“He told me about Sharon,” my sister says, her face a pixelated Cezanne, each gesture a second late.  “I asked him if depression runs in the family.  If I remind him of her.”

            There was a scratch in Aerosmith’s Dream On that I knew was Sharon.  She was hidden in the groove that made the needle jerk.  Dream on.  Dream on.  And on, until Daddy ran into the room, shouting over the screech, “It’s scratched, can’t you tell?”
            “It is?”
            That was the first vinyl I had ever played.  I had carefully unwrapped the record player, white packing foam tumbling out onto the hardwood floor like the scattered dandruff on the dark hair we shared.
            I had found the records in the basement closet, stuffed in a red, plastic milk carton.  I asked if I could have them for my fourteenth birthday, wide eyes and tilted head like the baby doll in the attic bedroom.   
            Grandpa said they were mostly Uncle Ted’s, told me I had to ask him if I wanted them.
            “A music time capsule,” Uncle Ted said, flipping through the box methodically.  “A history of the late seventies.”  The Doobie Brothers nodded agreeably all the way from Tolouse street.  “These were all my sister’s.  Sharon's.”
            Grandpa knew that, but he needed Ted to give them away.
 
            When I was five, I grasped at the fairies that danced across the cracking leather back of the passenger seat.  My sister controlled their passage, called herself Queen of the Sidhe.  She twisted a sequined headband in the afternoon light, scattering sunbeams and forcing them to dance.                     
"They’re fairies,” she said, and so I tried to catch them, slapping at the seat with paws clumsy.
            “Well, didn’t Sharon...?”  Mom’s voice was coffee (milk, no sugar) as she talked to Dad, and I leaned forward.
            “Who’s Sharon?” I asked.  She was applying lipstick, staring into the mirror, and her eyes met mine, a swathe of coral paint blending into watery blue.
            “Your father’s sister.”
            “I’ve never heard of her,” I said.  “Why isn’t she at Christmas?”
            “She died, you know that.”
            “I’ve never heard her name.”
             I tried to grab another fairy.  I didn’t want to catch it. 

            “Dad said I’m nothing like her,” my sister says, shrugging into her seat.  “He talked about it with Grandpa.  Apparently, our problems are completely different.”

            I examined my big toe through the distorted glass of the table.  My sister fussed with her bathrobe, took a bite of melon, and the smell of the lime Mom squeezed when she left our breakfast on the kitchen counter and ran to her meeting drifted lazily through the room
            “I’m just so tired,” she said.  “Even though I sleep a lot.  It’s like the more I sleep, the more tired I am.”
“Maybe you should go to sleep when I do.”
“At eight?  I’m not seven any more.”
“Yeah, but you wake me up when you come up to get ready.”
“You’re a light sleeper.  We both are.”

              Dad drove with only one hand on the steering wheel, the red and green of the Stop and Shop sign a glowing halo around his nearly bald head.
              “When she was in middle school always wore too much makeup,” he said.   “You know, she had acne.  She caked it on.  It didn't look good.”

             The first time I fell in love was in Sephora, in its mirror lined funhouse walls.
              “Aren’t you wearing a lot of makeup?”  Dad asked the next day, looking up.   I glanced in the mirror, at the massive black wings fluttering at the corners of my eyes.  The beat of their wings echoed in my ribcage.
               I stared at him.  When I was little, I loved to rub my fingers along eyebrows.  When Mom or Dad would hold me, I would stroke their eyebrows.  His were still bushy then, but different.
               “No,” I said.  “I like this.”
                Like Led Zeppelin in Immigrant Song I screamed, my throat scratched, or it would have if the scream left my head.   Bouncing off the rounded walls of my skull, the words “I’m not her!” subsided into silence.

                The rain crashes against the window outside, tapping SOS in Morse.
                “Dad and I talked about it for a long time.”  My sister says, her voice echoing across two thousand miles.  “Her.  He was unbelievably…open.”

                  “It’ll be fun, I promise!”  My best friend Lauren insisted, her butterfly pin fluttering as she bobbed up and down.  She twisted her hands.
                   “No,” Dad said.
                   “Mum, I’m eleven!  Everybody has lemonade stands.”
                    The lemons dripped money like blood from my newly scraped elbow, and their squeezed rinds filled the air with citrus bitterness.
                    “I’m not even allowed in the yard alone!”  I cried.  “Why are you so paranoid?”
                    “We’re not paranoid, just careful,” Mom said, twisting her fingers.  “Listen to your father.”

            My sister shrugs.  “It’s hard, you know?  The anxiety and depression diagnoses.  Wondering if with all this s*** in my head, am I like her?  I’ve never had any thoughts like that but…” her voice trails off, Heart at the end of the album, voices drifting like mist.  She bites her lip.
            “You’re 20." I say.  "By January, you’ll be older than she ever was. Nothing like her.”
            “I don’t mean like that.”

           When I was thirteen, Grandpa took us out for lunch.  By the third course, he was crying, his face crumpled, a pink and peach polka dot origami creation.
            I spent hours making origami swans, but whenever I made mistakes, I couldn’t quite smooth the wrinkles out of the paper.

            Sharon and I shared a music style.  Classic rock, with a bit of Black Sabbath thrown in.   I listened to her music while I did my homework, slipping a black disk out of aged cardboard.  Her name is written in neat letters on the upper right corner of each record sleeve.
            The needle lifted off right as I finished my science homework.  I put on a new album, staring at the ceiling and watching the division of cells across its white plane, the genetics and traits passed down like a hot potato.
            I painted meiosis like Michelangelo, acrylic in hand.  I stood on my bed, stared at the sky until my neck felt broken and my up-stretched arm would no longer lift, and explored the division of sister chromatin in neon.  I understood the science, the need to separate sisters at the level so small it can only be seen in radioactive energy.
            My parents shrieked when they saw the ceiling, spitting a lecture on resale values and paint fumes that devolved like guitar riffs.
            I looked heavenward, watching the creation of four beautiful, unique haploid cells; the sister chromatids barely touch, like God and Adam’s fingers in the Sistine Chapel.
            Did you know that when atom bombs explode, the radiation they exude remains in the survivors’ bloodstreams for generations?  Children who were born long after have high possibilities of illness appearing.  It’s lurking in their blood, and they don’t know they are sick until it strikes; the sudden clash of a cymbal that signals the beginning of their song’s crescendo.

            “Sharon was…I just wonder sometimes, you know?  If I’ll ever…”
            The rain knocks politely on the windows, and the Skype call breaks up.  My sister’s face lit by California sun: there one second, then gone.