You’re a Vision, Sis

Nellie extends her hand toward me, a magazine clipping of Joshua Bassett between her index and middle fingers. She’s making a face–her nose scrunched up over strawberry-glossed lips that purse when she asks, “This is your celebrity husband? The guy you want to bring into the new year with you?” I quickly draw a square around the perimeter of the photo with a glue stick before going back in and filling the middle with more glue. 

I roll my eyes, unable or unwilling to talk around the bottom of the glue stick between my teeth as I process Nellie’s disdain. With determination and focus, I flatten Bassett’s photo over the thick white poster board my mom brought home from work Friday. She works as an elementary school teacher, and she has a penchant for buying too many supplies. I asked her for the board a few weeks ago, forgetting about winter break. I thought she had forgotten about it, but I should’ve known my mom wouldn’t so easily forget my favorite New Year’s Eve tradition. 

As I put a little extra glue under the corners for safe measure, I spare Nellie a defensive glance. “Look, okay… You haven’t heard his music.” 

She shakes her head, and her straight honey-colored hair fans out around her. Last summer, Nellie went to Italy with our dad for his latest travel blog. He and my mom got divorced when Nellie was eleven and I was thirteen–just a few years ago. When she came back, she was like an entirely different person. Gone were her natural, coarse black curls that fell around her face in perfectly coiled ringlets, never stretching past her shoulders. She had acrylic nails that hid the ones she used to bite, hair extensions that made her hair fall past her butt, and she always, always wore sunglasses–even indoors, even if there was no sun outside. 

She flashes those glasses at me now, heart-shaped and pink in color, while shaking her head decidedly. “I don’t think I need to. I don’t understand why, at the beginning of every year, you decide to idolize someone you have no real chances of meeting. Sounds like a defense mechanism to me, Sis.” The smart mouth and attitude came shortly after her fourteenth birthday. 

My nostrils flare, and I flip my head around to face her more fully. “It’s none of your business, Nellie. It’s not about idolizing this person. It’s about…it’s about having a reminder of the things you enjoy to make it a little easier to remember who you are when you forget yourself.” 

“God,” she groans. She stretches out over the back of the lavender purple beanbag that has been hers since she was six and started sneaking in my room while I was studying to read, draw, paint her nails, or–later–to scroll through her phone mindlessly. I think she just liked the company. She never said a word, and it wasn’t until my mom opened the door once to get me for dinner that she saw Nellie sitting on the floor, and she silently put a beanbag in my room. I didn’t need to be told that it wasn’t for me. Neither did Nellie, apparently. She’s made herself comfortable with it over the years, enough so that I can probably find nail polish stains and Goldfish crumbs on it right now. “You would think,” she continues, “The way you talk about losing yourself, that you lived this full, interesting life. I mean, what’s there to hide from in your room? The villains you read about in your books?” She laughs cruelly, and I hate that I can’t see her eyes right now. I don’t remember Nellie ever being this mean to me before. 

“If you don’t want to help me out with this thing that I do literally every year, Nellie, you know where the door is.” I don’t want her to see me cry because I’ve always been the emotional one. Nellie has always been the chill one–the one who wasn’t easily rattled, who smiled and shrugged things off, who the parents favored until her apathy frustrated them. My mom once begged Nellie to show her some sign of emotion when Nellie got in trouble for staying out past curfew. Nellie shrugged and said, “It won’t happen again.” It didn’t, but I think my mom only got so angry because it seemed as if Nellie didn’t care. Even though I knew a little better than most when Nellie actually cared about things, understood that Nellie’s lack of emotion was often part of how she showed that she cared because she didn’t want to think about something that mattered too much and work herself up over it, there were times when Nellie’s apathy struck a chord with me too. 

Now, for instance, she grabs her phone off the floor and comes to a stand. “Okay. I thought you, like, wanted help. I’m just giving you tough love, sister.” 

Something about the way she says it makes me stand up, too. “There’s a difference between tough love and cruelty, Nellie.” 

“Oh, so now I’m being cruel?” She scoffs, folding her arms over her chest. “Why, exactly, do you want to emblemate these people, Sis? The ones you spend all year judging and determining if they align with your values despite not even knowing them? And yet you think you’re somehow different than me, a person who does the same thing but with actual people?” 

I feel my brows furrow as blood rushes to my face. “I don’t get it, Nellie. Are you upset about something?” 

