The Weird Sisters

by Eleanor Brown

ballet lessons (dropped before they got to fourth position, though she did wear the tutu for an awful long time after that, so it wasn’t a total waste),

Cordy, as mindless of convention as Rose, but never bearing its stigma in the same way, read everywhere: walking to class, during class, on the quad while Frisbees spun above her head, in bed at night while her roommate and her friends played cards on the floor, and once by a basement window at a keg party, where just enough light from the streetlamps spilled in to allow her to turn the pages.

Because despite his money and his looks and all the good-on-paper attributes he possessed, he was not a reader, and, well, let’s just say that is the sort of nonsense up with which we will not put.

Cordy was sorely underprepared for the fact that her smile and her ability to get an entire room full of Shakespearean scholars to do the Macarena (true story) would not necessarily guarantee her perennial success.

What with the embezzling and the adultery and the drinking. That’s what every man wants in a wife—a vaguely alcoholic, fornicating thief.

She had long ago given up being offended by men who compulsively showered after sex. It was an excellent time to get a little reading done without anyone trying to talk to her.

Our father had once written a paper pulling apart the advice given to Laertes (This above all: to thine own self be true—the same lines he had quoted to Rose) and that given to Ophelia (roughly: don’t sleep with Hamlet, you ninny).