My best friend looks a lot like me. We are both five-foot-five, have red hair, and have pretty much the same build—mine from years of dance, hers from years of soccer and basketball. When we go out together, people often mistake us for twins. We’re not, though. Despite the fact that we share both parents, she’s actually two years younger than I. My best friend is my roommate of eight years, my sister, Julia.  

 

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One important thing about Julia: she’s perfect. She’s brilliant, talented, and knows what she wants. She is quite the triple threat.

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When I was in third grade and Julia was in first, the principal mentioned to my parents that they might want to consider her skipping a grade. He explained that she was reading on a level beyond most of her classmates and she (along with a few other super-smart kids in her grade) was already attending math classes with the third graders, a whole year above. It would make sense, he said, for her just to skip the grade entirely. My parents, especially my mom, were vehemently against it. Julia did not need to skip a grade, they said. She could get special, advanced books from the librarian and would continue going up a grade for math. Their reasoning behind Julia staying with kids her own age became a family dinner conversation topic one night. I understood all of their points, and for the most part agreed, but one thing remained unclear.

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“Why didn’t Principal Galluzzo ask me to skip a grade?” I whined. “I go up a year for math, too, and I read longer chapter books than all the kids in my class.”

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My mom just smiled. “Do you want to skip a grade?”

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“Well, no, but…” I started.

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She interrupted me. “Good. Then it’s settled. Neither of you are skipping any grades.”

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At our elementary school, we could start playing a string instrument in second grade. I chose violin, not because I liked it more than any of the other choices, but because it was the smallest and therefore easiest to carry. Two years later, Julia chose the viola. Everything was going well—we would practice our different weekly assignments at home together and sit next to each other each day on the bus, instrument cases between our knees—until one afternoon Julia waltzed right into my orchestra class.

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“What are you doing here?” I hissed between closed teeth as she passed my spot at number two violin chair, heading toward the viola section. She just shrugged, her classic “Julia look” plastered on her face, the sort of “I don’t know, it just kinda happened!” half smile, coupled with a single raised eyebrow. She has mastered it over the years. Turns out, Julia was too talented for not only her orchestra, but also that of the grade above her. She would be practicing with the fourth graders for the rest of the year. In a couple months, I quit the violin. I never really liked it to begin with, but I especially hated it after I had been shown up by my baby sister.

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About a year after the violin vs. viola fiasco, I decided to try out for my town’s travel soccer team. You’re supposed to try out for the team in third grade, but I just hadn’t been up for it. Now, two years later, I was in fifth grade and I felt ready. After a strenuous tryout, I did not make the A team. I made the B team. Ever the perfectionist, I decided that this was just not good enough. I did what I felt needed to be done and quit soccer all together. Julia tried out for her team that year at the proper time, third grade. She was put on the A team and I tried to not be annoyed.

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This past year (her senior year in high school, my sophomore year in college) was the time for Julia to apply to colleges. Her decision to try out for travel soccer in the third grade paid off; over the years, she has become quite the soccer superstar. And colleges noticed. One college, in particular: Yale. The soccer coach wanted Julia to play for them, but, in classic Julia fashion, she stuck up her nose and said “no thanks.” She wanted to get in somewhere for her own merit and mind, as opposed to her foot skills. When my mom told me that Julia had turned down Yale University—Julia’s way too humble to tell me herself—I called her immediately and told her that she was the craziest person that I had ever met. She replied that she just wasn’t feeling the “super competitive and just plain overrated Ivy League Life” (her words, not mine). I sat there on my dorm room bed, phone pressed against my cheek, listening to the eerie technological buzz for a solid minute before I managed to utter out an “okay, Julia, you do what you want.”

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Yale had been my dream school. If I weren’t so insanely happy here at Michigan, I’d probably have had a few more choice words to share with her. As it was, though, all I could do was be proud. If there’s one thing Julia does not take lightly, it’s the process of making a decision. Julia has always known what she wants. Who am I to stand in her way?

 

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From when I was ten all the way until two years ago, when I left for school, Julia and I shared a room. Before that, in the old house, we had the luxury of separate rooms. Yet every morning I would wake up to find her in the twin bed beside me. It made her feel safe. I didn’t mind—I wouldn’t admit it at the time—but it made me feel safe, too.

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Every so often, like any best friends, Julia and I will fight. Most of the time, it’s about really dumb stuff, like who left the toilet paper roll empty or if either of us had borrowed an item of clothing without permission (I’ll admit, I am often the culprit for both). We will ice each other out for the entire day, until it is time for bed. Back in the old house, Julia would meekly come crawling into my room and climb into the extra twin bed.

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“Say goodnight?” I would say.

