Dear Sister

by Francine Pascal

  The sharp ring of the telephone interrupted Jessica’s thoughts. She picked up the kitchen extension.

  “Hello? Oh, hi, Mom.” Jessica wound a strand of hair around her finger as she listened to her mother.

  “Yes, Mom. Liz is fine.… Yes, I’m fine, too.… Of course I’ve already started dinner. Didn’t I promise I would? ’Bye.”

  For the next twenty minutes, Jessica rushed from refrigerator to counter to pantry to oven in a frantic effort to get dinner ready on time. “How did Liz do it?” she muttered, remembering that her sister had almost always been the one to start dinner. But that was before the accident.

  * * *

  “Hey, you almost ready?” Jessica asked, coming into Elizabeth’s room. “This is the big day. You—”

  Jessica completely forgot what she was going to say when she got a look at her sister standing in front of the full-length mirror.

  “Freedom day, Jess, that’s what it is. How do I look?” she asked, turning around.

  “Terrific, Liz, really terrific,” she said, eyeing her sister’s green minidress with envy. “Where’d the new outfit come from?”

  “Mom let me pick out a ‘return to the world’ dress. And get that look out of your eye, Jessica. This is definitely not borrowable.”

  “Why in the world would you think—?”

  “Because I know you, sister dear,” Elizabeth answered, grinning. “Hands off.”

  Jessica looked at her own reflection in the mirror. The jeans and shirt had looked great five minutes ago. Now they looked dull and uninteresting.

  Throughout breakfast, Elizabeth was subdued. She smiled and said “yes” every time her mother and father asked her if she felt well enough to return to school. During the ride to the Sweet Valley High campus, she nodded and smiled occasionally as Jessica kept up a steady stream of chatter. Jessica was in great spirits, as she always was when she was allowed to drive the little red Fiat Spider to school.

  “You’re not nervous, are you, Liz?” she asked. “I mean, it’s not like you’ve been gone for years. It’s only been a few weeks. You won’t have any trouble catching up,” she assured her sister.

  “Jess, you’re beginning to bug me.” Elizabeth snapped. “I am fine. I am not nervous. I am not worried about catching up—or anything else!”

  “Of course you’re not,” Jessica said quickly, realizing she was the one who was nervous. She wanted everything to go perfectly for her sister that day. It just had to.

  Jessica pulled the car into a spot in the student parking lot with her usual flourish. She halfway expected Elizabeth to tell her to stop showing off, but Elizabeth got out of the car without giving the expected lecture on safe driving.

  At that moment Enid Rollins dashed over to welcome her best friend back to school. Her large green eyes glowed happily, lighting up her whole face.

  “Liz!” she cried, throwing her arms around Jessica. “I’ve been dying to talk to you, but Todd said you couldn’t have visitors or telephone calls. It’s so great to see you! You look terrific!”

  “Enid, you are about to choke me, for heaven’s sake,” Jessica said, pulling away. “You are really dumb, you know that? I’m Jessica, can’t you tell?”

  Enid dropped her arms quickly. “But I thought you were—” she hesitated. “Where’s Liz?”

  “There she goes,” Jessica said, pointing to the figure in green hurrying across the wide front lawn. Elizabeth waved to friends as she made her way quickly under the columns and through the front entrance of the school building.

  She decided she had enough time to check in at The Oracle before her first class. As she walked into the cluttered newspaper office, Roger Collins, the good-looking young teacher who served as the paper’s adviser, was relaxing over a cup of coffee. He looked up with a smile that quickly became a frown.

  “Jessica, I certainly hope you’re not here to tell me Elizabeth still isn’t well enough to come to school.”

  “Mr. Collins, we just may have to get your eyes checked out,” Elizabeth teased. “Don’t you recognize your ace reporter, the distinguished author of ‘Eyes and Ears’?”

  Mr. Collins’s jaw dropped slightly. “Elizabeth?”

  “Elizabeth,” she confirmed, dropping gracefully into a chair.

  “Well, maybe a little knock on the head would be good for all of us,” he said. “You look wonderful, and I’m glad to have you back. We all missed you.”

