Fruits of Insanity

rambling jeans

I have sisters. Enormous amounts of sisters—or, four to be exact. I'm the oldest of six, and have only one brother. We range in age from me, two years to Joyce, two years to Rachel, two years to Lorenzo (the boy), three years to Madeline, and seven years to Rose. Which means that for most of my teen life, I shared pants with Joy and Rachel. The boy was too tall, Maddie and Rose were too young. It was mostly the three of us and five shared pairs of blue jeans.

This period of time was when I was fourteen until I graduated from high school at eighteen (so Joy was twelve to sixteen, Rachel was ten to fourteen), and we were all basically the same size and shape throughout those years. That says a lot about me, mostly, I think. Joy has a bit of an old soul, and she always would ask cashiers at the checkout who they thought was older. We genuinely looked as though we could be the same age throughout most of our childhood.

Here I also have to say that when we were growing up, I was a bit small for my age compared to my sisters at the same age—which I know because of marks on the wall. Mine at five was two inches shorter than Joy's at five, one in shorter than Rachel's. So, it's easy to see where sharing pants would be natural. We never fought over them. The person who grabbed out of the laundry basket first was the one who got them.

It's strange to think of our differences as children when we've grown so different as adults. Lorenzo towers above all of us, but as adults, Rachel is the tallest of all of us girls and Joy the shortest. Rachel is about five ten, I'm five six and a half, and Joy is five four. Maddie and Rose are both about an inch taller than I am. But those couple of inches were still in reserve back then, when we were all a size ten with some variation in how much we had to roll up a cuff.

Back in the day when I was in high school and my sisters followed (two and three grades behind me) we really didn't care about what jeans we wore on any particular day. It didn't matter, although they hit slightly different for each of us.

I was a quiet child, more interested in books than just about anything else, including clothes. Through no real effort on my part, I made good grades and graduated as the salutatorian of my class. The valedictorian was a young man who had one more AP class than I did, so his GPA was weighted slightly higher, even though we both had made the same straight As.

But I hadn't cared enough about those grades to take AP Biology with him.

We moved the summer before my freshman year in high school—so I was going to be in ninth grade in the fall, while Joy would be starting middle school, and Rachel would be in her last year of elementary. So, despite using the same five sets of jeans between the three of us, there was never any real chance of people noticing. We were suddenly in three different schools.

I think that was one of the best things that ever happened to Joy. Suddenly, she was in middle school as Joy, not Rhyssa's younger sister or Rachel's older sister. You see, we'd spent most of elementary school in a tiny school system where we went to a neighborhood school with only one class per grade. That meant that any animosities that we had were carried with us through the next grade and the next. We'd moved there when I was eight and in third grade, just after Halloween when all the friendships were already set.

I thrived by turning into myself and not caring what the other kids thought of me. I just finished at the top of everything without even really thinking about it, not caring that I was the slightly strange one.

Rachel was in kindergarten, so she essentially had a clean slate. She made friends and earned a place for herself within her class that she managed to carry with her through her time there. She has always been very musical. Mama taught us all piano and she had to start Rachel at the same time as me, even though she was four years younger because she is ridiculously competitive about anything she's interested in. So, even though she was one of the youngest children in that kindergarten, she was at the top of the class, she had her friends, and when her friends were untrue, she had her piano to focus on.

Joy, on the other hand struggled because she is an extrovert in our family of introverts. She wanted to get along and make friends, and I think that she did, but she always felt poorer than the people around us (which I didn't, even though we might have been) and she never found school as effortless as Rachel and I did.

So, coming into a school where she didn't have to live up or down to our reputations was good for her. She thrived. She made friends and found a place for herself. In fact, Joy so enjoyed being in a different school that she tested into a magnet school and went off to a different high school than I did.

Rachel did too. I didn't share my school with any of my sisters all the way to graduation.

But when I was off to college, Rachel switched back to our neighborhood high school as a sophomore for tenth grade. She missed her friends too much, and was unwilling to go off to what was probably a better school. She spent the rest of her high school playing xylophone for the marching band (no, she didn't march) and going to baseball games to watch her friends play.

Joy also ended up back at the neighborhood high school. When she was a junior (eleventh grade—I was off to college so I wasn't privy to all of the arguments) she went on a foreign exchange to Russia. It was 1996, and fairly safe, although the transitional period was still very much in effect. When she got back, she realized that if she stayed at her high school, she would have a year and a half left because she'd missed so many necessary classes. So she came to the neighborhood high school in order to finish in only one year.

And I went off to college at eighteen with my own wardrobe that I didn't have to share with anyone.

But by then, we'd grown out of each other's pants. Joy stopped growing taller and went into art, so her pants were ink and clay stained. Rachel was so tall that we couldn't fit hers if we tried. Maddie is a tiny thing, fitter than any of the rest of us. Rose also went into art and wears paint all over all her clothes.

Word count: 1193
Prompt 5: National Wrong Pants Day (7/1)