A Sibling Rivalry
Weird fiction piece by Clark Humphrey
4/8/94
Jack always had a rivalry going with his two-years-older sister Janine. They didn’t do a thing without calculating its effect on the other’s overwrought sense of pride. Their parents encouraged this rivalry, and even encouraged it up to a point. They wanted Jack and Janine to vie for the highest grade point averages, the most friends, the most school activity trophies.
At some pre-teen point, Janine found she could usually get her way by sucking up to her parents. She could start a fight, claim to mom and dad that Jack had started it, and would always be believed. That only spurred Jack to find new ways to humiliate or otherwise get Janine, ways that usually backfired on him. If he tried to trash her room, he’d get caught. If he tried to upstage her in the sports at church picnics, the adults told him to be a gentleman and let her win; he’d cry that she was beating him anyway, but that didn’t help his position.
When adolescence reared its ugly head, Janine found a new weapon that Jack could not match for several years. She cultivated a powerful, jealousy-inducing beauty with the aid of the best clothes and make-up available to her; she carefully arranged friendships with older girls with cars who could take her into town on Saturdays to get the hottest looks unavailable to the mall-bound other girls in school.
By age 15 and a half, Janine had perfected a particular kind of drop-dead appearance that made other girls jealous and submissive, but was not overtly sexual and didn’t cause trouble from boys. The boys indeed noticed that Janine looked different from any other girl in school, that she gave more care to her face and her clothes, but she was still just one of the kids to them. Janine initially treated the boys with respect/indifference, while she schemed to become the girl invited to every party, chosen for every intramural sports squad, named to every honor roll.
Jack, meanwhile, did what he could to maintain his popularity among the other boys. He learned to smoke and drink and cuss and tell racist jokes and crash cars and collect copies of Hustler and fight and rob vending machines and get bad grades and go to dentention, all to prove he was the king of the real men.
But as he turned 15, just before Janine turned 17, he faced a crisis. He’d gone into a ditch on a suburban road in a “borrowed” car without a license, and spent a night in juvenile hall; there, he’d met plenty of kids who were far tougher than he, and who were also fated to turn that toughness into a lifetime of visits in and out of the criminal justice system. Jack spent his hours there reassuring himself that this unpleasant misadventure would at least increase his standing among the guys. But once he was back, he found the guys in school were suddenly cold toward him; he’d apparently crossed some unmarked line between being a creative rebel and being just a common criminal.
Within weeks of that incident, Jack’s carefully assembled entourage of buddies started to disband; many of the guys were getting involved with girls and had better things to do than hang with him. He berated each of them with individual variations on one rant, avowing that guys who liked to be friends with girls were “faggots.” He asserted that he would never get trapped by any girl, and the girls in school were quite willing to let him keep that promise.
By the Christmas break of his sophomore year, alone, a below-average student with no after-school activities, no A-list friends, and no apparent hopes of curing his virginity. At that year’s family Christmas dinner, all the relatives patronized Jack with the formal “friendliness” people give to family members they don’t really admire. Janine, however, drew admiring stares and gracious remarks from all the grandmothers, aunts, nieces, and sisters-in-law. She was resplendent in her formal dress (tight but not lewd), flowing dark hair and perfectly-accented eyelids. She knew she was a superior creature, enjoying her status as the new center of the family, bowing and gently smiling back at the other relatives, showing off her new straight-A-student boyfriend — the leader of a clique in the school of mama’s boys that Jack had long despised.
As the second semester of school got underway, Jack started noticing who his ex-buddies’ girlfriends were. They all hung out together in the halls, in the mall, and at the girls’ basketball games. Jack had been so blind to the world outside his own ego, he hadn’t noticed until now that his clique of buddies hadn’t really disbanded, they’d merged with a girls’ clique and tossed him out without him noticing it.
Jack decided to start paying attention to things he hadn’t been noticing, like how Janine prowled her way into higher and higher levels of popularity. He’d spent his first year and a half of high school avoiding her wherever possible during school hours. He couldn’t stand it when the teachers compared his grades to her superior achievements, when the counselors kept telling him how he should learn from her how to make friendships the right way. Now he decided to get a locker near hers, to take classes with or near her, to see just how she gathered more and more admiration.
He mentally catalogued her every word and motion. The way she demured coyly to male teachers and made instant girlfriends with female teachers. The way she gathered other girls wherever she went, telling them just enough to improve their looks without upstaging hers. The way she turned down invites for dates with civility and charm, making boys feel appreciated to have even been in the range of her deep green eyes.
While Janine was popular among all the girls, Jack gradually noticed a pattern. Janine turned on her friendliness spigot harder among people who could do things for her: teachers from she especially needed a good grade, coaches who could put her in the starting line-ups for basketball, girls who could get her into the good parties. He also noticed that there were certain classmates to whom Janine was more formally amiable. These included the girlfriends of Jack’s former clique. Jack thought to himself that Janine’s snubbing (or the closest thing to snubbing that Janine ever did) the girls who’d destroyed Jack’s social life was a sign of sincere family unity. For the first time in his life, Jack felt that Janine actually cared about him. Of course, he never told her how he’d been investigating her behavior. He never told her he appreciated her acts of solidarity with him. That would be acquiescing to her superiority as a human being.