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“Infinity oodles from Julia,” came the soft response from across the room.

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“Infinity oodles from Larkin. Good night, Julsie, love you.”

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“Good night, love you Larkin.”

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Our reasoning for starting our goodnight ritual was pretty morbid, actually. I had just finished a fictional book about young people who died and in the after life they were able to go into a room where a huge book of everyone’s last words was laid out. They were able to see their final words imprinted among everyone else’s. It gave them a sense of closure; it was their imprint on the history of death. I told Julia about it during one of our nightly talks and it really tickled her fancy. She reached out and turned on the light, a weird smile across her face. “We need our own precautionary last words, Larkin,” Julia had said to me. “What if we die in our sleep? I want you to be able to tell everyone exactly what last came out of my mouth.” I agreed wholeheartedly and we came up with our nightly script. The oodles part came from my dad. He would always say to us—before we got old and embarrassed by classic dad behavior—that he loved us oodles and oodles. We would ask how many oodles and he would say “enough oodles to make it all the way to the moon and back.”

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In the new house, fighting is more complicated. We’ll hash it out and then be stuck with each other in an eighteen-by-twenty box, both too stubborn to be the one to leave the other in peace. Even now, though, when I’m home for the summer and we’re going through one of our rough patches, as soon as I reach over and turn off the light, all will be forgiven for the twenty seconds it takes to whisper our good nights.

 

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Another important thing about Julia: she is so perfect that she is actually totally and completely imperfect.

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Over the years, Julia has found herself a really amazing, supportive group of friends. They’re considered the “popular, but nice” girls of her grade. It’s the friend group that any smart girl would be envious of and any decent boy would want to date—Julia and her friends are beautiful, smart, and charming. Even with this seemingly perfect group of girls, Julia struggles. Julia has insanely high standards for people. She expects them all to have the same moral compass she does, and because of this she often finds herself feeling disappointed and lonely. Julia has had one boyfriend and he lasted just long enough for her to figure out that she was too good for him—one month, to be exact—and only one girl has lasted with her all the way from elementary school to now.

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“Why would they do that,” she’ll ask me, after a friend forgot to include her in some sort of social event, or a guy made a rude comment about her butt in public, or even if Mom was particularly getting on her nerves.

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“I don’t know,” or “probably because they suck,” I’ll normally say, because, with Julia, answers are hard. She isn’t usually looking for an answer, more just a confirmation that she is right.

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Julia always has to be right. While this (somewhat obscene) need to be right has been a big help in making her one of the most brilliant, most stubborn, most tactful women—scratch that, people—that I know, it has also lead to many, many unnecessary conflicts. Julia fights and Julia wins. I fight and I apologize. It’s why we’re so compatible. But whenever I’m feeling extra testy about a subject we disagree on—whether that be something as dumb as if it would look good if I wore this shirt with those shorts or something as serious as whether or not the death penalty is ethical—and I attempt to stand my ground, “Lawyer Julia” comes out.

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“Larkin,” she’ll say. “You sound like an uneducated idiot right now. Honestly, I don’t understand how you could possibly think [insert here whatever we happened to be arguing about].”

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“Uh-oh!” My mom will call from across the room, “Careful Lark, here comes Lawyer Julia!”

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After the initial “uneducated idiot speech”, I’ll usually last about five more minutes, give or take, before I end up resorting to yelling to get my point across. Julia never yells. She will stay cool as a cucumber, taking pleasure in how riled up she can make me. I’ll stomp away, as frustrated as ever, and she’ll smugly go back to whatever she was doing before I had stupidly decided to take on Lawyer Julia.

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Julia is incredibly straightforward when it comes to just about everything. If I come downstairs wearing no makeup, ready to take her to CVS, she will say to me, “You’re ready to go? No makeup, really? Okay, you do you,” and I will beeline back up to the bathroom, grabbing the closest mascara I see. One time I asked her to quickly glance over a paper that was due the next day. It was eleven o’clock, I was exhausted, and I had already had a really bad day. About two sentences into my introduction, she looked up at me, face aghast, and said, “Larkin, this makes absolutely no sense. You were seriously going to turn this in?” and I sort of lost it.

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“Julia!” I hissed (I would have yelled but, as aforementioned, it was eleven o’clock and Mom usually goes to bed around nine-thirty). “Sometimes the way you say things really isn’t cool. I’ve had a terrible day and you’re being a bitch.”

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She shrugged and handed back my paper. “Whatever. Not my fault if you get a bad grade, then.”

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We still said our goodnights, oodles and all, but I went to bed seething. I ended up getting a B on that damn paper, one of my lowest grades in that class all year. Julia had been right, per usual. Perfect.

