I hated her, as a kid. Growing up, the parents’ top priority was making Bell feel wanted, and how do you think that made me feel? I get it, I’m lucky. I had one of those princess beds and I had a plastic kitchen that could really cook, and every year, every single year, they threw me a birthday party with catering. That’s lucky, right?
But it wasn’t like Bell had it hard either. The parents brought her home from the hospital as a newborn. Sure, she had a poor mother, but she never experienced the consequences of that poverty. She’d been a Hobbes her whole life, and yeah, maybe I resented that she got all the Hobbes perks and an interesting adoption story to boot. Sue me.
When we were younger, I took it out on her, all that misplaced anger. Do I feel bad about it now? Yes. Can I change the past? No. And anyway, it’s not like I ever hurt her. Not really. I just played a few little pranks to demonstrate all the ways in which she wasn’t a “real” Hobbes. Each year we’d get identical Christmas sweaters, the whole family, with hobbes stitched on the back like it was our team, and I would find a way to ruin Bell’s, unspool its wool or cut the necessary letters to leave it saying only ho. Or the time, after Meg got Bell and me matching Rachels at the salon, I snuck into her bedroom and recut her hair in the night, gave her a set of jagged bangs that not even Meg’s designer stylist could fix. Or, when I got my period, long before Bell got hers, I used to leave used tampons out on our shared bathroom counter. The message: See how we don’t bleed the same.
But things changed between Bell and me when we started intermediate school. On the first day, one of the boys, one of the ones who always sat at the back of the bus, he called Bell an orphan. “Hey Brit,” he called from his throne at the back when we got on. “Ditch the orphan and come sit with me.”