When it comes to your sister, opposites attract

I have this little sister.

Her name is Yvonne and she is 16-years-old, although you would… I have this little sister.

Her name is Yvonne and she is 16-years-old, although you would never know it by looking at her – she carries herself like a 25-year-old. (Sometimes).

If you asked her who her best friend is, she would name two individuals. Both of these girls are in her grade and have gone to school with her for the past five years. They know almost everything about each other, they do almost everything together and they love each other very, very much.

Similarly, if you asked me who my best friend is, I would also name two individuals that I used to go to school with (and then along came college and alas, we diverged). One I’ve known since I was a toddler, the other since ninth grade. They define me in a huge way and they are the first people I go to for advice, encouragement, reproach and, of course, love.

Yet the paradigm is this: My sister is the person I am closest to in the whole wide world.

Not because she’s the only person who has witnessed me eating a million potato chips in a row while watching reruns of Friends until 3 a.m. – and not only because the time (fine, times) that happened, she was scarfing them right down with me.

Not because she’s younger and she looks up to me or anything – I have far more to learn from her in terms of boys, fashion, or any of that grown-up stuff. Not because we both have a closet love for Meg Ryan movies, or because she always knows exactly why I truly love but also occasionally am forced to groan at our parents. I am close to my sister for two reasons: firstly, she’s hilarious. Secondly, opposites attract.

I’m not sure how to truly explain our differences, but I can provide some examples.

In short, she has a small group consisting of several loyal friends; I have my best friends, maybe one or two other very close ones, and mostly lots of good ones from all over the place. She is careful, calm and deliberate in her actions; I regularly rush into things, get ahead of myself, and spill food on my clothes. She prefers to stick close to home; when I was trying to decide where to go to college, a friend of our family joked that I probably drew a large circle around our town on a map and refused to stay inside of it. I read a lot of Tom Wolfe; she reads Mitch Albom. If I don’t know anyone in a situation, I don’t mind introducing myself to a stranger. She’s perfectly confident just observing the group. And so on and so forth.

And this is where that parallel sense of humor that only siblings share really comes in handy: We have always been able to connect by simply laughing our faces off. It’s the one thing we could always count on, even when our personalities clashed to the point of screaming matches.

Now that we’re older, we have a deep sense of respect for each other and a mutual desire to learn from each other’s ways. I could not be more grateful for that.

But here is an anecdote from my last night home this year before leaving for college that reflects our relationship very well: We are both sitting in the kitchen, long after my parents have gone to bed, half-jokingly arguing about the fact that I was giving up my first full weekend at school with my friends in order to fly home because I was away all summer, and she had decided to go to the beach with her girls.

I claimed that she was choosing them over me. She replied that she told me she was going to the beach before I told her I would be home. I said, “But I was about to tell you!”

She didn’t miss a beat. “Carolyn, if somebody walks into the store and tells the clerk he was about to buy the million-dollar lottery ticket yesterday, he does not get the money!”

We convulsed into fits of giggles. Yeah