Being a younger sibling can really suck.
You’re lucky if anyone ever made you a baby album and if somebody was there to record your first steps. People assume that you already learned how to walk or read or get your driver’s license and playing catch-up can become part of your daily routine, if not your whole personality. You’re smaller and less experienced in the world than your older brothers or sisters through no fault of your own. How is anyone supposed to know what they don’t know? Alright, maybe it wasn’t all bad in this story.
Chrissy would begrudgingly admit that there were a few upsides to not being as micromanaged as her older sister, Lucy, but they were few and far between. And Lucy had not exactly been a one-woman welcoming committee into the family when Chrissy was born. She’d spent the first three years of her life quite content as an only child. Her parents were a bit on the older side when she was conceived, so they happily gave in to the majority of her requests. When the adults in her life started asking her if she was excited to be a “big sister,” Lucy’s stomach would tighten and her face would twist into an exquisite frown. She was not excited. One could say that all this meant that Chrissy came into the Walker family with a minor hindrance.
She would need to develop some skills and coping mechanisms to get through her second-class status. But what was she supposed to do? By the time she was fully aware of her predicament, at around four years old, it was not like she could move out or spread a nasty rumor about her sister throughout the neighborhood (yeah, ok, she tried both.) She needed some muscle. She needed an ally. She needed help. And that came in an unexpected form.
Chrissy’s steadfast companion and underling, happy to do her violent bidding, was the last member of the household whom you would expect. It was Smoky Toes, her fluffy orange cat.
Smokey Toes came into the Walker family as unexpectedly as their second-born child. He was a tiny, shrieking, stray kitten who’d gotten himself tangled in Mrs. Walker’s rose bushes. It would turn out that this type of cat-astrophe (sorry, we had to,) was not an anomaly for Smoky Toes. On the first night of his official adoption, he ran across the stove as Mr. Walker was stirring his “famous” bolognese and managed to light his paws on fire. He was fine, he got his name, and he still had eight lives remaining.
Now, Chrissy doesn’t remember when she first started confiding in Smoky Toes. But it became a nightly ritual. One of her parents would argue with her about brushing her teeth, read her a bedtime story, turn out the lights, and then Chrissy would wait patiently. She’d hear her sister arguing for one more episode of something or other on Nickelodeon, listen to the pots and pans being washed and put away from dinner, and then, like clockwork, her creaky door would open a few inches, pale light extending a streak across her worn carpet, and Smoky Toes would (almost) silently pop himself onto her My Little Pony Bedspread. He’d press his paws gently into her leg, kneading back and forth until she heard the steady motor of his purr. Then he’d flop himself down, cock his head, and wait for the stories. And Chrissy had them.
She’d tell Smoky Toes about the butterfly she found in the garden, the speed she managed to accumulate on her new scooter, and the gossip at Mrs. Henley’s daycare. She’d whisper what she had for lunch and how she’d traded her carrot sticks for Benjamin’s fruit snacks by telling him that carrots helped you see through walls. She’d go deep into the day of who took who’s Lincoln Logs, who was going to see their grandparents in Florida, and how she’d only pretended to brush her teeth that night. Smoky Toes seemed to listen. His eyes would stay open until Chrissy’s had closed, her soft snoring indicating her deep sleep after her thorough talk therapy session. And Chrissy never thought anything of it. But, she also didn’t tell anyone. She may have only been four years old but she could imagine the social stigma associated with letting people know that you talked to your cat. And, as her conversations with her feline sibling grew deeper and deeper (albeit, one-sided, this is not a story about a talking cat,) her relationship with her human sibling grew worse.
Lucy was now eight years old but could not seem to handle the idea of sharing her space in the world (or, at least the townhouse,) with her younger sister. She would tease Chrissy mercilessly. It didn’t matter the time, place, or subject. She’d tell her that she was a mistake (“A surprise!” Mrs. Walker would interject.) She’d swear that aliens had abducted poor Chrissy in the middle of the night and that she wasn’t real herself. She’d steal her stuffed turtle, hiding Shellington in the closet where Chrissy would wail for hours until someone was able to locate the fuzzy Terrapin. Lucy would put salt on her sister’s ice cream and sugar on her mashed potatoes.
