Isn't she?

I am a firstborn and, though I don't ascribe to astrology unless it fits into my point, a Leo. So I had three and a half blissful years of being the supreme princess of the universe (think of the tutu-wearing little sister in "Welcome to the Dollhouse"; my best friend I grew up with helpfully pointed out that the character was just like I was).

I was totally unprepared for Jill to come into my life. Her unwelcomed presence interfered with my master plan of total world domination. My Sainted Southern Mother loves to tell the story of my initial inspection of Baby Jill: "Flush her down the potty, Mama." After being assured that was not an option, I helpfully suggested giving her to the devil, only to be once again rebuffed.

 I went on to find creative ways to rid myself of this nuisance stealing my thunder. I would creep into her room, drag her out of the crib, stash her in the closet, then take her place in the crib with the bottle. Never worked. She had a healthy set of lungs.

Jill learned to walk at the astonishing age of eight months because I dragged her all over the house in my attempts to dispose of her. I convinced her to drink a bottle of perfume by telling her, "It'll make your insides smell good." At the emergency room, the staff assured my parents she was fine, just drunk from the alcohol in the perfume. Then there was the time I locked Jill in the wooden toybox and sat on top of it for a very long time before my mother came in and freed Jill, then snapped a shot of Jill screaming and me beaming.



My sister was the perfect child. She was loving, affectionate and never met a stranger. She had a winning smile and a head full of soft, ash blonde ringlets. "Hold still, Jill," my mom overheard as she came down the hall to find me standing over Jill with a pair of scissors, beautiful curls spread across the floor (see first picture posted). Her hair grew back straight after that.

When I went to kindergarten, the world was a safe place where children could stand at the ends of their driveways waiting for the bus with no need for parental supervision. Jill would toddle out and wait with me. So it took my mom a while to realize Jill was missing that day I took her to school with me.

I went on to ignore Jill for many years. Amy was born when I was in first grade and she and Jill were closer in age and had to share a bedroom. I had my Duran Duran-plastered lair to myself through middle and high school and had no use for either of them.

Our age difference placed us in different schools, which was a plus when I entered high school and she was a tween already taller than me, but the same clothes size as me. We could share our awesome 80s wardrobes of Gasoline jeans, Jamz, parachute pants and fluorescent tops. Couldn't share shoes, she outgrew me when I was 10 and she was seven.

We started to sorta bond in that era, mostly because we had to share a bathroom in the morning to curl and tease our perms. Jill had become savvy about my weaknesses by then and had started paying me back for all the torment I'd laid on her. She'd wait until I started brushing my teeth before making an elaborate display of going to the bathroom, guaranteeing a gag-response from me.

Our insults to each other were so stupid, of the "I know you are, but what am I?" genre. Whatever one sister said, whether it was as innocuous as, "I like oysters," the other would respond with, "You LOOK like oysters." This worked really well until Jill and I were alone in the car when I first got my license, and the Psychedelic Furs' "Pretty in Pink" came on the radio. "I love 'Pretty in Pink!,'" Jill announced. "You LOOK like 'Pretty in Pink,'" I snidely shot back. "Thanks!," she replied. D'oh!

We grew up in a sleepy beach town. The closest malls or movie theaters were an hour away north or south, which was really inconvenient to kids with curfews. We hung out at the beach, terrorizing the tourists. At the beginning of my senior year in high school, I was enjoying wine coolers in the dunes with my friends, when my sister and her best friend appeared. My buddy Charlie offered them a drink, and I screamed, "That's my little sister!"

I went away to college and lived it up my freshman year. It really pained me to go back home that summer, back to girl-child rules after living with none for a glorious, fun-filled year. I was really taken aback that they hadn't saved my bedroom as a shrine to me: Amy had moved into my room, leaving Jill with the big bedroom. I had to spend the summer on a cot next to the wall.

Jill, in the meantime, had become completely stunning. She was nearly six feet tall and rail thin. My parents enrolled her in runway modeling classes, and she could sashay around a room like nobody's business.

That summer, on my 19th birthday, my friends and I went to Crazy Zack's at North Myrtle Beach. We took Jill with us. I gave her my college ID and she somehow got stamped legal. As she swished through the room, frat-boy types crazily vied for her attention. I walked along behind her going, "She's 15, she's 15, she's 15..." I ended up getting kicked out for underage drinking. Sent my friend back inside to drag Miss Popularity out and we went home around 1. Not sure how, but my parents found out I had taken Jill to a bar, and I got grounded. At 19. Jill went on her merry way. I never lived at home again.

Oldest kids always get the strictest restrictions. Daddy would check the mileage on my car, when I was allowed to drive it, to make sure I hadn't strayed outside my boundaries. Jill was allowed to drive four hours away to hang out with me in my college apartment when she was 17. I loved letting her do her thing unrestricted in our hedonistic household. We were starting to have a blast together, and she ran some interference for me. For example: She came up the night before my college graduation and things got ridiculous. When the phone rang the next morning, Jill was the only body among the various ones passed out around the apartment who could get up and answer it. I overheard her say, "Oh, hey mama... you're where? 30 minutes?"