Then, as his discreet Janine-watching continued, he started to notice another pattern. Certain girls were more regularly at her cafeteria table and around her locker than others, even though she acted comparatively cool and aloof toward them. And as often as not, these hangers-on included several of the girls Jack hated, the girls who’d stolen his buddies away from him. Jack wondered if they were perhaps trying desperately to get back in Janine’s good graces after they destroyed her brother’s life.
It was only on the day after Janine’s team won the district girls’ basketball title that Jack found out what was really going on. During this time Jack had slightly cleaned up his act, got a better haircut, began studying a little harder, and was rewarded with an invite to a party. Not one of the most exclusive parties in the school, but a good one nonetheless. There, he overheard a sequence of conversations that collectively told him what Janine had so cleverly kept from him. It seemed that there was a group of girls with a special relationship to Janine. Girls who weren’t in Janine’s inner circle but who came to her privately for advice. She told them how to dress, how to look at people, how to hold themselves in public. She even told them how to attract, control and seduce boys, without the boys’ noticing what’s happening to them and without losing their reputations among other girls. In return, the girls were expected to keep their proper distance from Janine in public but to privately keep her informed about every aspect of their love lives.
The next week, Jack kept track of which girls appeared to belong in this outer circle of Janine’s. He began to discern that the girls to whom Janine showed the most outer warmth were the ones with whom she had the most superficial, log-rolling friendships, the girls she used to get popularity points. The girls with whom she was iciest in public included the girls with whom she had her secret deals.
They included each of the girls Jack hated.
Having grown up with Janine’s schemes and manipulations, it didn’t take Jack long to realize what his sister had done to him. Without sleeping with anyone herself, his sister had deliberately and indirectly seduced each of his friends. The clique that had surrounded Jack now was part of Janine’s social empire.
There was nothing for Jack to do but plan patiently for his junior year, when Janine would be safely away at college. He applied his collected awareness of Janine’s system to give himself a makeover. As he paid more attention to his clothes, his poise and his social graces, he declined Janine’s kindly offers to take him shopping. He wanted to defeat her, not to submit to her power.
By September he was ready with a new wardrobe and a new attitude. He got back into at least an outer-circle relationship with most of his former clique. Without Janine’s constant advice, some of the girls she’d coached began to lose the undivided loyalty of their boyfriends, so several of Jack’s old buddies were single or seeing other girls now. Jack made his first moves on one of those ex-protoges of Janine who’d been left lonely by Janine’s graduation and abandoned by one of Jack’s old friends. He positioned himself to her as the closest thing she could have to Janine’s companionship. Once he decided to be a ladykiller, he found the skills easy to develop. All he had to do was imitate some of Janine’s charm, and Janine’s girls fell for him one by one. By the end of the school year he had slept with all but one of the ex-girlfriends of his ex-guy friends, and had carried on public relationships with two of them. He had finally beaten Janine at something; she had had only one public boyfriend by the time she’d graduated, and to the best of Jack’s knowledge was still a virgin.
Janine didn’t come home from college that summer; instead, she invited him to spend a week or two in a spare room at the shared rental house where she was living. Before he could gloat to her about his love life, he saw her field a solid hour of dinnertime phone calls. She made dates with at least three guys, broke up with another, and told yet another that he ought to do something about his snoring. During the late dinner, Jack once again didn’t have the guts to boast of anything to Janine. She complimented him on his rosy complexion and his newly-found confidence. He shrugged a thank-you. She asked him what some of her old girlfriends from school were doing; he lied and said he didn’t know.
The following year, Jack moved into town right after graduating from high school. He barely got into college and barely stayed there. His rivalry with Janine evolved into a more mature, more playful-serious game, with mutually-agreed-upon rules. They took points for the number of lovers they collected, the degree of difficulty in getting them (extra points for grabbing someone in a previously-exclusive relationship, etc.), and the novelty and creativity of the consummation scene (in a moving vehicle, in a basement with the target’s spouse upstairs unaware, in the target’s office during lunch hour, etc.).
For two years the game continued, with Janine usually ahead in the point rankings. But neither Janine nor Jack had achieved the ultimate bonus-point item in their rule book, breaking up a marriage. Janine carefully planned the move that would end the game once and for all. She steadily developed a deep abiding friendship with a grad student in her department at school. She invited the grad student and her husband of one year, a junior instructor in the same department, to a skiing weekend. Before she left, Janine promised Jack that she would return in the husband’s arms, with the wife filing the divorce papers that next Monday.
Jack had to act fast. He rented a room at the same lodge late Friday night, arriving just two hours after Janine and the unsuspecting couple checked in. That Saturday, thw wife went up on the chairlifts while Janine took the husband out on the X-C track, from there straight to the sauna, and from there along a circuitous route to the couple’s room. Once the wife was back alone in the lodge restaurant, Jack made his move on her.
Exactly an hour after the junior instructor unhooked Janine’s bra strap, his wife entered on schedule. Instead of shrieking and shouting and ordering Janine and/or her husband to get out, the wife calmly put her ski equipment away, undressed and got into bed with them. The grad student explained that she’d just run into an “old friend” of Janine’s who’d made a persuasive argument for the new institution of open marriages. During a long talk in the lodge restaurant, this nice man had helped her see that what she needed in her life was intimate friendships with a man and a woman, even if she might be sexually attracted only to men. The grad student invited Janine to move in with her and her husband, so the three of them could live as one big happy family.
