My sister, Victoria, has always been the star of the family. Top of her class since the day she was born. The President of half the clubs at our high school, founding member of the other half. Come graduation, the administration had to ask her to step down as class President so that someone else would have a chance to give a speech. She agreed with all the grace and charm that was expected of her and, a year older than me, left a towering shadow for me to shine under.

I replicated her high school career perfectly--better in some aspects. The only thing Victoria did that I did not manage was to get caught kissing Julian Banksy, or anyone for that matter. When she brought the quarterback home for dinner, I couldn't see why she liked him. He had brutish shoulders and a square chin tickled by peach fuzz. He laughed too loud spoke to quietly, and called her "Vicky," something she always hated before and since. Julian was my age and in my french class. He couldn't even pronounce his numbers right. Mom liked him, I could tell, but Victoria and I weren't stirred.

I think the only reason she liked him was because she was supposed to. He completed her Disney-channel-villain life. She had the valedictorian spot, the would-have-been class Presidency, captain of the cheerleaders, equestrian dream jockey, and the quarterback boyfriend to make her popularity unimpeachable. The lower echelon of high school girls, the nerds and the pariahs, the low ranking sluts, hated her as much as they hated me. We were an empire of cool, a duo of irrefutable high school dominance, mistresses of culture, class, and education. But the truth is: I never had much interest in boys.

I only ever cared about my best friend, Amy Routhier, who let me braid her wonderful black hair after school.

I At Victoria's graduation party, the whole neighborhood turned up, the whole family. But when I graduated with a 4.0, valedictorian, wrote a speech that was later published for its originality, and there was no one at my party but my parents and my three best friends. And all of them could only talk about Victoria who had just returned from her first year at Harvard studying medicine. That was when I realized that it didn't matter how smart I was or how pretty or what I did. So long as Victoria did it before me none of my accomplishments mattered.
My parents rolled their eyes when I was accepted to Harvard med school but my sister squealed like a sorority sister in shared or feigned excitement. She had always seemed, at least on the outside, to value our sisterhood. When I saw her room at school for the first time, she had a picture of us in a heart shaped frame that proclaimed "sisters for life" in sickening sequins: two nearly identical blondes smiling perfectly at the camera. I could never tell, not then, if my sister resented me for following her the way I did or if she actually felt the friendship with me that she professed to the world. Victoria is a practiced woman, a performance of correct social graces. Though she detested theater, she could have been the greatest actor of them all. Or perhaps she was genuine and sweet to everyone because she is genuinely sweet.

I found that living at school, far away from our parents, was easier than I had imagined. For the first year, I hardly saw my sister. I made my own friends. I scored my own grades. I took an interest in English literature and the French language as a supplement to pre-med. I thought, for once, that I had distanced myself from my sister. I even met a girl.

Alex was short haired and butch--she liked to be described that way. She wore beaters and baggy ripped jeans. She never wore underwear. She never wore makeup. I'd never met a lesbian before.

For her rough outlook on life and what I took to be her immature tendency towards boyishness, she was intelligent, bright, aware. She was a student of English and philosophy but had enough sense to pursue biology instead. She wrote poems about rocks and stones and cicadas, all the things that I missed. She taught me about rebellion and rock music, modern art and what it meant to be alive.

She took me back to her dorm room one evening to change her shirt. Her breasts tumbled out of their restraints perfect and shapely. I was sitting on her bed, watching her do it. They were small, crested by tight brown nipples. I tried not to stare.

"I've never been with a boy," I said then. Something possessed me to say it. I wanted to make conversation to break the awkwardness of seeing her body. I don't know why I thought confession would make it better.

She thought that I wanted to be with a boy then, she promised to help me. She called me her straight friend after that.

Eventually, she did help me meet a boy. He looked like Julian Banksy with his broad shoulders and tight muscled arms. She said she knew I would like him. I let him take me to his dorm. Alex watched me go with him from the quad, smiling, waving, and congratulating herself. I went because it made her happy.

When the boy closed the doors his hands came on me. He took off my clothes and showed me his penis. I could see myself in his mirror, my blonde locks covering the ends of my nipples. He brushed the hair away and put his mouth on them. I kept looking at myself in his mirror, looking at how close my bare thighs were to his penis. His penis was long and curved upwards, thick and hairy. He told me to suck on it.