She’d convince her sibling that her nose had been stolen during her nap. She’d swear that it would rain on the sunniest days, poor Chrissy’s feet, sweat puddling in her galoshes by the afternoon, and give her a hard time for wearing a raincoat when the sky was dark and rumbling, little Chrissy’s yellow dress getting soaked through on the way home from preschool. That day, with tears streaming down her sunburned face, Smoky Toes bolted across the street to her side, jumping out of the way as a Honda Civic screeched into the opposite lane, barely missing our feline friend. That’s ok. He still had seven lives left.
Mr and Mrs. Walker told themselves that the household dynamic was simply sisters being sisters, and as the couple was incredibly busy with their small business, a moving company located right in downtown Charlotte, there wasn’t a ton of free time for them to engage with their children and parse out their issues.
“Be NICE to your sister!!” was a refrain screamed often in the Walker household, from one room to the next. Mrs. Walker would be on the phone, handling logistics, while Mr. Walker was hunched over spreadsheets on the kitchen table. So no responsible adult could see that Lucy had given Chrissy bangs - against her will - or that the bangs were in the back of her head. They couldn’t see their younger daughter struggling to get out of a wrestling move that their older daughter had unfortunately learned and mastered in her PE class. They didn’t hear the taunts or the insults or the lies taking place in the attic-turned-playroom and thus were mostly unaware of the rather mean bullying taking place under their supposedly happy roof.
Throughout the summer, leading up to Chrissy’s first year of elementary school, Mrs. Kristofferson’s kindergarten class, to be specific, was an especially difficult time for her in the Walker household. Lucy was relentless. Maybe it’s because she was having a hard time making friends or that her personality was a little bit off or some real undiagnosed ADHD, but all of those explanations were unavailable to our little heroine and her family. Her parents were especially busy as Charlotte was experiencing an unprecedented housing boom and movers were in high demand. So Chrissy was left to her own devices. Which, to be honest, weren’t many.
The closer the two Walker girls got to the first day of school, the more the tension between them rose and the intensity of Lucy’s bullying grew. Chrissy couldn’t find Shellington anywhere. Her mac and cheese tasted sour. Her favorite pants had been cut to only have one leg. It was getting untenable.
Chrissy was tough. She soldiered on. She asked for playdates at their neighbor’s house even though Mac was an entire year younger than her and sometimes still wet his jeans. His mom fussed over her since she didn’t have a daughter of her own and they had an excellent jungle gym in their backyard. All of this negotiating made this tough troubleshooter of a girl very, very tired.
The night before the first day of school was not exactly a peaceful one in the Walker household. Lucy was losing her mind. She hated, hated the haircut that Ellen at Hair She Goes gave her, and threw her purple paddle brush at the wall with such force that it left a dent in the wallpaper. She was mad about it being too hot to wear her new corduroys and livid that all of her friends were in the other class. She was a small, hot mess. And it was the 90s. No one really knew how to deal with any of it. Especially Lucy. So, she did what she knew best. She took it out on her younger sister Chrissy.
Chrissy was used to it. It had been a damn long summer filled with this kind of behavior. But that night, the weight finally got to our soon-to-be kindergartener. And she did something that she’d never done before. That night, in bed, as the dishes clanked loudly in the sink, the muffled cries from Lucy’s room intermingled with the commentary from Mr. Walker’s baseball game on the small kitchen TV, Chrissy waited for Smoky Toes to push open her door, walk silently through the room, and knead his paws into contentment on her bed. And that’s when, in the quietest voice that Chrissy could muster, she told her feline sibling all about Lucy. Smoky Toes understood. That week, he’d narrowly escaped certain death by running faster than a raccoon who’d wandered into the neighborhood. It was ok, he still had six lives left.
Now, Chrissy didn’t leave out a single detail. She described the bullying, the tormenting, and bringing Shelly into the whole mess. She talked and cried and talked more. And Smoky Toes seemed to listen. He nodded and pawed and purred and stopped purring during the part about Lucy taking a pair of scissors to the sunflower-print bellbottoms. He licked Chrissy's hand and moved closer when her words brought her to tears. If either one of them had been able to tell time - or, ok, even owned a clock, they would have known that this exhaustive confession took almost two hours. But it was nighttime with secrets and best friends and in those moments, time is not a real thing.
