Brother Angel, Sister Devil

The story of my very complicated relationship with my older sister

From before I was born we were enemies.

Oh, it sounds so dramatic when I put it that way.

Except it’s true. We grew our hatred for one another even before we grew memory. When I first came into awareness, I already hated my sister in my soul and she was right there hating me back. It was a loathing made for legends and myths.

Naturally, we attempted to murder each other several times.

My cousin Timmy solemnly swore that if you connected two walkie-talkie batteries¹ end-to-end that they would explode. I was skeptical until he hesitatingly opened two walkie-talkies and brought the batteries close to one another and showed me that they sparked. Thirty seconds longer, he swore, and that connection would go kaboom! The resulting blast would easily be big enough to liquify a kid’s hand. In an Oscar-worthy performance, Timmy concluded with a solemn story that a kid at his school had died that way.

I fell for it. Hook, line, and sinker.

At last, an inner voice rejoiced, a realistic way for a child to obtain explosives!

Being me, I shortly saved up enough money to buy forty or so walkie-talkie batteries. I used some scrap wood in the garage to build a jig to hold the batteries in two rows, twenty on each side. I packed each jig tightly and practiced as well as I could to ensure I would be able to connect all of the batteries in one instant. Then I waited for an opportunity to arise.

My opportunity came on my sister’s birthday. She went into a special log cabin my father had built for her. Her name was carved on the front so there was no doubt as to its true owner. “Rachel’s Ranch” was carved there for anyone with eyes to see. My father had built me no such special retreat and never would.

I was bitter as hell about it, too.

It’s not fair to say that we were in a war for our parents’ love. Neither of us were confused on that front. The war was long over. Rachel had always been loved the most. While my father was more demure, my mother said it openly. It is more that while they loved her best they also liked her least. She was ill-tempered and caused problems, but had an openness and rawness to her emotions that demanded love. I was in the reverse position, in that I took care of myself and got good grades but also it’s hard to fully love a precocious and emotionally reserved child who is always quietly judging you.

I was like a cat. She was like a dog.

When my sister and all her friends were distracted with the celebration and gift-opening, I belly-crawled from behind the garage to Rachel’s Ranch and slid into a groove I had dug beneath it some days previous. I snapped the two battery jigs together without a moment of hesitation. Her friends would be unfortunate collateral damage.

I told myself that they’d all been right beside Rachel during one abuse or another. Several had witnessed the last time she’d held me down, drawn on my face with lipstick, and dressed me as a girl. They’d all laughed as I was paraded around the neighborhood and forced to introduce myself as her new friend “Mallory.” Which, you’ll soon see, is lot funnier than most of the abuses I’m going to describe.

I crawled only long enough to get out from underneath Rachel’s Ranch. Then, as if I could already feel the explosion, I sprinted across the yard to hide in the garage. I was sure that I must be narrowly escaping shrapnel like in the movies. Then I waited something like an hour for an explosion that never came. Rachel and all her friends left to go terrorize the neighborhood. I questioned if all the batteries had connected fully. Finally, I accepted that no explosion would be forthcoming.

That may have been the last time I ever fully trusted Timmy.

Not every murder attempt was so labor intensive. I had a GI Joe toy set, where I could pull a rip cord and send a single GI Joe flying away on a quickly swirling helicopter. The helicopter blades had a protective plastic ring on the outside, which I removed with a pair of tin snips. Then I sharpened the plastic blades with a piece of sandpaper. It wasn’t sharp enough to cut skin but at speed it hurt my fingers terribly.

I played with it near Rachel’s neck as often as possible.

It proved very difficult to aim.

The closest I ever came to actually killing her was with a spear I made from a rolled up newspaper. After swiping a newspaper from out of a recycling bin, I took each individual sheet and rolled it starting in one corner. I rolled each spear as tightly as I possibly could. I had a half dozen or so by the time I was done.

Then, I waited outside with my bike. It wasn’t long before Rachel appeared.

It wasn’t rare for her to beat me up and steal my bike. I knew in my heart what she’d do if she saw me standing there holding my bike. So it was, in a sense, entrapment.

If I wanted to write a bike then I could ride a girl’s bike, Rachel said. Because that’s what I was. A girl. After knocking me to the ground, she spit on me and took off.

I went inside with some real tears and then snuck out to hide behind the hedges with my newspaper spears. My heart beat faster, fueled by my ugly hate. It seemed like my whole body was suffused by hate and that if I held anymore hate that I would burst. We lived near the bottom of a small hill. Rachel would be going her fastest when she appeared in front of that hedge. It seemed that I waited forever, but there was too much murder in me to leave and go back inside.

When the right moment came, I threw one of my newspaper spears like a Zulu warrior into the spokes of the front wheel. The spear caught in the fork but did not break. The bike did not skid or simply crash as I had intended. Rather, it caused the bicycle to flip and pivot on the front wheel so that Rachel’s head collided directly with the road. It wasn’t as dramatic as that description suggests but she struck the concrete with enough force that it damn near cracked open her pretty pink helmet. I ran away as fast as possible when my father ran out of the house to see what was happening.

Rachel was okay, not even concussed, but I can see another timeline in my mind where she broke her neck or didn’t wear a helmet and spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair. That timeline scared me even as a boy, even as much as I hated her. I wouldn’t have minded if she died, but I didn’t want to get in trouble for being the one to kill her.

It was the last time I ever tried to outright kill her.

I agonized over it every time I watched MacGyver, but I kept remembering the way her head hitting the road and told myself never again.

I had my reasons for feeling this way, of course.