Something something chapter 2: The Closet

~ Hetty Eliot

Vanessa moved the phone to her other ear and rolled over on her bed. “Brad! Please!” she giggled. “You can’t say stuff like that! At least not over the phone.” She was too busy giggling to notice her door open before her sister, Tiffany, marched over and yanked the phone out of her hand.

“Hi Brad!” she shouted into the phone.

“Give me that back!” she grabbed it back and said into it, “I’ll call you later. I need to kill my sister first.” She hung up and yelled, “Stop bothering me at a critical moment!”

“Well, I have my own ‘critical moments,’ too,” Tiffany said. She put her hands on her hips and twisted back and forth. “Guess what I got?”

Vanessa shook her scrunched up face at Tiffany. “I don’t care what you got!”

“Come and look in the garage.”

They went downstairs, and as she put her hand on the doorknob to the garage, Tiffany said, “Be prepared to get very, very jealous,” and threw open the door.

Vanessa’s jaw dropped, after which she closed the jaw and curled her lip. Without saying a word, she circled around the bright red eighteenth birthday present with a convertible top.

“Well? What do you think?”

Vanessa stopped and pointed at it with one long, sharp, artificial nail. “Why do you get a car? That isn’t fair—”

“You got new—”

“Never mind what I got! Ugh! They always favor you!” She stomped out of the garage and back upstairs to her room, and locked the door.

She sat on the floor against her bed for a long while, her boyfriend Brad forgotten. She stared across the room at the pile of crocodile handbags, hair straighteners, and stiletto shoes stacked up on an armchair against her walk-in closet, her once cherished utopia, now the cause of sleepless nights.

First it had been Tiffany’s clock from when she was a kid. It looked like a huge, primary-colored plastic wristwatch that you hung on the wall. Tiffany put it in her closet as a joke one day and for some reason Vanessa left it in there. Its ticking was very annoying so she went to take the batteries out. But–

There were no batteries in it. She buried it under a heap of body-con dresses in the corner of her closet. That seemed to take care of it.

Not long after that incident, though, she woke up in the middle of the night and the closet light was on. The outline of the door seemed to glow in the dark, and she lay under the blanket in a ball until she could get herself to jump up and go shut it off.

But it was already off. This kept happening for almost a week. Finally, she hung clothes up on the front and back of the door and piled up as much crap as she could, against what exactly she didn’t know.

She put her face to her drawn-up knees and wrapped her arms around her head. She did know.

34 thoughts on “Something something chapter 2: The Closet”

  1. I enjoy your daily writing challenge. I have two sisters, I have two sisters as kids of my own and the oldest daughter has two sisters as kids of her own. I have observed a lot of sister dynamics and learned to be stealthy and invisible unless needed. You really capture that sister competition thing well in the story. The transition to something mysterious and intriguing, possibly supernatural was when I realized I was pulled in and couldn’t leave after that last short sentence. This is good stuff Hetty. Write on!

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    2. My sister and I have a pretty big age gap (I’m the younger). She got married and moved out when I was fifteen so I’ve had the sibling experience and a quasi only-child experience, too. Sounds like sisters run in your family.

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      1. I do know that it is the elder sister’s responsibility to dominate the younger sister’s life. However, I secretly helped three generations of younger sisters learn to do their lioness roar to keep the older sister from digging in too deep into their business. That’s interesting that you had a chance to be the only child for a while. Was it a good experience? My youngest sister was also the last child and had the house to herself after the rest of the gang moved out. She seemed to enjoy it a lot.

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        1. Oh, I like being the “only child” in a bedroom shared only by herself. My sister is eight years older than me, so she didn’t really rule my life; it’s more the case that I was a “nudge” eavesdropping and playing pranks. Lord knows we did our share of fighting, though. We got along much better once she moved out.

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          1. My daughters are only 4 years apart and at one time they were the same size so there were some real fights over one taking the other’s clothes and shoes without asking. Of course, they remain very close even though they evolved very different personalities. I think they treat each other a lot better since they both sport some long sharp fingernails.

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              1. You spared yourself that fierce conflict of fashion sneakery. I consider that a sign that the Fates will be kind to you. For myself, I’ve always been a jeans and t-shirt guy which never seems to go out of style. But, I can clean up and mingle if necessary. I even have a custom tailored tuxedo for the rare grand formal occasion. Thankfully, those have dwindled to zero lately and I can remain in my base style, which requires zero fashion skills.

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