At our grandmother’s funeral, we didn’t cry.
I didn’t know her and I couldn’t find grief. I knit my eyebrows together and adopted a little pout, but I knew my Sad Face looked fake. I was mortified. I wanted to escape out the back, out the garage door.
The only thing that made this bearable and also worse at the same time was that Katy’s face was a mirror of my lying face. We wore identical serious half-pouts and solemn scowls. We both had dry eyes.
Our lies together made everything worse, and so I hated her for doubling my sin. But at the same time, and even more intensely, I loved her for sharing it with me. I loved that we both knew exactly what the other was thinking. It’s always been like that.
I used to play school with her when we were small, both to teach and prepare her, but also because I liked to boss people around. I’d sit her down at a makeshift desk – in side our garage door, and an overturned plastic costume bin—and I would hand her diligently prepared worksheets of arithmetic, spelling, and vocabulary. I conducted lessons with a tiny little chalkboard and pink sidewalk chalk, and I had red pens for correcting her papers. But she never got anything wrong. We started sharing vocabulary since she could talk, and never stopped. If it weren’t for me, Katy wouldn’t use the words ‘qualm’, ‘lucrative’, ‘effigy’ or ‘imbecile’. We almost always think of the same word at the same time. Or she thinks of it first.
She has a much better memory than me. Once I made her memorize the periodic table, because I couldn’t even remember the first eight elements and I had a test. I even made up a song, but I couldn’t sing it without looking. So I sat Katy down on her teal and purple bed (same as mine) and made her learn it and teach it to me. It was easy for her, of course, anything she knows, I know.
When I asked Katy what she remembered about grandma’s funeral, she said she remembered what we wore- she was wearing a pink skirt with blue flowers, and I was wearing a white with pink. Later on we found a photograph of us, morbidly crowded around grandma’s coffin, and Katy remembered the outfits perfectly. And I remembered our identical expressions. Her eyes are greenish to my blue, and her hair is more reddish (we call my hair Pencil Lead Blonde and hers Strawberry Brown), but other than that we look the same. Our similarities are unmistakable.
Every time I see that picture I am reminded that even if I am a phony who doesn’t believe in God or cry at funerals, I will always have Katy, rain or shine, through hundreds of awful outfits, for a thousand lying faces.