“Mom,” I asked that night, “why am I not in more pictures?”
She did not even look up from brushing Victoria’s hair.
“You never smile right in photos, Evelyn. You always look too serious.”
I practiced smiling in the mirror for weeks after that.
No new photos of me ever appeared.
Our bedrooms told the same story.
Victoria had the master bedroom upstairs. It came with its own bathroom, a rainfall shower head, a queen bed with a canopy, a fifty-five-inch television mounted to the wall, and a mini-fridge filled with her favorite snacks.
“Victoria needs room for her creativity,” my mother used to say. “She’s sensitive. She needs her sanctuary.”
Victoria’s creativity, at twenty-six, amounted mostly to posting selfies to Instagram for an audience of two hundred and thirty-four followers, most of them probably bots.
My room was beside the garage.
It had once been a storage room. My father had put up drywall, shoved in a single bed, and declared the job complete. It had no windows. Just a ceiling fan that rattled when it spun and walls thin enough to let the garage door thunder through the room every time someone arrived or left.
I asked once if I could switch rooms with Victoria.
Just once.
My mother’s expression twisted as though I had said something indecent.
“Victoria was here first,” she said. “And she needs more than you do. You’re adaptable.”
Adaptable.
