My Favorite Sister

     If ever you’ve had the grave misfortune of reading “young adult fiction” or listening to Taylor Swift’s You Belong with Me, then you’d know that every guy is in love with the girl next door and he just doesn’t know it yet. He’ll try out other girls, tell her all about them, see it all end miserably, and come running back to the open arms of his dear friend only to realize that he wouldn’t mind staying in her arms a little longer.

     I never loved Ella Bashara, not like that, anyway. I guess part of it was that I was in kindergarten when we met, but also because I had always acted like her brother, and she treated me as though she was my sister. And technically speaking, she didn’t live next door: she lived four streets over from mine. Ella and I attended Norfolk Collegiate School together; Mrs. Sykes taught our kindergarten class. We dealt mostly with how to read and write paragraphs, but Mrs. Sykes also kept us up to date on the Washington Redskins’ season and Jeff Gordon’s latest races, something that neither of us really appreciated then but that I find amusing and even endearing now.

     At this point in time, my real sisters had yet to enter into the academic prestige of elementary school, and with one in preschool in Ghent and another at home, looking after them engaged my mother in a full-time job. Since we lived so close to the Basharas, my mom often deferred responsibility for my rides home from Collegiate to Ella’s mom, Sondra. I spent countless hours in their little green house, playing with Ella on the shag carpets of their wood-paneled family room or playing Wii in the cramped bedroom she shared with her younger sister Lucy.

     Sometimes we’d be too tired for games, so we’d lounge on the couch in their family room and watch the hottest Disney movies: High School Musical, Bolt, Enchanted, and any of the Buddies franchise movies. Her mom almost always had Danimals in some form—tube, bottle, or cup—and between the questionable yogurt and Goldfish crackers we were two well-fed and happy kids.

     We used to spend every Halloween with them; it didn’t feel like Halloween if it wasn’t at the Basharas’. Most years have blended together in a combination of tradition and habit, separated only by my costumes: clone trooper, vampire, the Green Lantern. Every year, our family would dress at home, take pictures, and adorably swindle, in the way that only young children can, candy from our neighbors before trick-or-treating actually began. We’d then drive over to the Basharas’ and join in the festivities.

     There is, however, one Halloween that will forever stick out from the rest. I remember I was dressed as a vampire, with slicked-back hair, white makeup, and a set of custom fang dentures my dad had made for me in the ortho lab at the Naval clinic. Tom Bashara, Ella’s dad, had moved his perpetually tarp-covered 1974 Triumph GT6 Coupe from the narrow cracked driveway, and in its place was the brand new firepit Ella had shown me the Thursday prior and a semicircle comprised of six camping chairs and a cooler. The garage door was open, the only time of year of which I knew it would or even could be opened, and inside were two folding tables covered in a dizzying array of food. Along the left wall of the garage, a small army of coolers sat in formation, ready for the night ahead. It was made expressly clear to us children that under no circumstances were we to touch the coolers in the garage; ours were inside.

     We knew immediately that something was up: our coolers had been moved inside, the adults had commandeered our cornhole game for the front yard, and due to some illness circulating at the time, bobbing for apples had been suspended. Stranger yet, an unexplained blue tarp sat on the grass next to the elevated wood patio. Ella and I had no idea what the tarp was for, and neither did any of the other twelve kids present. The adults wouldn’t tell us anything, instead following the custom of trying to stuff us full of Sondra’s chili to tucker us out before the trick-or-treating had even begun. So rather than consume the vile concoction, we opted to drag the two unlucky adults designated as the child wranglers and begin pillaging the neighbors’ candy supplies. It was a fairly standard operation: small candy from the front houses, non-chocolate candy from the middle houses, and massive, king-size chocolate bars from the houses in the back of the neighborhood, the ones that sat on the waterfront and had their own docks.

     When we returned to the Basharas’ house, instead of our usual hostage exchanges with the candy, we were herded into the backyard for a ‘special announcement.’ Tired and eager to tally up the loot, we begrudgingly complied and stood around the tarp. We were told by the adults that, because she was turning thirteen that winter, Ella’s cousin Bailey would not be allowed to trick-or-treat next year, per Virginia law. As a result, the moms wanted to offer her a ‘special treat’, something by which to remember her last trick-or-treating run.

     Sondra, Tom, and Bailey’s parents then proceeded to take the two massive bowls of candy usually reserved for trick-or-treaters to the Basharas’ house and dumped them on Bailey’s head, who had been placed strategically on the tarp, in the most glorious rain of sugary goodness I have ever seen. Ella’s eyes nearly jumped out of her skull at the sight, and before Bailey could begin to haul in her catch, the hungry mob of kids descended on the small mountain in front of them. Sondra and Bailey’s mom had to rush into the fray to extract the tarp, but by then, at least a quarter of her stash had been pilfered. Ella grabbed my wrist and led me on a mad dash into the house and up the stairs into her room, where we pooled what we could get away with and split the loot according to taste: it was an unwritten rule that I had dibs on sour candy, Kit-Kats, and Almond Joys, and for the privilege of dibs I paid a hefty sum in Hershey’s and anything with peanut butter.

     It’s memories like these that kept us in touch for so long. When I bought my first iPod touch when I was ten, we iMessaged each other constantly. After my family moved, iMessages turned into FaceTime calls, and when I got a phone, FaceTime calls turned into phone calls proper, followed by Instagram DM’s and Snapchats. We continued to reminisce, to poke fun, and to watch Disney movies (although that was more due to my having younger sisters than my actual preferences). We’ve had our ups and downs together, too, and there was a time when we just quit talking altogether; we were different people, living in different states, leading very different lives.

     My family and I had never visited Norfolk since we left, not until spring break of junior year. We had returned for college visits, and because our main objective was college visits and my dad had to stay behind and work, we decided against telling anyone we were in the state. My mom explained to my sisters that there were simply too many people to see in only two days of time within reasonable driving distance of Norfolk, and she informed them that she had made up her mind.

     When we passed through Norfolk, however, my mom got off the highway at our old exit. “To see the house,” she had said. We headed down Granby, but once we passed Oak Grove Road, I knew something was afoot. When we turned onto Regent Road, I knew immediately where we were going, and I mapped our route by heart: past the Lutheran church, take a right at the fork in the road, pass the big, whitewashed brick colonial at the turn, and arrive at the small green house with the covered Triumph GT6 Coupe in the driveway. When Sondra opened the door and embraced my mom with a sound that can only be described as uniquely feminine, I followed her in and saw behind her, leaning on the old easy chair with that same twinkle in her eye, my third and favorite sister.