Brown Sauce

Brown Sauce

         Cassandra was a pretty girl, with long pale hair and wide, too-big eyes, doe eyes, that made boys swoon and teachers take it easy on her when she forgot to attach the ten-point works cited page to her midterm essay. She walked in a long, sloping gait in too-tall stilettos that everyone else wished they could wear, the shoes her sister Kate tried on in the bedroom and only managed to wobble in across the berber carpet without any of her sister’s grace.

         Kate was shorter, darker, quiet. She faded into the background at school and played the flute in the marching band since saxophone seemed limited to boys only. Her teeth didn’t shine when she smiled and her sentences never had the flawless flow, spoken or written, that seemed to come so naturally to Cassandra.

         The sisters went shopping together every Friday afternoon when school let out since Cassandra would be going away to college in the fall. They stopped at a coffee shop for raspberry Italian cream sodas with pink straws that Kate offered to pay for, but Cassandra got for free because the barista had a thing for blondes. They sat in the plastic chairs outside the shop and watched young mothers push strollers down the block, college students jogging, businessmen on cell phones and palm pilots that didn’t look up until they ran into someone. They sipped in silence until the sun started to dip below the buildings at the west end of the street.

         Their parents took them to dinner at a fancy French restaurant downtown called La Perruche to celebrate Cassandra’s acceptance to Harvard and Princeton, which happened all in the same week. Their mom taught them how to eat escargot without getting any brown sauce on their clothes. Cassandra did it perfect the first time. Kate dropped three before she finally put her napkin in her lap to catch them. Their father said that they could have champagne when they got home.

         As they were walking down the street to their car, Kate said to her sister, “You’re lucky, you know that? You got into college, you have a future, and a clean pair of pants to walk home in.”

         Cassandra frowned at her. “Sometimes I wish I could drop a snail, too,” she said.

         They crawl into their beds later that night and stare at the plastic glow-in-the-dark stars they stuck on the ceiling years ago. Cassandra thinks she might be too old for them now.

         Kate’s head is swimming with a glass and a half of champagne. She falls asleep fast, and the neon-green imprint on her eyelids fades away into dreams of snails and Harvard and pink Italian sodas. Cassandra sees the letter she didn’t show her parents, an acceptance from an art school in Rhode Island that she had to hide under her pillow. She sees brown sauce in curving, oily patterns on a delicate china plate against the pale blue linens of La Perruche.