This is an excerpt from Little Sister – a novel in the making .

An Emily Wright original

Ashley was looking for the cat.
She sat on the ugly carpet of the new house with its diamond pattern in every shade of brown, flipping through the pages of the photo album. Tasked with emptying the boxes of books onto the shelf became too dull. What seven-year-old would not go leafing through photos instead of doing a chore? One of the thick binder held a tattered square of yellowing masking tape. 1975-80, was written on it in a hasty black marker.

This album was all too tempting as it held the promise of her baby pictures.
In hand-me -down shorts and a tank top, Ashley was all sharp shoulders, pointy elbows, and knobby knees folded there on the floor on the first weekend of summer break of 1981. Freckles at all of her corners had sprouted up over the last few days. With no more space on her face, the smattering had taken to her eyelids. Her skin wasn’t tanned as much as it was consumed by the less pale dots.
Someone had once said that freckles were kisses from the sun god.
To which Debora responded, “Then, my little sister was molested,” with that self proclaimed wittiness. Voicing her not always appropriate or appreciated opinion was an unfortunate symptom of her attention seeking disorder. In other words, middle-child syndrome. Often, such comments came at the expense of her little sister.
Most of the photos were Polaroids and all had a greenish tinge. There were very few pictures of just Ashley. Someone was always holding her or feeding her. Wait, was she eating in every picture? That thought didn’t last long, as something caught her eye.
There was a picture of Ashley on her mother’s lap, eating of course as a four-year-old Deb grinned at the camera clutching a doll. Ashley didn’t recognize the doll, but the red pants and white shirt with a strawberry print caused her to take pause.
  An odd feeling crinkled at the corners of thought and blurred the edges. She shifted as if uncertain of the floor beneath her. The breath in her lungs got hot as she flipped back through the pages. She didn’t know what she was looking for until she saw it. Three pages back, her green eyes skated over a photo that now held her undivided attention. Her mom was sitting on the edge of the bed reading to Debra as a tiny Ashley lay on her stomach in the background. Too small to be the focus and too young to even lift her head, the baby Ashley wore red pants, and a strawberry printed shirt. She couldn’t understand what she was seeing or why it held her in place. She only knew that something fractured in that moment.
The idea was so inconceivable that it hurt her brain. She tried blinking and squinting around it, but it was like a clog in a drain, stopping all flow of thought. The next thing she knew, she was scanning pictures, looking for the cat. Had her sister dressed Fiskiss, the ferial farm rescue in her clothes too?
  It was hard enough being the youngest of three, but to learn that her station in life was equal to or less than the doll’s existence had cracked something; the lense of her rose-coloured glasses, maybe.
  Just then, there were footfalls on the stairs. It was her mother.

“There you are,” she said, ”you were just supposed to stack the books and come back. We have a lot to do.”
Ignoring this, Ashley stood with the album stressed wide open out over her arm. A dark line of dirt trapped beneath a jagged fingernail tapped on one page before pressing into another. “Look.” Her mother took a cursory glance at the two photos because her arms were full of cleaning supplies meant for the laundry room. 

“Is Deb’s doll dressed in my clothes?”
She humored the girl with an impatient sigh before answering. “Yes, it appears so.” Not understanding how staggering this knowledge was to her third daughter, Ashley’s mom continued on to the dank corner of the room.
“No really mom, or am I wearing Debra’s doll clothes?”
“I doubt I would have put you in doll clothes.” Her tone was dismissive, as always, but also unconvincing.
After lining the shelf above the washing machine with the bottles of cleaner she brought down, Ashley’s mother returned to the stairs. “Don’t be long. We will set up your room next,” and she disappeared to the main level of the bungalow.
By ‘your room,’ she meant the one that Debra and Ashley would share, just as they had in the old house.
Ashley was named after her mother because, for lack of imagination, she was named after her father’s favorite women; his wife, his mother, and his grandmother. You would think that such an honour would be reserved for the eldest. But no. Ashley Margaret Rose shared a room with her sister, owned nothing but hand-me-down clothing, and had just discovered that even those she borrowed from her sister’s doll.
There were no boundaries. Ashley had no distinct outline. She was just a blur with no features, form, or purpose. An inconvenient after thought to maintain the rule of threes. Both of her parents were the eldest of three who knew no better than to repeat the tradition. Was it out of obligation? After the first two, why not just get a dog? She felt like a pretense, with no real identity.
Suddenly, the move seemed less exciting. Their room was at the end of the hall. From its doorway, Ashley watched as Debra labored to stretch a long piece of tape through the not-quite middle of the carpet. Ever the opportunist, she had already arranged the furniture. But everything seemed lopsided. Entitled as only an older sister could be, Debra’s side of the room had the desk and two-thirds of the dresser, as well as the window, the closet, and the door. A bed pushed into a corner of bare walls and one stack of drawers was carved out for Ashley according to the line of tape. It was a good thing that she hadn’t come to expect anything more.
At the dinner table, older siblings filled the moments when the television newscast was in commercials with rhetoric that supported their self importance and superiority.

For most of her childhood, she assumed her parents’ opinions of her aunt and uncle. The babies of the families were spoiled and irresponsible, free spirits with criminal tendencies. Even Ashley thought her dad’s baby sister was a phony con-artist and a thief. Her mother’s little brother was no better, as an out of touch hippy who dodged all accountability. Ashely adopted these discourses before she knew what any of those words meant or that they would apply to her. Loyal to her family, she aligned her beliefs with theirs and innocently accepted her inherited disadvantages. It had not occurred to her how such dinner time chatter would shape her own role within that family of vipers.