  “You look pretty good, too,” Elizabeth said. Every girl at Sweet Valley High would have agreed with her. Roger Collins wasn’t the most popular teacher at school only because he was interesting in class. In fact, most of the girls would have loved a little after-class attention from this teacher.

  “Believe it or not, Mr. Collins,” Elizabeth continued, “I missed this dusty old room and all the last-minute deadline hysteria.”

  “Well, it’s still here, exactly the way you left it.” Then he turned serious. “Being in the hospital must have been a horrible ordeal,” he said.

  “Not all of it was bad.” She gave him a dazzling smile. “Fowler Hospital has some fantastic-looking doctors and interns. And some of the nurses aren’t at all bad, in case you’re interested.”

  For the second time that morning, Mr. Collins’s jaw dropped in surprise.

  “Just a suggestion, Mr. Collins,” Elizabeth said and grinned. “I’d better go now. I don’t want to be late for my first class. See you later!” And she was gone.

  “See you. Welcome back, Elizabeth?” he questioned faintly.

  Mr. Collins wasn’t the only confused one at Sweet Valley High that day. Other teachers and many of the kids kept mistaking Elizabeth for Jessica. None of this bothered Elizabeth at all, but Jessica was beginning to have an identity crisis.

  The rest of the week wasn’t much different from that first day. Elizabeth didn’t wear the green minidress again, but she showed up in one new outfit after another.

  “Mom must have bought you an entire new wardrobe,” Jessica said with a trace of envy.

  “Just a few things I needed, Jess. And you’re a fine one to talk. You’ve always wrangled more clothes out of her than I did.”

  “But you never wanted them,” she pointed out.

  “I do now.”

  Why don’t I like the sound of that? Jessica asked herself. The only thing that kept Jessica going that week was the thought of the pool party she and Elizabeth were throwing on Saturday night.

  She spent Saturday afternoon at the beach, playing volleyball with the kids, working on her tan, and feeling sorry for everyone who didn’t live in Southern California. She was also feeling sorry for Todd Wilkins, who wasn’t having any fun at the beach.

  “I thought Liz would be coming with you today, Jess.”

  “She’s home resting up for tonight’s party. She’s still kind of weak, you know.”

  “Oh.”

  “Why the long face, Todd?”

  Todd squinted up at the bright sun for a moment, then shrugged his broad shoulders. “I just never seem to get a chance to be alone with Liz. Every time I’ve seen her this past week, she’s been too busy to talk.”

  “Well, she is busy, for heaven’s sake. Liz has a lot of catching up to do.”

  “I guess you’re right, but I wish—”

  Jessica shook her head in exasperation. “Of course I’m right. You’ll have plenty of time to be alone with her tonight.”

  The thought of being alone with Elizabeth brought a smile to Todd’s face. “Yeah, tonight will be great.”

  Jessica hummed happily as she came into the kitchen late that afternoon. Alice and Ned Wakefield would be out the rest of the day and evening but had given their daughters special permission to have a party without their supervision. “We know we can trust you,” they’d said.

  Jessica was wondering whether she should go up and wake Elizabeth when the phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Jess, it’s me.”

  “Liz? I thought
you were upstairs.”

  “I’m at the mall, Jess. Please don’t be mad, but I remembered something vitally important I had to do.”

  Jessica drummed her fingers impatiently on the counter as she listened. “You’re at the mall? I’m not mad, Liz, but you’re supposed to be up in your room resting for the party.”

  “I’ll be home soon, I promise!”

  “How soon, Liz? There’s a lot of work to be done before the kids get here.” The fingers were still drumming.

  “Not to worry, Jess. I’ll be there in a flash. Why don’t you start things?” And the line went dead.

  “Well, how do you like that? She wants me to start the work!”

  Four

  Jessica kept telling herself she shouldn’t be upset with Elizabeth. After all, she thought, Elizabeth was just getting back on her feet. So, OK, she had left her with all the work of setting up for the party. “Listen, Jessica Wakefield,” she lectured herself, “haven’t you ever ducked out on work and left Elizabeth to do it?” She sighed and got out the onion soup mix to make the dip.

