Nothing

I don't have a favorite sister.

Ok, so sometimes I might. But every sister has been a favorite on multiple occasions throughout our span of sisterhood.

I have these moments with really the most unlikely sister to be favorite all the time. Not only is she one sister removed from me (meaning there is a sister in age difference between us) but she was cool and independent and gorgeous all growing up and I was a little greasy spazz ball. She was funny and charming and I was just wild and tactless. There was no obligation for her to be good to me like there was for my oldest sister (the sister just older than her), but she was good to me and we have had such hilarious times.

For all our differences, we were definitely the shnikes of the family.

One time my mom made a bunch of pies for a Relief Society activity and they were just sitting on the counter. Jamie loves crust, and it was the good homemade kind.

"I want some of that crust so bad." Longingly.

"Take some! Mom will never know." Daringly.

"I will if you will." Testingly.

"Ok. Let's do it. Relief Socieyt sisters don't like crust anyway." Acceptingly.

Relief Society sisters do like crust. Mom did know. Jame and I just laughed.

One of our favorite past times was a game we made up and played in the narrow hall of our upstairs connecting the bedrooms to the bathroom. It was called "Nothing." On one side of the hall was the craft closet and it was always just barfing up ribbon and materials and velcro strips and random little bells from some old sweater my mom dissembled to use as a different craft. I don't know how we originally ended up laying in the hall, but once there we discovered a tin of beads sitting on the floor next to us. I opened it up and poured some of the brightly colored bits of plastic onto the floor in front of us.

"Watch this." Jame picked up one of the beads and chucked it into the air, and it went soaring down the hall and across the open space to the living room stairs and into the bathroom where it flew through the dark and landed with a plop in the open toilet.

"Oh man! that was perfect!" I picked up a pink heart shaped bead and lobbed it through the air. Too hard. It bounced off the silver handle gleaming in the dark and onto the tile floor.

"Close!" She picked up another one, clear and glittery this time, and rubbed it through her fingers before chucking it. It fell short of the toilet and bounced across the floor, making a tapping noise as it went. Too short.

Bead after bead went flying through the air, red ones, round ones, green ones, big ones. Some landed short and bounced around the dark bathroom before settling in the corner next to the plunger or pile of towels. Others landed with a perfect splash right in the U-bend, and these were followed by joyous cheers from us in the hall. One that Jamie threw barely nicked the top of the doorway and fell to the floor, pattering on the ground and rolling to a stop against the edge of the shower. Too loud.

"Hey... girls? What are you doing up there?" My mom heard the beads bouncing and came to the bottom of the stairs. She couldn't see us becuase there was a corner between the hall and the staircase, but she knew exactly where we were.

Jamie and I looked at each other, the whites of our eyes sticking out in the dark of the hallway. Her eyes squinted up as we snickered because we knew we woiuld be in trouble if mom knew we had just chucked a pound of beads into our already failing sewer system.

Without missing a beat, both of us smiled and turned our heads toward mom's position.

This worked every time we played this game.

"Nothing!"