Penny was the prettier sister. From childhood on, girls understand that there will always be a prettier sister. Penny was delicate and fine-boned, taking after our mother’s side, whereas I shot up like a weed long before puberty and had thick wrists and a solid frame. I was made with bones that wouldn’t break no matter how much abuse I threw at them, taking after my athletic father. I fell out of trees, crashed on the mountain, and did all the things that had my peers showing off plaster casts for classmates to sign without managing to bust myself up. Penny was the opposite: forever getting hurt, forever breakable. But Penny was precocious and could talk circles around the kids her age by the time she was five. Our childhood was a series of incidents in which Penny would taunt me to the edge of a fit and then I would smack her or tackle her and the corridors or our little midcentury modern, four-bedroom home would ring out with “MOM! Katie’s hurting me!”

“What a sweet child!” people said when they met Penny. She had strawberry-blond hair and freckles speckling her fair skin, which went nearly translucent in the winter and would burn at the mere suggestion of sunshine in the summer. She’d also gotten my dad’s clear blue eyes, which mesmerized people even before she could talk. And Penny was sweet—just not to me, but that wasn’t in the job description. As kids, we were close in that tumultuous I hate you, I love you way that siblings are. Together, we dug in the dirt, fished tadpoles from the streams, and built complicated forts out of scrap wood and mats of woven-together sword ferns. Penny organized games of capture the flag with the kids in our neighborhood, and her team always won. It seemed then that Penny was destined to be a leader; she was smart in a way that made her seem, in strange flashes, much older than she was, almost cunning. She was magnetic, convincing, and far more social than I was. I was a little ambivalent about people, more liable to get lost in my own dreamy thoughts or entranced by nature.

Sisters learn early on that everything you are will always be in relation to the other: you’ll always be the pretty one, or the smart one, or the strong one as compared to your sister. It was especially acute because of our ages and the fact that our town was small. The Cleary sisters were like mismatched salt-and-pepper shakers: a pair that never quite made sense. Penelope and Katherine Cleary. Penny and Katie. P and K. Back then CDA was still tiny and undiscovered, far smaller than its less comely nearby cousin, Spokane, Washington.