I did. It tasted like sweat and salt. The hair tasted like oily string. When he was inside of me it felt like he was trying to push me off the bed.

When he was finished he told me I could stay the night. He told me I had to meet his friends. I wasn't sure what that meant. Was I supposed to see their penises too? I didn't ever want to see another one again. I didn't want to fuck him again. So I left.

Then, Alex wanted me to meet her new girlfriend for lunch.

"Bring your new boyfriend," she said.

I told her it didn't work out.

At lunch, I had the tavern burger. It was the same thing Alex ordered while we waited for her girlfriend. When she arrived, she was blonde and beautiful and looked a lot like me.

"This is Victoria," said Alex, introducing me to my own sister.

When the confusion had cleared away and our food had arrived, I was, for the first time, angry with my sister. I knew it wasn't her fault for getting there before me, I knew it probably wasn't her fault that we both turned out the same way. But in this, I was first. I knew that I had no interest in men since high school, though, in reflection I didn't realize this fully until we had lunch with Alex.

By then, I don't think Victoria had realized that our lives were a competition of firsts. But to me, it was a race of who would be the first to come out to our parents. And of course, whether she knew it or not, Victoria won.

She called Mom up from her dorm room one night with Alex and I waiting in the room for moral support.

"Mom, I need to tell you something and there is someone for you to meet."

That was the first time I ever held Alex's hand. She knew she would be put on the phone and she told me she needed the support of her "straight best friend" to get her through it.

"Yes, it's someone I'm dating."

I could hear Alex holding her breath, wondering if Victoria would go through with it.

"Mom, I'm gay," Victoria said and Alex let out her breath and squeezed my hand. She was happy. They were happy.

I knew then that I could never tell my parents about me or my jealousy would be exposed. I knew that I had to show myself for who I was to my sister, to my parents, and to Alex, but I couldn't do it the way my sister did. I could think of only one way to accomplish these goals, only one way to finally set myself apart from my sister, only one way to exact my revenge--and I realized that it was revenge, revenge for every year that I had sulked in Victoria's shadow, every moment of my existence that wasn't in my sister's limelight.

I would have it all. I would have Alex.

So I waited. I waited all through my second semester. I waited all summer when Alex came to our home to meet our parents and I had to pretend that I barely knew her, I waited until Victoria asked me to be her roommate. I waited until Alex had nearly moved in with us. But all the while, I was their friend. I whispered fears in their ears. I told them that the other might be straight. I told them I'd seen the other with some boy. A straight girl in a lesbian home has power beyond imagination, but the power of a secret lesbian in a lesbian home is unfathomable. I had the power to dissent the ranks, to question the sexual order of things.

I took Alex to lunch. I rekindled our friendship. I became the straight friend she needed in the face of distrust at home. I was the voice of reason and the face of madness. I drove them to fight, to break up, to make love, and to sleep. But when finally, the fighting and resolution had strained that tortured relationship to the brink of my emotional limits, Alex finally cracked.

One night, after I had engineered a fight over Nathan Combs, jock and intellect, a boy I respected, Alex came to my room to find her solace. Only this time, I intended to give her none. Tonight was the night I had been waiting for: the night that I would tell her who she should be with.

She came in flannel pajamas and a baggy gray T-shirt, the clothes that a girl might have borrowed from her boyfriend--a point that I had slipped into Victoria's head long ago. Vicky was always intent on her appearance. Whatever protruded her breasts and successfully cascaded her blonde curls would do--a style that opposed that of Alex's, which I often pointed out.

"What is it?" I said sympathetically, pretending that I couldn't hear them through the walls.

"Your sister," Alex said, collapsing on my bed as she had done many times before. "She's just so...so..."

"So stubborn?" I prompted. This was the theme I had run against my sweet sister. She was stubborn and status quo. She liked pop music and name brands. She liked whatever was most popular and easiest to like. And she was resistant to change on any level. The implication was that she was a republican and a straight girl. But the symptoms, the need to party and refusal to wholly convert to the gay rights cause, were the selling points for Alex, the things she liked least about my sister, the things I exaggerated.

"Yes," said Alex, letting out a long breath.

I made it my code to never ask what they had been arguing about. Like a farmer afraid to know what seeds had grown, I was satisfied to collect the fruit of what had survived. And I made sure that I opposed everything my sister did without ever knowing what it was.