She chuckles a brief, stabbing bark of laughter. “You never do, sis. You never do.” 

I try not to let her get to me as she walks out, slamming the door shut behind her. I look down at the work that I’ve done so far and struggle to feel as fulfilled as my vision board once made me. There’s a playbill for a play I want to see in New York City next year, a logo for the college I want to apply to, a few outfits that I feel emulate my aesthetic, and several, several book covers of books whose energy I want to take into the new year with me. While I enjoy all of these things, it’s true that there’s no real mark of myself on here. You could put the same board in Nellie’s room and believe, just as easily, that it’s hers. 

I try to ignore the nagging sense of guilt at the back of my mind. After all, Nellie was being rude to me. The thing about Nellie’s apathy, though, is that it’s never been mean. This is Nellie showing that she cares, and when it’s the thing I’ve spent most of my life begging for, I guess I can’t begrudge her that. 

I walk into her bedroom without knocking, determined to show her that her anger may be valid, but mine is too. When I walk in, she’s hugging a magazine to her chest, staring up at the ceiling as she lies back on her bed. Nellie’s room has always reminded me of the beach. Her duvet is thick and white, her pillows a deep blue the color of the ocean, her carpet a soft brandy color, and her room minimalistic. There are black-and-white posters on the wall, all of various music artists ranging from Michael Jackson to Rihanna. There’s a chestnut brown dresser against the white wall opposite her queen-sized bed. On it sits a single shelf of books–mostly young adult, some mystery, and a couple self-help. There’s a cylinder of multi-colored paper clips on the surface under the shelf, beside an open journal and several gel pens scattered across the pages. Her matching wooden chair is pulled out as if she just launched herself on the bed from her seat there. There’s a single large window along the wall beside her bed, and in front of it hangs perpetually-closed curtains that are white on top and ocean-blue at the bottom. Above her bed hangs Polaroid photos of the family and her friends, all hung beneath fairy lights that, taken against her white walls, make her room look sunny yellow. All the colors combined feel like stepping on the sand and waiting for the water to greet you. 

Nellie rolls over on her bed to face me, eyes still imperceptible behind her glasses. “What do you want?” She flattens back against the bed, stretching the magazine cover over her stomach. 

I climb up onto the bed, sitting beside her as she continues to lie, hardly acknowledging my presence there. I pull the magazine from her abdomen, staring curiously at the page she stopped on. It’s a quiz about how well one knows her best friend. I glance down at Nellie, whose lips remain in a fixed line on her face. “Who is this quiz for? Is this what you’re upset about?” When she doesn’t answer, I lie down on my stomach beside her. “Nellie, if one of your friends performed poorly on this quiz, I’m sure they didn’t mean anything by it. I mean, these quizzes–they don’t really mean much.” 

She doesn’t respond again, and I’m tempted to dart back into my room never to emerge again…Until Thanksgiving, at least, because I can’t pass up our mother’s sweet potato custard. I blink the thoughts of food from my head as I focus on Nellie, who slowly begins to sit up. I join her, and we sit criss-cross applesauce on the foot of her bed, each of us looking past the other person as our shoulders brush and knees bump. She flips her hair over her shoulder. “Do you remember what you said when I got back from that trip with dad last summer?” 

My brows furrow, and I shake my head once. She nods. “Figures. I remember I was so excited to see you because that trip was hell for me. Dad kept droning on about Mom and how much he missed her. He said he regretted cheating on her and that he had just been overworked. I don’t know if you forget this little detail sometimes, Rochelle, but our father is white. It was his idea to get my hair straightened. Do you know what I wanted that summer–why I went with Dad in the first place?” I shake my head again, and she nods once. “I thought that maybe…like, maybe if I could just give both of them what they wanted…I mean, maybe if I was a better daughter, it would convince them, somehow, to get back together.” 

I lean into her, bumping her tricep with my elbow. “Nellie, that doesn’t make any sense.” 