 

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Despite all of her perfections, and the imperfections that those perfections entail, Julia is amazing. I’ve never had a problem admitting that she is the hardest worker that I know. Her schedule makes mine look like that of a 65-year-old retired grandmother. Her senior spring, the time that you’re supposed to get into college and totally slack off, has been one of the most hectic times of her life. Julia plays number one doubles on her high school’s varsity tennis team and just recently came in second in states. After tennis practice, which is every day right after school, she goes home, has a quick snack, and is off to soccer practice. Not just any soccer practice, but soccer practice for the top premier team in Connecticut. Then she comes home and spends around four hours doing her homework for her five AP classes (I might add here that she has an A in every one of them) and usually goes to bed around 1AM. She has to get up around six to make it to either her National Honors Society or Spanish Honors Society or Society for Talented Musicians meetings, all of which meet once every two weeks before school starts. A night with five-to-six hours of sleep is plenty, obviously, for her to function. Of course, I don’t know any of this from Julia, herself. She would never complain about being overworked, having too full of a schedule. It’s the life she has chosen, the life that she loves. Instead, I hear about it from my mom, who has to drive Julia to her soccer practice (40 minutes away) when she is too tired to keep her eyes open on the highway.

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I know that Julia respects me, too, even though she won’t always readily admit it. She’s come to every single play and dance recital I have ever been in—even though, for the majority, she was probably dragged along by my parents, this is still quite the feat. When I was in my first professional production in seventh grade, Julia gaped at the check that I received at the end of the show’s run. “Wow,” she said, as we both sat in my bed, staring at the numbers, “You’re like, professional.” I couldn’t help but feel as though I had finally one-upped her. She had two shelves full of trophies from soccer and basketball and swimming and tennis, but she had never been paid for doing something she loved. In her own way, she acknowledged my visual art skills as well. When we were both in high school and she had a project that required some sort of poster or visual representation, I would find a bag of watermelon sourpatch—my favorite—on my bed. I always helped her out because, if for no other reason, it feels amazing to be needed by someone who rarely admits to needing anything.

 

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Since I quit soccer in fifth grade, Julia and I have had our own worlds. I have the arts and writing and dance and theater. She has soccer and basketball and math and science. We prefer to use different muscles—all the way from our toes to our brains. I think that my parents probably had something to do with our separate extracurricular activities. Despite my dad’s love for sports, I don’t remember him saying anything to convince me otherwise when I decided that soccer just wasn’t my thing. And my mom is a writing teacher, but she always spent just as much time helping me with my pre-algebra homework as she did with Julia and her sentence structure worksheets. I think my parents always knew that it would be this separation that would allow Julia and me, two of the most competitive people that I know, to be best friends.

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In February, Julia found out that she had been accepted into the Michigan Honor’s College. I was ecstatic. Nine years ago, when our worlds were still colliding and I was struggling with loving Julia while being sickeningly jealous of her at the same time, I would not have been happy about the idea of us being together for another four years. Not that I was thinking about college at all when I was nine-years-old, but I am positive that I would have told anyone who had asked that I wanted to be as far away as possible from my perfect younger sister and her stupid viola.

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But by the time I had nearly completed my sophomore year of college and she was finishing up her senior year of high school, we had our own separate paths. She still has plenty for me to be jealous of, but we’re both coming into our own and it’s a much healthier, more admiration-based jealousy. Being with Julia no longer makes me feel inept; I simply am happy to be in the presence of an amazing person. Julia wants to go into the sciences, probably pre-med, maybe pre-law. Her future plans are still somewhat unclear, as they should be, but she’s talked about being a physical therapist for athletes, or potentially a sports lawyer. I, on the other hand, am majoring in art and minoring in writing. We couldn’t be much more different. We’re 800 miles away from each other, living our own, separate lives, and I miss my best friend more than I ever thought I would. I miss going to her tennis matches and soccer games, embarrassing her as I would call out “Go Julia! Yeah, that’s my sister!” from the sidelines. “Shut up, Larkin,” she would hiss at me in between points. I miss our silent breakfasts, the only noise the constant crunching of our preferred cereals. I miss saying goodnight and waking up to her obnoxiously loud alarm every morning.

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When I found out that she had nixed Yale and was instead deciding between University of Michigan and UVA, there was no doubt in my mind that I wanted her to join me here.

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She came and visited and we had a fantastic time. It was a hard decision for her, as important ones often are, and she ended up committing to UVA. I know it’s where she’ll best fit in and I can’t wait to visit. No matter how many times she forgets to change the toilet paper roll or tells me that my essay needs a lot of work, Julia is my person. I was lucky enough to meet my best friend when I was two years old.