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    The Wrong Sister: Stories
    The Wrong Sister: Stories
    The Wrong Sister: Stories
    Ebook73 pages1 hour

    The Wrong Sister: Stories

    By Caroline Leavitt

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    About this ebook

    Critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Caroline Leavitt explores the family ties that bind—and garrote—in two haunting stories. In “The Wrong Sister,” a younger sister yearns to be like her elder one, right down to cozying up to her boyfriend, with startling results. In “The Last Vacation,” a family finds itself imploding during a sunny Cape Cod vacation, and nothing will ever be the same. Moody, funny, and full of insights about what makes a family.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherShe Writes Press
    Release dateMar 25, 2014
    ISBN9781940838267
    The Wrong Sister: Stories
    Author

    Caroline Leavitt

    Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Is This Tomorrow, Pictures of You, and eight other novels. Is This Tomorrow was a January magazine Best Book of 2013, a May Indie Next Pick, and a San Francisco Chronicle Lit Pick. Pictures of You was a Costco Pennie’s Pick and was on the Best Books of 2013 lists by Kirkus Reviews, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Providence Journal, and Bookmarks magazine. Leavitt’s new novel, Cruel Beautiful World, will be published by Algonquin Books in 2015. Her work has appeared in New York magazine, “Modern Love” in the New York Times, Salon, Redbook, More magazine, and more. She teaches writing at UCLA Extension Writers Program and Stanford and reviews books for People magazine, the Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She can be reached at Carolineleavitt.com.

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      Book preview

      The Wrong Sister - Caroline Leavitt

      Thanks for downloading a Shebook.

      To find out more about other great short e-books by and for women,

      click here, or visit us online at shebooks.net.

      Enjoy your read!

      Copyright © 2014 by Caroline Leavitt

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.

      Cover design by Laura Morris

      Cover image from Shutterstock

      Published by Shebooks

      3060 Independence Avenue

      Bronx, NY 10463

      www.shebooks.net

      The Wrong Sister, Copyright 1999 by Caroline Leavitt, was originally published in the anthology Forever Sisters (Pocket Books).

      The Last Vacation, Copyright 2000 by Caroline Leavitt, originally appeared in the anthology Father (Pocket Books).

      Table of Contents

      The Wrong Sister

      The Last Vacation

      Reading Guide Questions

      About the Author

      The Wrong Sister

      In the summer of 1974, when I was 14, I lost my older sister Rose to love.

      We were living in a suburb of Waltham back then, a green, leafy new development, full of scrubby trees and mowed lawns and clapboard houses painted pastel, just a half hour bus ride away from Boston. We were a family of women, my father having died four years before. He had had a heart attack, falling in the very garden that had been a selling point when we had bought the house. He left my mother enough insurance so that the house was hers, but not enough that she didn’t have to work long hours as a legal secretary, forcing my sister Rose and me to tend to ourselves, often well after dinner.

      I didn’t mind. There was no other company I wanted to be in than my sister’s. She was beautiful back then, 16 and reed slender, with my mother’s same river of black hair, only hers wasn’t tied up into a corporate bun but skipped to her waist. She had luminous pale skin and eyes as blue and clear as chips of summer sky. I was almost everything Rose and my mother were not—studious and shy, shaped like a soda straw with frizzy hair the color of rust.

      Before Rose fell in love, she adored only me. We had grown up inseparable, a world unto ourselves simply because we didn’t like anyone as much as we liked and needed each other.

      Tagging along with Rose, anything was possible. We roamed the woods behind our house looking for the secret landing places of flying saucers. We walked two miles to the Star Market just to steal fashion magazines and candy and cheap gold-tone jewelry we wouldn’t be caught dead wearing, for the pure shocking thrill of doing something dangerous. We ate ice cream for dinner with my mother’s wine poured over it as a sauce. We dialed stray numbers on the phone and talked enthusiastically to whoever picked up, pretending we were exchange students from France looking for a dangerous liaison or two. Adventure is the code we live by, Rose declared, hooking her little finger around mine to shake on it. We were always going to be together. We were both going to be famous writers, living in the same mansion in Paris, scandalizing everyone by the hard, fast way we lived. We plotted out our books together. They were always about young girls like us on some quest or another, for stolen diamonds or lost love, and the only difference between my books and Rose’s was that Rose’s heroines always ended up riding off on the backs of motorcycles with any boy she felt like kissing, and mine were always teaching school in some quaint little town in Vermont, with two Persian cats warming themselves at her feet.

      And then Rose met Daniel, and everything changed for all three of us.

      Daniel Richmond was a senior in Rose’s high school, a science major who loved cells and combustions, who said words like mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum as if they were poetry. Rose had met him the first day she started tenth grade, when she had wandered into the wrong room and found him there peering into a microscope. The first time Daniel saw her, he looked stunned. I’ll take you to the right room, he said, and by the time he got her there, going the longest way he could manage, he had her phone number, and a date for the following night.

      He was Rose’s first boyfriend. She was giddy with the incredulous joy of it. She walked with a new bounce. She brushed her hair a hundred times every night and stared dreamily at herself in the mirror. Daniel called her every night before their actual date. She curled protectively around the phone. She whispered into it and even after she had said goodbye to him, she held the receiver up against her cheek. Wait until you meet him, Stella, she told me, out of breath. You’re going to die.

      The first time he came over, I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to dress up, to shine the same way my sister did. Both Rose and I tried on three different outfits. We both braided our hair and took it out again, put on perfume and washed it off, and when the doorbell finally rang, we both went to the front door together.

      Rose

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