Not long after that, Jill went to her first Grateful Dead show and didn't come back for good. She lived the nomadic life for years after that and became a crusty gutter punk, hitch-hiking and living in squats from San Francisco to Minneapolis to New York. I was living in Raleigh by then, scraping out a living as an assistant editor while waiting tables at night, but I'd always take her collect calls. She'd breeze into town a couple of times a year, and I totally remember picking her up at the bus station or wherever and rolling down the car windows, then making her shower and change into some of my clean clothes at the apartment. I cannot abide the smell of patchouli.

But by then, even though we couldn't have been more different, Jill was becoming my very best friend.

No matter what else we had to do, we always made time to watch "Pretty in Pink" when we were together, loving Duckie and swooning when Blaine sent Andie the picture on the old-school computer. That was our thing. We'd quote along line-for-line, including "Blaine? That's not a name, that's a major appliance!" But our favorite was Andie, talking to her dad before going to the prom by herself: "I just want to let him know he didn't break me." Without fail, we'd always burst into tears during the OMD prom scene when Blaine tells Andie, "I always believed in you. I love you."



We went on like this for a couple of years. Then Amy got killed in 1994, and it changed us both forever. Jill had been living back home for a while, but retreated back to New York. My live-in boyfriend dumped me and I quit the job I hated and worked retail for a year. But Jill would come back home to North Carolina every three or four months and we'd go out to the Fallout Shelter, the Five-O or the Comet, a dive club immortalized by Ryan Adams in his Whiskeytown days in the song "Yesterday's News." Then we'd come home and watch our movie.

I got a job at a national advertising agency and got swept up in the glamorous life of working 50+ hours a week, traveling and attending fabulous parties. Jill decided to start her career in clinical herbology and scored an internship at an herb farm outside Charleston, S.C., where she lived in a camper in a field.

When she called me to tell me that she and her friend Chris had decided to have and had successfully conceived a baby, I completely freaked out. "Our parents will die!," I pleaded with her. And I have never been the maternal sort, never understood why anyone would want to be a parent, and I mourned the loss of my party-buddy sister.

Jill called home after three months of pregnancy to break the news to my parents. Charleston is about three hours away from Shallotte. Three hours later, my daddy showed up and took Chris for a ride in his truck. They came back a couple of hours later, and to this day, only the two of them know what was said during that ride. Jill and Chris were married two days later at a rent-a-chapel in Myrtle Beach, with only my parents and Aunt Jo in attendance. I will always regret not being there, but when Jill e-mailed me a single line: "I'm getting hitched tomorrow," I swear I thought she was joking.

I didn't get to spend time with Jill while she was pregnant. She and Chris decided to move to a rural area outside Lexington, Ky. She gave birth to Joshua at home with a midwife. I caught a flight out there two weeks later. I was still resentful of this change she'd imposed on our lives, but when she put that baby in my arms and I gazed down on his beautiful face, I felt a love I didn't know I was capable of having. Kinda like on "Friends," when Monica assured Ross's baby that she'd always have gum, but I told Joshua I would give him both of my kidneys if he wanted them.

Jill and Chris moved to hippy, liberal Asheville, in the N.C. mountains a year later. My family was thrilled, though it was a six-hour drive for my parents and a four-hour drive for me. It didn't matter, we had a baby to love! Two babies soon after, when Banyan came along.



When Joshua was born, Jill had the first-baby protective thing going on, wherein anyone granted her short permission to hold him had to be seated and still. But she'd sling Butter Ban into the arms of anyone willing to take him. I went to visit them when Banyan was two weeks old and was holding him in the organic grocery store while Jill perused the aisle. A nice lady came up and admired him and asked, "How old is the baby?" "Two weeks," I replied. She told me I looked great and I thanked her. Jill snarled at me and I smiled at her.

Over Christmas that same year, Jill and I went to a bar together. I got carded and she didn't. She got really upset, but I pointed out that I'd remained a creature of the night and out of the sun while she was a hippy out in the herb field. Then the next year, at her 30th birthday party, she introduced me to a group of her friends. "Who's older?," one asked. We both pointed at the other and in perfect time, replied, "She is." She laughed it off, apparently still in a good mood from the present I gave her in commemoration of her 30th year: I got my friend (and amazingly talented graphic designer) Greg to help me make a spoof of the Blue Mountain cards the older women in our family are so fond of sending and had it framed for her.

The over-the-top sappy text read:

All that I am, only you know
You wish all my wishes with me
When I stumble, you ground me
You're half of my heart
You're so very pretty in pink
I would give all I have
For you never to hurt
My sister, my bloodline, my link
And I want you to know
Just how lovely you are
You will always be pretty in pink




I stayed single for a long time. I met Steve when I was 35. For Thanksgiving that year, I invited my family from Shallotte, Wilmington and Asheville to my house in Raleigh to meet Steve. Five minutes after she met him, Jill pulled me aside and whispered, "You need to marry him."

Steve and I got married the following June. Jill spent the night before with me and we stayed up late talking and watching our movie. We had our makeup and hair done in the morning and she made me pull it together and eat a sandwich.

At the ceremony, Jill stood next to me, and when the Unity officiant called on her to say a few words, she said, "I'm afraid I don't have anything prepared, but I'm so honored to be here, and I want you all to know that Leigh Ann will always be very, very pretty in pink."