Blue Sisters

by Coco Mellors

A sister is not a friend. Who can explain the urge to take a relationship as primal and complex as a sibling and reduce it to something as replaceable, as banal as a friend?

But she did go on, she always has.

She hates authority but loves structure.

Most people go through life never knowing what it’s like to have a calling, one that asks you to sacrifice the pleasure of the moment for the potential of a dream that may not be realized for years, if at all. It sets you apart from others, whether you want it to or not. It can be grueling, lonely, and punishing, but, if it is really your calling, it is not a choice.

Lucky is twenty-six years old, and she is lost. In fact, all the remaining sisters are.

But what they don’t know is this: As long as you are alive, it is never too late to be found.

Being one of four sisters always felt like being part of something magic. Once Bonnie noticed it, she saw the world was made up of fours. The seasons. The elements. The points on a compass. Four suits in a pack of cards. Four chambers of a human heart. Bonnie loved being a part of this mystical number, this perfect symmetry of two sets of two.

Around her sisters, she was always the eldest, which meant, in comparison to them, she was never young. But she was tired of being the grown-up.

The problem with her pain was that it was invisible. Avery wished she could have given it crutches, some object that made it obvious to everyone around her, but she had learned now that most pain is private.

She’d heard once that guilt was for something you’d done—you could feel guilty for a certain behavior or action but still fundamentally know you were a good person—but shame was deeper, shame was for who you were.

Lucky didn’t simply do bad things, she was bad, she saw that now.

“Once you get to my age, you will learn that you can take a lot of wrong turns and still end up in the right place.”

Her mother had taught her to believe in nothing but a woman’s capacity to survive disappointment.