That night, utterly depleted of energy, Chrissy fell into a deep but dreamless sleep. She was more than excited about kindergarten - she had plans for her educational odyssey - really, really big plans. First up, she was going to learn how to read. This way, Lucy could no longer trick her about what signs said or what was listed on the side of the cereal box. She would be able to take books out from the library, absorb all of their knowledge, and override any facts or ideas that her big sister might be holding onto. Chrissy knew that with knowledge came power, and with reading came knowledge, and she was primed and ready to wield that devastating sword.
The next morning, instead of being woken up by the chatter of birds outside her window or the sun pouring in through the panes, Chrissy came to via the blood-curdling screams of her sister, down the hall. It took our soon-to-be kindergartener a moment to orient herself to reality. But when she did, she realized that something had gone horribly wrong with Lucy. And she was not going to miss this. She tumbled out of bed and raced down the hall. Her parents arrived just before she skidded to a stop in her stocking feet. Lucy was holding her face and sobbing.
“I didn’t do ANYTHING,” she wailed as Mr. and Mrs. Walker rushed to her side, still unclear of the issue. But Chrissy saw it.
There, in her baby blue bedroom, crouched behind the old velvet reading chair, was Smoky Toes. And as Lucy looked up to her family and removed her hand from her face. The reveal was, well, super gross.
Five deep, scarlet, angry-looking scratches slashed their way from her sister’s forehead to her jawline as Lucy continued to howl. Smoky Toes silently slipped through the door frame as the Walker parents tried to console their elder daughter.
“He just came out of NOWHERE! I didn’t even know that he was in the ROOM!” The cuts were deep, dark, and shiny in the morning light.
Chrissy felt her cat’s tail linger on her bare calf and turned to the feline pausing behind her. And, she swears, up and down, almost thirty years later, that he winked at her.
“I CAN’T GO TO SCHOOL LIKE THIS!” Lucy shrieked. Now, the Walkers may have inadvertently let their firstborn get away with a lot of poor behavior, but missing school was a non-starter in their book.
Lucy slumped behind her sister on the walk to the bus stop, hiding behind her hand, shielding her face from the onslaught of questions from her classmates. The older kids had some fun teasing her. It wasn’t totally out of left field. She did, in fact, closely resemble Scar, the villain from The Lion King. Chrissy almost felt bad when she saw Lucy sitting alone at lunch in the cafeteria or hiding under the slide during all-school recess. But, yeah, not quite. And as much as Chrissy loved her new school, friends, teachers, and The Responsibilities Board, where she was voted to water the plants all week, she could not wait to get home and talk to Smoky Toes.
But, she couldn’t rush home and plop down onto her My Little Pony bedspread and chat with her fluffy orange kitten. She couldn’t sprint through the door, grabbing the snack that her mother always left out in the same place on the kitchen counter. She couldn’t hold her breath, waiting for Lucy to go find something else to do instead of bothering her. Nope. None of Chrissy Walker’s secret and silent after-school plans could come to fruition. Why? Because she wasn’t able to walk home alone. Nope. She was joined by someone who wanted to hear about her day, who wanted to talk, who even pulled out a package of Hostess cupcakes that she’d retrieved from the staff vending machine when she was hiding from the other students during lunch and offered a whole and entire cupcake – and, get this, not even the squished or half-eaten one to her.
Chrissy’s walk home through the neighborhood lined with bright green elm trees and whizzing pollinators was ripe with questions, conversation, and kindness. And it all came from the least expected source. Yup, you guessed it: Scar, wait, sorry, Lucy.
A day with a hideously deformed face had apparently knocked the eldest Walker sister down quite a few pegs. She’d spent eight hours being tormented and ostracized and did not like it one bit. Chrissy, for her part, wasn’t sure how to receive this side of her sister’s personality. But, she did know how to receive a Hostess cupcake.
So, the sisters walked home, chatting away about life and school and friends and plans. Now, their relationship didn’t totally change after the first day of school. But, it was never the same. And whenever Lucy turned into an A-hole, Chrissy knew that she could tell Smoky Toes. About half of the time, he would take matters into his own paws. Chrissy never told anyone about her secret hitman. She wouldn’t want to jeopardize his safety. She didn’t remember how many lives he had left.
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