She was always the tan one, the one who could turn the perfect golden shade, while I was always much more pasty white, my sunburns peeling and turning to freckles, my hair lightening from the rays of the summer sun.

You can tell it from the picture, even at our young ages. She inherited our father’s dark eyes, dark hair, and olive complexion, yet if you could see a baby picture of our grandmother, our mother’s mother, you’d swear they were twins. It’s funny how genes work, and not the American Eagles worn by Sydney Sweeney in a recent, infamous ad, although it triggered a memory for me:

When we were young, no one ever said that my sister and I looked alike. I was always dressed in blue, to better suit my complexion, it was said, while my sister had the privilege of wearing pink. 

I so badly wanted to wear pink. It was just one more reason to resent my pale skin. Yet I always hoped that someone would see some physical similarity, something in our appearances, that would leave no doubt that we were siblings.

At times, my sister and I looked almost like we could have come from different families altogether, so much so that I tricked her into believing she was adopted, a trauma from which she probably still suffers. 

And some folks today say that she’s the mean one, but she had to learn it from someone else. Oh, they don’t know the things that happened at home. The war where we laid hands on each other over a sweater, and one of her hot rollers ended up flying across the kitchen floor. Or the time I tricked her into drinking dirty dishwater from a Pepsi can, all for spite. 

But she got me too. Nearly every one of my fingers ended up jammed and swollen at some point from trying to shield myself from her kicks. The ultimate kick: my glasses broke when she kicked me in the face while she was flying high on our all-in-one swingset and I was hanging upside down from the monkey bars. She swears it was not intentional, but she was always a great kicker.

In the photograph, she looks like she’s trying to escape my grasp, like she’s tired of being held back by her big sister.

But in another photograph, she’s a ready learner, and I’m doing my best to impart all my knowledge.

Our father aggravated her, saying she was only pretending to read, and sometimes she did, making up all manner of stories and adventures of her imaginary friend, named Chainey Binkery, and calling truck hitches “chargerators” and belly buttons “spellecks.” 

But she insisted, “I am reading! I know how to read!” and she’d keep running her finger along the page, whether she knew all the words or not.

Something must have taken hold, for she made a perfect score on the reading portion of her ACT back in her high school days.

My parents even say she didn’t talk for the longest time, but I don’t remember that. 

I only remember her incessant crying at night, and I couldn’t sleep. “I hate my sister!” I exclaimed one day, and my mother scolded me. It was the first time I ever felt deep remorse, as if my words themselves had the power to kill, and I could never take them back.

“You’re her big sister,” our mother said, “and it’s your job to love her.”

So love her I did, and despite the fusses and fights, we always found a way to come together:

When I was mortally afraid of aliens, and I thought a spacecraft was hovering outside my window in the middle of the night, I went to her room for protection.

The night before Christmas, when I couldn’t sleep for excitement, I went to her bedroom to see if she wanted to get up with me to see if Santa Claus had already come.

When I was getting the whipping of my life, for doing what, I can’t remember, but she burst into the room, telling our mother, “Don’t hit my sister!”

When we were horsing around, playing chase, and I wheeled on top of my bed with enough velocity to carry my body on over and onto the floor beside the window, but not before my bare heel went crashing into the lower pane. Shattered glass rained down on my body, and somehow I made it through without a scratch. 

We told a story that day.

But it is no story that today is National Sisters’ Day, celebrated to honor the special bond between sisters. It is no story that we do share a special bond, made even deeper by time and life experiences.

And it is no story that it is funny how genes work, for strangers and others who don’t know our relation can now see a resemblance. 

“Are you sisters?” asked the lady in the checkout aisle. 

My sister and I just looked at each other. “Yes,” we said, “though we still don’t see it.”

“There’s something about your faces,” the lady continued, “they’re shaped the same.”

If she could only see into our hearts and our souls, she’d swear we are twins.