“I know that now, Rochelle. I’m not totally dense, I just…I was desperate. I wanted so badly to be perfect because I thought, if I was perfect, maybe they’d have no reason to fight. Maybe I could be good enough to save their marriage or something.” She laughs bitterly. “I know. I’m so stupid, but in my head, at the time, it made sense…” She pauses, but I don’t fill in the silence. I don’t think I can. She chews her lip nervously. “Dad thought this hairstyle looked pretty, and so I just went with it. But then, I actually started to like it. And…Do you know, Rochelle, that the only thing Dad gave me the entirety of our trip was a pair of sunglasses? It was like, Mom sent me with all this money to pay for souvenirs and meals, and when I sat in the car with Dad at the airport, it was just silent. And then he looked like he had just remembered something. He pointed to the dash and said, ‘I have something for you in there,’ and I scrambled through this stack of disorganized papers and food wrappers to find a single pair of black sunglasses. And it didn’t look like he even recognized it… It was like he was just hoping I’d find something in there that would satisfy me. It was like I wasn’t even there for the entire trip. I was just a stand-in for Mom.” 

“Oh, Nellie.” I squeeze her arm, and she falls into my lap, twisting around to rest her head there and look up at me. I brush her hair behind her ears and capture the tears streaming beneath her sunglasses with the top of my thumbs. 

She laughs again. “Do you know how confusing that was for me? I went out and gave my best and it still wasn’t enough for him. He wanted me to be Mom…But Mom wasn’t enough for him either.” She scratches her head like this is a puzzle she’s been working on for years, and she still can’t figure it out. “Why wasn’t I enough, Nellie?” 

“Nellie, you are enough.” I squeeze her shoulders, and they shake in my lap. 

“Then why didn’t you include me in your vision board the following New Year’s Eve?” She sniffs, and I feel my eyes widen in shock. She shakes her head suddenly. “Forget it. This is stupid. I shouldn’t have said anything.” 

“No, Nellie, what are you talking about?” I wait for her to answer, but she just keeps shaking her head. Finally, I grab the sides of her glasses and slowly remove them from her face. Her eyes are large and espresso-colored, fueled by emotion as she looks up at me. “Nellie?” I ask again. 

She sighs, a fresh sheen of tears still falling from her eyes. “You make your vision board every year, Rochelle. And I’m not saying you can’t love Harry Styles and Conan Gray and Joshua Bassett, but you didn’t used to need them, Rochelle.” She sniffs. “You used to always have a picture of the two of us together, and that was the first year you didn’t.” 

I gasp, nudging Nellie up by her shoulders and pulling her into my embrace. “Nellie, no. I…That had nothing to do with you. The truth is, I struggled with Mom and Dad’s divorce too. I also grappled with feelings like I wasn’t good enough. I…I sort of fell into this world of escapism. I watched so much TV the summer you were gone, Nellie.” We both laugh, and I feel a tear escape my eyes suddenly. “I didn’t want to think about their divorce or what caused it because I didn’t want to feel any pain. And I guess I sort of…shut you out as part of that? Like, I couldn’t think about any aspect of our family without thinking of their divorce. And I guess it just looked so easy to you…and maybe I begrudged you of that.” 

She hits my chest, and I wince, jaw dropping in astonishment. “Ow! What was that for?” 

She giggles. “You’re such a loser, Rochelle. You were like…the one stable thing in all of this for me.” She rolls her eyes, and I pull her once more into my chest. She laughs against me, “I’m so sorry I didn’t just tell you how I was feeling. I didn’t even think about how things might be hard for you too. You’ve always been invincible to me, sis.” 

I laugh at that, pulling her face away from mine so I can wipe the last of the tears from it. My phone buzzes on the table, reminding me that the New Year comes in in exactly two minutes. We usually wake our mom up to join us in counting down, but I don’t think she’ll be upset when she finds out why we didn’t. 

I grab my phone off the table and wipe the tears off my face. Then, I motion Nellie to scoot over. “Why don’t we make a new New Year’s Eve tradition?” 

She smiles, and it’s the first genuine smile I’ve seen from her in a long time. “What did you have in mind?” 

I grin. “Just trust me on this.” I fluff her pillows and busy myself with miscellaneous tasks for a few more seconds.

“Seriously, Rochelle,” she laughs, “What are you doing?” 

And when the clock strikes midnight that morning, I snap a selfie of me kissing Nellie’s cheek. She swats me away from her, but her delighted giggles betray her true feelings. I smile at her. “I’ll print this off tomorrow. For my vision board.” 

She throws her arms around me, whispering in my ear, “Happy new year, Rochelle.” 

I pat her back gingerly. “Happy new year, Nellie.”