  Actually, that was just the trouble. Normally it would have been Jessica calling from the mall to say she’d be late and for Elizabeth to go ahead setting things up without her. This just was not like Elizabeth.

  “Now, don’t start creating a humungous, imaginary crisis over nothing,” she cautioned herself aloud. “Knowing my sister, she might even be picking up some wonderful surprise for the party.”

  Still, it nagged at her.

  “Stop it,” Jessica commanded herself. “If you don’t make that dip, the kids will have to eat powdered soup mix.” She giggled and kept working.

  Jessica checked the pool, skimming out leaves and twigs, and made sure the chlorine level was right. She set out the chips and dip and lugged the ice chest filled with soda out onto the patio. Then she moved the stereo speakers.

  Pausing to look in a mirror, she reacted with horror. “Yaaaaagh,” she gagged, looking at her tangled hair and red, sweaty face.

  That was the problem with doing all the work. You wound up red-faced, sweaty, cross, and tired. Jessica made one last circuit of the patio, going around the pool to check the little wrought-iron tables, and then raced inside to take a shower.

  “Hey!” she yelled in surprise when she got upstairs. She heard the sound of the shower running. “Is that you, Liz?”

  “In a minute,” she heard floating out from the volcano of steam and froth in the shower.

  “Well, how do you like that?” Jessica muttered. Elizabeth had come home, done nothing to help, and sailed into the shower first!

  “Elizabeth Wakefield, you come out of there!” Jessica raged.

  “What?” said Elizabeth, turning off the shower, wrapping a towel around herself, then jumping out and smiling radiantly at Jessica. “Isn’t this going to be a great party?”

  Jessica stood there glaring, but Elizabeth didn’t seem to notice. She just skipped past and darted into her room, looking back out to say, “Hey, Jess, you’d better get a move on. You’re an absolute mess.”

  Jessica threw up her hands, got undressed, then went into the shower.

  By the time Jessica put on her ice-blue bikini for the pool party, Elizabeth was already out of her room.

  “Liz,” Jessica called out. “You there?” No answer.

  Jessica checked herself out in the mirror, examining her slim, perfectly tanned figure and her smashingly daring bikini. She smiled. “Not bad,” she murmured. The boys of Sweet Valley wouldn’t have a chance that night.

  By the time she came downstairs, the gang was already starting to arrive. Gathered around the pool were Cara Walker, Lila Fowler, and Enid Rollins, Todd Wilkins and Ken Matthews, the football captain, John Pfeifer from The Oracle, and even crazy Winston Egbert with his new girlfriend, Mandy Farmer. They were all standing around somebody near the diving board, somebody who had their undivided attention.

  Jessica heard a provocative, flirtatious laugh rise from the circle of boys. “That’s my laugh,” she whispered, confused. But it was Elizabeth doing the laughing.

  Jessica strolled over for a closer look, and her eyes almost popped out. It was Elizabeth, all right, but she wasn’t wearing her old swimsuit. She looked simply sensational in a brand-new, very revealing green bikini. It sure wasn’t Elizabeth’s usual style.

  It wasn’t only the new bikini, which Elizabeth had bought at the mall while Jessica slaved away like Cinderella. No, it was something in the way Elizabeth moved among the awed guys. She was holding a platter of chips and dip, and as she turned between Ken Matthews and John Pfeifer, she treated each of them to dazzling smiles.

  Jessica sensed someone standing beside her, and looking around, saw it was Todd. He was gazing at Elizabeth with an odd expression on his face. He looked at Jessica. She looked at him. They glanced back toward Elizabeth.

  “Well, I guess she’s feeling better,” Todd said with an effort, looking for something positive in this strange behavior.

  “If she felt any better, she’d be orbiting the moon,” muttered Jessica.

  But Jessica couldn’t really complain. She was glad to see Elizabeth enjoying herself so much. The party was a blazing success, largely because of Elizabeth’s radiant performance. She picked out the music, insisted on dancing with every boy, and kept up a nonstop chatter that the guys found fascinating.

  Jessica and Todd stood by the patio doors drinking sodas and watching the new firefly of the Wakefield family.