"Come here," I said, putting aside my books and opening my arms to her.

I have held my best friend before but never like this. There was an urgency to our embrace, a need for closeness on my part and for comfort on hers. It translated into some kind of desire.

Her breath was hot and thick with tears. Her thin shoulders heaved with the heaviness of her breathing. Her head rested on my breasts.

"Why do you stay with her?" I said, carefully.

"I don't know."

I held her closer as if trying to pull her away from my sister.

"I would still be here for you, you know. Even if she is my sister."

"I know."

It's going to happen. I could feel my pussy growing wet at the thought. I needed this. I needed to take this from Victoria.

And then she said it: my way in.

"You're prettier than her. Did you know that?"

"You really think so?" I said, strategically moving my hands closer to her hips.

"And you're nicer. She can be a bitch sometimes."

"She's always been like that."

"Sometimes," she said, "I wish you were the gay one."

"Sometimes," I said. "I think I might be."

Alex seemed to freeze in my arms and I wondered if I went too far too soon. Hours ticked by and she didn't say anything. All my hard work hanging on a thread.

Finally, she said: "What are you saying?"

"You should be with me, Alex."

Her read rotated to me, her face was red from crying but she was beautiful. I kissed her. For the first time, I kissed my best friend.

Her tongue was soft, softer than I had imagined. Her lips were wonderfully full, sweeter than the thin lips of the boys I had experimented with. It was right. Every minute of my waking life, every moment of doubt that led to this was wiped away by her tongue as it passed between my lips.

I let my hand follow her brow, push her short dark locks from over her eyes. She was motionless next to me, her tongue still probing my mouth uncertainly. She stopped.

"Wait," she said.

I held my breath. I held everything. My arms stopped, my mouth stopped. My eyes stayed shut.

"Are you sure about this?"

I started again. My hands traced her curves. She had curves like I couldn't believe for such a butch lesbian like her.

"Alex, I've been waiting for this since I met you."

This time, she kissed me. She threw one leg over my lap and kissed me with everything she had. She was a great kisser. She buried her face in my neck and bit me. She sucked on my neck and kissed me. I felt rushes of tingly excitement through my heart.

I pulled off Alex's shirt. She never wore a bra and her breasts were a perfect handful in the dazzling florescence of my room. I buried my tongue in the hollow of her neck and bit and kissed and sucked my way across her chest, drawing hickies and sharp breaths out of her with every motion. My tongue carefully found her nipple. I sucked on it gently, my head falling into her chest and her mouth breathing hard into my ear.

I can't even remember how long I had been waiting for this. My hand snaked down her stomach and slipped into her pants. She pushed me away, almost roughly, and threw her pants onto the ground beside us before thrower herself back on top of me. My hand dropped into her panties now, my first two fingers finding the wet sliver between her legs. Feeling her for the first time was like nothing I had ever experienced.

I could feel her growing hot underneath me as my fingers worked in her. Her hips writhed with sexual energy and her breasts began to heave. She lifted my shirt over my head and snapped off my pink bra in one swift motion,

"Yours are bigger than Victoria's," she said, breathless, and put her lips around my nipple.

When she touched me, it was a sensation I had never felt before. Without even going into my pants, she made me feel more wonderful than that boy's dick ever had. It's an inexplicable feeling finding out who you really are.

Suddenly we were both naked and her hips were pressed around my neck and her pussy was flooding my mouth. She tasted like citrus. Meanwhile, I could feel her tongue digging into me and I was breathing harder and harder as tingling strings of nervous energy sprung up and down my spine. I remembered all the times I had tried to do this to myself and been unsuccessful. I remembered when that boy had gone down on me and it felt like he was trying to eat me. This felt like I was being massaged from the inside out.

She arched her back, my mouth filled with her juices, and she screamed in pleasure. Orgasms rippled through me. She spun around and kissed me so that I could taste myself in her mouth.

"You taste better than your sister, too," Alex said into my ear. "Was it good for you?"

She kissed me, one hand still probing my pussy.

"Yes," I said, thinking that I had finally found something I truly loved, something I was better at than my sister, something that was all my own.

"I can't stop touching you," Alex said and her head slid down my torso to rest between my legs.