Eva(my sister) has to be a genius, a poster child. She was class valedictorian and has collected so many awards and scholarships that everyone has lost count. By the time the letter saying she had scored 1550 on the SAT, I wasn’t even surprised. Over the years, people have asked my if I’m jealous of her. I always laugh and answer of course not. If you knew her as well as I do, you would laugh too. Her life is comical, but not something I’d like to live.
This would happen about once a week. The mess starts piling up in our room, and Eva begins to go mad. For some reason the chaos around her seems to leak into her brain until she is disorientated and upset. Soon she is yelling at me to clean up because she can’t do her Calculus with my clothes strewn about. When it gets too loud I clean, because I can’t live with that either. Despite her claims, I’m know why she hates clutter so much. It’s because she never looks where she walks, ever. My mother says this has always been the case. When encountered with a half finished puzzle on the floor, she tramples right through like a charging buffalo. Sometimes it’s funny to watch. However it wasn’t so humorous when my hamster was flattened by her big black boots or when my rinse water soaked into my half-finished watercolor painting, brutally wasting hours of work. Both times I cried. These are qualities I’ve learned to live with but I’d never want to posses them myself. Things would be awful being a klutz.
Her best qualities aren’t something to wish for either. Being so smart comes with a price. It means staying up late to finish work any sane person would have abandoned in favor of sweet dreams in a warm bed. It means stressing over grades and class rank. Awards aren’t as meaningful when it becomes normal. So many scholarships are useless when your college takes away financial aid because of them. Eva also cares a lot about other people. It is what I admire her most for. Every year she works as a counselor at a Christian camp in New Hampshire. It doesn’t pay well and taking care of seven hyper kids can be very exhausting. Yet each day she entertains them and each night prays for them. She has taught me a lot about compassion through her actions. Most people are too busy taking care of themselves to really worry about other people so much. If they cared as much as her, their hearts would always be broken without time to heal them.
Eva is my sister and my best friend. Now that she’s at college, people ask if I miss her, instead of asking if I’m jealous. I can’t be jealous because it is hard being so remarkable, and ridiculous being so clumsy. Right now I can only miss her smile and company.