uh, uh, uh.” She wags a finger. “An artist must never let fear of judgment keep her from expressing what must be expressed. If people get it, bravo! If they don’t, it is their loss. Remember, Jorgianna, ‘to thine own self be true,’ as the great Winston Churchill said.”

  “Um . . . I think that was Shakespeare.”

  Mrs. Vanderslice is not listening. She has side-stepped me to greet my parents and engulf them in her green vortex.

  Then it’s true. I won. I really won!

  I wish Sammi were here, but I suppose it’s for the best that she isn’t. It wouldn’t be good for us. We aren’t as close as we should be. It’s my fault. I win too much and she wins too little. I know it’s a problem, but I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t know how to be anyone other than who I am.

  My sister thinks she doesn’t measure up to me, but she’s wrong. I make people uncomfortable. Sammi puts them at ease. She can get even the shyest person in the room to talk. She’s beautiful, too. My sister is tall and graceful, with thick flame-red hair and eyes the color of London-blue topaz. Freckles dust her nose and cheeks and neck, as if someone has blown gold glitter into her face and some of it fell onto her shoulders. People may be impressed by me, but they are charmed by Sammi.

  “Such a dynamic piece.” Mrs. Vanderslice’s voice rises for the benefit of the growing crowd. The four people behind her nod enthusiastically. “We are enormously proud to have Jorgianna Tremayne’s piece My Corner of the World move on to represent the Tonasket School District at the state level in the student art competition.”

  Everyone applauds.

  A woman rushes toward me. “Congratulations, Jorgianna!”

  “Banana!” I hug her. My grandmother was not named after a fruit. Her actual name is Brooke-Ann, but when my sister was little she had trouble saying Nanna Brook-Ann. It came out Banana, and that is what our family has called her ever since. “I’m so glad you made it,” I say.

  “Are you kidding?” She shakes her key ring. “The shop is closed up tight. I wouldn’t miss my granddaughter’s artistic debut for anyt
hing.”

  I step aside. “So what do you think?”

  Putting a hand on her heart, she gasps. “Oh, Jorgianna. I think it is extraordinary and I think you are a great blue heron soaring among mallards.”

  Banana gets another hug for that. Someone is tugging on one of my sleeve pom-poms. I twirl to tell the child to stop, but it’s not a kid. It’s Shamrock!

  “Nice job, Quirky Chic.”

  “Thanks.” I cannot hide my happiness. The formula is usually: Jorgianna wins = kids scatter. Shamrock has discovered a new equation and I am thrilled!

  “My dad’s picking me up in a few,” she says. “I just wanted to say it was a blast to meet you.”

  “Same here.”

  “Bye.”

  I watch her go. She takes quick, small steps on her tiptoes like a ballet dancer.

  “Wait,” I call. “What about your photo? I want to see it—”

  “Last room,” she calls back.

  “But which one is it? You never told me your name.”

  She keeps going. She isn’t going to tell me who she is! I did frighten her away. Halfway across the floor, Shamrock twirls. Her hair flutters out like a golden cape. She flings both arms wide. “Patrice. My name is Patrice Houston.”

  THREE

  The Six-Percent Sister

  I TIP MY HEAD SO my chin is resting on Sammi’s doorframe.

  It’s impossible for her not to see me. I am wearing an oversized orange tee with bright pink diagonal stripes, a pair of turquoise leggings, and fuzzy hunter-green socks. In jeans and a faded brown tee, my sister sits cross-legged in the middle of her white comforter. She has a yellow legal pad balanced on one knee. Sunshine streams through the window, setting the burnt-orange and sienna tones in her thick curls on fire.

  I can’t wait forever. “Sam?”

  “Read the sign, Jorgianna,” she says, not looking up.

  “Your door was open.”

  “Read the sign.”

  My sister likes to whine that I am, “always bugging her,” which is not true. First, “always” is an absolute, so you should not say “always” unless there isn’t even a sliver of a chance you could be wrong (same goes for “never”). Second, I have proof. I did a few calculations and found Sammi spends approximately 94 percent of her time doing things that don’t—repeat, do not—involve me, like sleeping, showering, going to school, studying, etc. Turns out I am a participant in only about 6 percent of her life. 6 percent! That’s a long, long way from “always.” Certain she would be impressed, I showed her my math. She wasn’t. Instead, my sister took it as a challenge to decrease the amount of time she spent with me. Sammi bought a big piece of white poster board at the craft store, cut out a huge circle, divided the circle into eight equal parts, and colored each slice. She wrote different things in each slice, such as Sammi is Sleeping, Sammi is Eating, or Sammi is Practicing Her Clarinet. She swiped the second hand from our mom’s broken rooster clock and attached it in the middle of the circle with a brad. Now it hangs on her bedroom door so she can spin the second hand to whatever slice of the pie chart she wants me to see. My favorite is Sammi Wants to be Alone. Talk about a drama queen. Sammi’s door looks like Wheel of Fortune. Currently the arrow on Wheel of Paranoid Sister is pointing to Sammi is Studying.