  Todd sighed. “It’s terrific to see her so happy,” he said, though his hopes of being alone with Elizabeth were rapidly disappearing.

  “Yeah. She’s so happy she doesn’t notice we’re out of chips, ice cubes, and soda,” Jessica said.

  It was weird. At parties Jessica was always the one who whirled and sparkled while Elizabeth kept the food coming. Now Jessica was doing all the work.

  Just then Winston Egbert came up. “Kind princess, something to wet my parched throat before I expire, please! And a drink for my lady.”

  Jessica felt a curious twinge of jealousy. She knew Winston had been crazy about her since grade school, and usually she couldn’t be bothered with him. But tonight was different. He was just about the only boy at the party not hanging all over Elizabeth. There was only one problem. He wasn’t paying attention to anyone except Mandy.

  “Hang in there, Win. I’ll get more soda for you and Mandy,” Jessica said, heading back toward the house.

  When Jessica returned, she spotted Elizabeth standing in front of Ken Matthews, gazing soulfully into his eyes, as though hypnotized by whatever magic words he was saying. When she got close enough, she heard their conversation with amazement.

  “I was just telling my father the other day, Ken Matthews knows all there is to know about football.”

  “Well…” Ken blushed.

  “Oh, yes, you do, Ken. Why, I bet we’ll see you out there playing with the Rams in a few years.”

  Jessica stood there, holding the tray of soda cans. Elizabeth Wakefield playing up to Ken Matthews? Impossible! She’s just being friendly, just being a good hostess, Jessica told herself. So what if she’s having more fun than I am? She deserves it. Jessica put the tray on a table and walked over to where Todd was sitting alone.

  “Jess, have you been watching Liz?” he said cautiously. “Does she seem different to you?”

  “What? No,” said Jessica. “She seems really terrific tonight.”

  “Yeah, terrific with everybody but me.”

  “You’re jealous!” she accused. “And you’re mad because she’s having a fantastic time, and the two of us are just—”

  “Yes, Jess, the two of us. It occurs to me that you’re just a little miffed at your sister for stealing your usual place in the spotlight.”

  “Todd, really, you can be an awful nerd sometimes,” she said and stalked away.

  Todd was wrong, she told herself. She wasn’t the sort of person who always had to be the center of attentio
n, was she? And neither was Elizabeth—at least not before that night.

  Things began adding up in a way Jessica didn’t like. But there it was. Elizabeth had conveniently gone shopping at the mall instead of being home to help with the party preparations. The Elizabeth Jessica had always known would never have done that. Elizabeth had told her she had something vitally important to do at the mall. And what was that? Buying a new bikini! Not only had she gotten out of setting up for the party, but she’d also sneaked home and into the shower right under her sister’s nose. And finally, there was Elizabeth, looking sensational, flirting madly with every guy at the party.

  Why, she’s doing at least a hundred and thirty-seven things that I usually do, Jessica raged inwardly. At least, things I sometimes do. Once in a while.

  She was so busy thinking that she might actually have walked blindly into the pool if she hadn’t bumped into Cara Walker.

  Cara turned, saw the tray of sodas Jessica was carrying, and took a can.

  “Well,” said Cara, looking over her shoulder toward the other end of the swimming pool, where Elizabeth was surrounded by five guys, “would you check out Miss Butterfly of the Year?”

  “What kind of a crack is that?” Jessica snapped. “Isn’t my sister allowed to have a good time?”

  Cara apologized quickly. “I’m sorry, Jess. I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just that I’ve watched you in action with guys and—”

  “What?”

  Cara’s face turned beet red. Her apology was only making things worse, and she knew Jessica was getting mad at her. “Jess, you always know the right thing to do around guys. You’re really terrific in everything, especially cheerleading, and you’re a marvelous dancer, and you—”

  “Calm down, Cara,” Jessica said, then sighed. Usually she liked Cara telling her how terrific she was, but tonight she had other things on her mind.

  “What I was trying to say was that I’ve never seen Liz in action. She’s always friendly, but not this friendly. I thought she only had eyes for Todd, but tonight she’s breaking all records for flirting.”