My mother never really read my sister’s diary – she only skimmed it, so that she got names and dates wrong. I know. Because I read it thoroughly, even made edits occasionally, inserting commas in my sister’s life.

I hated Lidia. She was younger than me and wasn’t supposed to be so self-assured. When she was a toddler she’d take off her own wet diaper and drop it in the pail. My mother found this enchantingly precocious. Of course, I point out, even today, after all that’s happened, that had she really been precocious she would have just peed in the toilet.

I admit that Lidia was talented. She wrote poems in her diary that made me weep. Although I cried at almost anything. My mother says I’m high strung, which always makes me think of vigilante justice in old Westerns.

I hated Lidia because she didn’t care about being popular. She never wore the right clothes, she joined the clubs at school that had only five or six members, like the Earth Club or Teens for the Homeless, and she was in the marching band. I mean, really, marching around the football field or in parades wearing that stupid uniform, that hideous hat strapped under her chin. And she’d take on these projects at school like trying to get everyone to recycle.

And though I know my mother secretly wished Lidia was popular, she did admire her for walking through life as if she had a purpose, as if she were happy just the way she was. Lidia put us both to shame. She always had.

“You’re not the boss of my imagination,” I told her. “You’re not the boss of anything.”

When we were small, Lidia and I were often given identical toys, my mother’s way of showing that she didn’t favor one of us over the other. One day my mother bought us each a doll. They were twin baby dolls, exactly alike, except that the hair on mine was a lighter brown, mousy and dull, as if the dye had been defective. So, you see, my mother did manage to show favoritism.

My mother would have liked to have had twins herself. It would have made her special, she thought. “Look at those adorable twin girls,” people would say. Of course, I knew she would have wanted twin Lidias, not two me’s.

The dolls were white-skinned as all dolls were in those days. But my doll soon became even whiter since I would leave it out in the sun and the flesh coloring got bleached out of the plastic. I never really cared for dolls and I would often toss mine aside in boredom or outright malice. Lidia would pick it up out of the crabgrass or extricate it from the thorn bushes and she would scrape the dirt and weeds from the blank spaces in the rubbery scalp where I had plucked pieces of hair, and she would whisper softly, “There, there, Maryann.” Lidia had named my doll. Her doll was Margaret.

One day the four of us were in the backyard, me and Lidia and the twin dolls that no longer looked like twins. Maryann was practically an albino, colorless from the toes – eroded from being dragged on the cement sidewalk – to the eyes, once sapphire, now the color of bath water.

I hung upside down from the cross-bar between the legs of the swing set and watched Lidia put cups of imaginary juice to the lips of each doll.

“I think Margaret just peed on the blanket,” I said. I wanted to get good, unblemished Margaret in trouble.

“No,” Lidia said. “No, she didn’t.”

“You’re not the boss of my imagination,” I told her. “You’re not the boss of anything.”

Lidia said nothing, just continued to feed those dolls. I flipped myself off the crossbar. “Hey,” I said, “why don’t you let them go down the slide. I’ll stay at the bottom to catch them.”

Lidia thought a minute and then said she would stay at the bottom to catch them. So, she kneeled at the bottom of the slide and held her arms out so that she was posed just like the statues of the saints in church. I carried Margaret whose dimpled limbs were still flesh-colored, whose eyes were still round blue jewels, whose deep brown curls were still intact, and I set her at the top of the slide.

“Okay,” Lidia said.

I gave Margaret a firm push that sent her skimming down the shiny metal surface into my sister’s waiting arms.

“Whee,” Lidia said, as she scooped Margaret up and then lowered her down to the grass. “Okay, now Maryann,” she said. And then she added, “gently.”

If only Lidia hadn’t said that word, hadn’t acted like she could tell me what to do. Anyway, Maryann was mine and she could do more than slide. I tossed her high in the air. “Maryann, the flying albino,” I shouted, and clapped my hands with each somersault she turned against the clouds before she came down like a missile on her head, which bounced off and rolled away.

Lidia started to run to the rescue.

“Leave it alone,” I yelled, and Lidia froze. I could do that. I was older. That was the order of things.

But that was a long time ago, before she started keeping a diary, before she started trying to save the earth and the homeless, before I started pretending she wasn’t my sister.

At school, not everyone knew we were sisters, since we didn’t look alike and I always snubbed Lidia in the halls. I’m tall and she’s short and somehow, I felt that physical advantage should have translated into preference points. At least, it helped me make the volleyball team. And if I wasn’t a star, I was at least good enough to be in the starting line-up, and that was good enough to be noticed by the popular kids. Like Haley, head cheerleader, and Rico, the best-looking guy in probably the whole state, or at least our pathetic little suburb.

One day after volleyball practice, I hung around outside the gym with Haley and some of the other cheerleaders who had also just finished practice. Some of the guys on the football team tromped by in their cleats. A couple of them stopped to flirt with the cheerleaders and I stood there and timed my laughter to Haley’s, mimicked her coy stance, one hip jutting slightly forward.

Lidia walked by with some posters flopping under her arm and a roll of masking tape on her wrist. I ignored her as she started hanging a poster on the side of the gym. It was another one of her crusades. Save something or other. I didn’t bother to read the whole sign.

“Hey, look at that,” one of the boys said, and we all turned, each girl, including me, swinging her ponytail like a shampoo commercial. We saw a pigeon hunkered in the grass, stilled by a broken wing, its breathing slow and labored. Rico went over to pick it up.

“Oh, gross,” Haley squealed.

The pigeon fit in Rico’s hands like a small football. He bent over and hiked it through his legs to one of the other boys, the kicker on the team. “Go for it, Kenny,” someone shouted. So, Kenny punted, and as soon as the wounded pigeon was airborne, I saw Lidia shoot past, a Save the Something poster clinging by a strip of masking tape to her shoe.

I should have yelled at her, “Leave it alone.”

But would that have stopped her from running into the parking lot into the path of Tino Delgado’s Firebird? I watched her sail, her trajectory wide and graceful. It looked purposeful, as if she were meant to fly. And I closed my eyes to hold her there in the sky.

.

Sometimes my mother goes into Lidia’s room and looks around for the diary. She’ll never find it, because I have it. I keep it hidden. I take it out at night and read Lidia’s thoughts.

I miss my sister. But she wasn’t perfect, you know. No one is. You have to understand that.

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Donna Miscolta is a Mexican/Filipina author who grew up in National City, California, and now lives in Seattle. She is the author of Hola and Goodbye, (2016) a series of linked stories, and the novel When the de la Cruz Family Danced (2011). Recent work has appeared in Bluestem, Hawaii Pacific Review, Waxwing, and Spartan. Miscolta is a 2014 recipient of an Artist Trust Fellowship, and she has also received awards from 4Culture, the Bread Loaf/Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the City of Seattle.

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Zoe Hawk, whose artwork “Dreaming as the Summers Die” appears here, grew up in St. Louis. Zoe’s paintings deal with the complex experience of girlhood, often referring to children’s storybook illustrations. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, and included in publications such as New American Paintings and The Oxford American.