“For God’s sake, why don’t you draw Spider-Dork or Wonderful Woman, like you’ve been doing?” she said.
I boggled at her. Even Rachel knew the name was Wonder Woman and that she was my favorite. When I didn’t answer immediately, she turned away, as if I’d stopped existing. She plopped down on a love seat and flipped the top magazine open. She stared down at the pages with such laser eyes I worried they’d start smoking.
“This is a chance to do my own stuff,” I said, keeping my voice low, too. “I didn’t invent Wonder Woman.”
She actually snorted.
“You didn’t invent her either,” she said, waving a hand at the coffee table. “You just drew me.” She flipped a page so angrily the corner tore.
“You think this is you?” I asked. “You think Violence in Violet is about you?”
“Didn’t say that,” Rachel retorted, but I talked over her, my temper sparking back, even though I worked to keep my tone light.
“Shocking as you may find this from your seat at the center of the universe, I have several things in my life that are not actually about you.”
“I didn’t say your thingy was about me! I mean, it could be about me—who could tell? It’s so weird. It could be about anything.”
“You read it?” I said, moving from surprised to genuinely shocked. Read it and never told me? Well, apparently she’d hated it, so maybe silence was her idea of kindness.
“I looked through it, and I’m not blind. That’s my face, that’s my hair, that’s my body.” She paused to flick an angry hand at the sketch. “She’s even in my favorite yellow sundress.”
“What yellow sundress?” I asked. Rachel wasn’t the boho sundress type.
Her eyes narrowed. “You know. The one I had when I was six.”
I threw my hands up. “Everybody has a yellow sundress when they’re six.”
“You didn’t,” Rachel told me. “Yours was blue, and mine was prettier. We wore them to the botanical gardens, and Daddy called us Sun and Sky.”
I was utterly nonplused, and trying to remember. We’d gone to the Norfolk Botanical Garden all the time when we were kids. Mom and Rachel both loved to see what was blooming. Me, I’d always taken a book and plopped onto a bench to read about Conan or Cthulhu every time they stopped moving to ahhh at something.
“Rach, when did I ever care about clothes?” I asked.
“Never. It wasn’t about the dress.” Her tone was accusing. “You wanted to be Sun.”
“I don’t remember any sundresses. I don’t remember when Keith called us Sun and Sky,” I said. “Violet isn’t meant to look like you. She’s just any pretty blonde.”
“You think I’m any pretty blonde,” she shot back, vehement. She thrust the magazines off her lap and stood up again. Those words resonated. They sounded both so damning and so true. I did think of her that way, smooth as an egg, generic and symmetrical and beautiful. Which was awful of me, except that—was it wholly my fault? When a lovely and untroubled surface was the only thing she ever, ever showed me? But by the time I had my defense, she was already talking, her voice quiet but thick with pent-up anger. “You made me help destroy the earth! You made me be some kind of a lesbian!”
“Violence and Violet aren’t lovers,” I said, speaking to the point that mattered least. But I didn’t want her reducing V in V, the best thing I’d ever done, to me calling her gay as if it were an insult—as if in coming to Birchville we really had driven all the way back to 1987. “They’re closer than lovers. They’re like two sides of a coin.”
In the middle of this weird and angry conversation, intense but very quiet in deference to the sleeping kid upstairs and the grandmas cooking in the kitchen, the artist in me heard me say it. The artist in me understood that these words were going to matter.
“Kinda like sisters?” Rachel said, snide. “If it’s not me, then why did you steal my baby name and give it to her?”
“Steal your baby name? What?” I asked. “I don’t even have a baby.”
Digby kicked, calling me a liar, but he barely even had lung buds yet. I ignored him on the technicality.
“Violet,” she said, holding up her left hand, as if the name were written on her palm. “Lavender.” She lifted the other hand, then bobbled them, as if she were weighing them against each other and they were coming out dead even.
Now I was too mad to stay quiet. “Violet and Lavender are two entirely different words, and—”
She cut me off. “It’s the same color!”
“And anyway! Violet came first. I started drawing that character in high school. Lav wasn’t even a dreamy star in the corner of your eye. So if you really think Violet and Lavender are the same name, then you stole it from me.”
For a second I thought she might explode, fly at me, and slap or bite, she was so enraged. But then she sucked in air and her chin came up.
“Okay, Leia. You are letting me stay here, and I really need this right now, so if that’s how you want to remember it, fine. I guess. We’ll forget about the dollhouse baby. The one that I named Lavender when I was in preschool.”
I shook my head. I was never much into playing dollhouse, preferring to jump on the sofa to zoom my Millennium Falcon toy around up as close to the ceiling as I could get it. Playing house way down on the earthly floor didn’t interest me, especially since Rachel never let me stage a Sand People attack on the family who lived there. There had been a family. I did remember that. Mommy and Daddy, then a girl and a boy and a baby.
She had named the dolls, but I didn’t remember all of them. The boy had been called Jean Pierre or something very like that, and if Rachel had actually been serious about that, how lucky for Lav that she was born female.
“The girl doll was named Lavender?” I asked.
“No, the baby,” Rachel said. “The tiny baby doll. The little girl was Madeline. Ugh, just forget it. This is the least of my life’s problems. So fine, draw me again. It doesn’t matter, because let’s be real. No one I know is going to read it. So whatever. Do whatever. Make a supervillain named the Rachenator, give it six or seven evil heads. I forgive you.”
She plopped back down and picked up the top magazine, as if she were finished with the conversation, but it didn’t play. Her hands were trembling. I heard the rustle in the pages.
“You forgive me?” I said, incredulous.
“You heard me.” She sniffed, turned a page. “Oh, look, aqua is coming back for summer. How lucky for you. You look good in aqua. Not that you’ll wear it.”
“I didn’t steal your baby name,” I said again.