Title: The Other Boyd Sister

Summary: How Linda's always felt about her sister's friends

Rating: PG for angst and some mild swearing

Spoilers/Timeline: Preseries up through the beginning of the first book

Characters: Linda, Nicole, Scott, Steven, Jennifer, Robert, Paul, Ivy

Note: This probably won't make sense to anyone not more than familiar with the swacit-verse. P.S. It's also rather overdramatic, lol

 

 

 

I’d never known how capable I was of hating before they fully came into my life.

 

I had been nine when my family and I had moved from Ireland to a tiny village a few hours south of London. That was when my seven-year-old sister, Nicole, had met Ivy. I dismissed my sister and her gawky, blond best friend as childish and irritating, as any older sister would. I didn’t like them, but I could ignore them at the very least.

 

I wasn’t much older than 12 when the full force of it began. That was when Jennifer McGregor had moved to our little village. Nicole, Ivy and Jennifer bonded in a way so quick but deep, that I couldn’t help but resent it. My sister was able to make friends so fast, while it took me months to even open my mouth to anybody at school. I was teased for my red hair and freckles and Irish-ness, but Nicole never was. My friends came and went, but Nicole’s never did.

 

The three of them were inseparable. Nicky, Ivy, and Jenny. Witty, freckled Ivy and brilliant, impetuous Jennifer… both of them were positively dynamic and, at ten, already showing signs that they would grow into beautiful women, the same way Nicole was beginning to. Ivy and Jenny: always kind, always funny and always sporting scraped knees from playing in the woods and fields of our little town. I hated them.

 

They had turned my sister, who in Ireland had been quiet and tolerable, into someone vibrant and full of laughter and talk. Nicole had become someone who my parents worshipped and who I couldn’t stand. I hated Ivy, I hated Jennifer, and then I hated Nicole.

 

As I grew up with them, it only got worse. My suspicions had been right. My sister and her two friends had grown into girls that boys even in my highest sixth form found fascinating. Ivy had let her hair grow out and it waved becomingly around her English rose face that I longed to slap. Jennifer, with her jade green eyes and full, almost-black hair, could be described only as lush.

 

But Nicole was the worse. Where my red hair made me look almost clownish, hers mellowed to a bright, autumnal copper that made her blue eyes stand out. When my hair frizzed, hers waved into shining curls. Where my freckles, so sweet in my youth, had melded into blobs, making my complexion splotchy, hers had disappeared, leaving a spotless, fair complexion that all the makeup in the world couldn’t give me. Her freckles reappeared only when she got too much sun in a way that the boys around her found deviously charming.

 

Boys flocked around my sister and her friends. I was seventeen and in my last year of secondary school (my upper sixth form) when they were fifteen. That was the year Ivy and her doppelganger, Paul Hewitt, started dating. I couldn’t stand him either. He talked too much and always had to find something funny to say in a way I found unbearably arrogant. Nicole had dates, but no one really ever stuck (that made me happy, even if I did know it was Nicole who always did the dumping). And then there was Robert.

 

I knew it was rather disgusting at seventeen to fancy a fifteen-year-old boy, but something about Robert Fairchild made me feel girlish and alive. I never approached him, of course… he was fifteen and besides, I had a boyfriend (yes, I had a boyfriend and Nicole didn’t). Still, Robert was handsome in a dark, boyish way and I liked looking at him. He calmed me, though there was really nothing soothing about Robert (who was just as boisterous and loud as his best friend, Paul)... except maybe his eyes. His eyes I found positively hypnotic.

 

And so, apparently, did Jennifer. I had noticed Robert’s fascination with Jennifer for a while (and I found it disgusting)… but I had thought I was safe. Jennifer had despised him for years, finding him arrogant and annoying, and suddenly, with no real warning, they were holding hands in the halls and coming to my house together to see Nicole. I didn’t understand what had happened.

 

And I was jealous. Not just because of who Jennifer was with, but of how passionate Jennifer was able to make Robert. I was jealous of whatever it was that Jennifer and Ivy had that made their men love them so senselessly. My boyfriend, Steven, didn’t feel that way for me. His feelings were mild at their best and he was more often cold than caring. But I loved him…in a way I now realize was sick. I loved the idea of him. I loved him because no other man had ever shown so much interest in me. If he hit me, I’d write it off. When he drank, I wrote it off. When he asked me to sleep with him that first time, I’d let him and felt no love in it. But I’d done it… because perhaps it would mean that he would keep me. And maybe that was why I’d agreed to marry him. He’d asked, and the thought that Nicole, my mother and father’s favorite child, would be the last to get married appealed to me far too much to say no.

 

I was twenty-one when I announced my engagement. My parents seemed pleased, but Nicole didn’t. Nicole didn’t like Steven and I knew it. That fact only made the whole thing better. Shortly after my engagement, Robert and Jennifer announced theirs, and I’d scoffed in disgusted disbelief. They were only nineteen. They’d dated for only three years.

 

And their wedding, goddamn them, was perfect.

 

Robert’s family’s offensive wealth had bought them only the best. The cathedral was beautiful with stone and stained glass that looked anciently romantic. The bridesmaids-my sister and Ivy and their friends in sleek, silvery blue dresses- looked gorgeous. That bloody Paul as the best man, looking handsome and nearly as happy as the groom.

 

I watched the ceremony my parents had forced me to go to. Watched Robert and Jennifer exchange vows and rings. Watched Jennifer, the little bitch, looking ethereal and beautiful in her perfect white dress, smiling at her handsome groom, who stood, radiating with love. It made me sick… and I wished every horror I could think of on them.

 

My wedding was pathetic in comparison. Still, it was my day and I tried to be happy. My parents forced me to have Nicole as one of my bridesmaids and so I chose pink dresses, knowing Nicole’s hair would clash. Even in that horrible dress, she still looked prettier than I did on my own wedding day.

 

Three months after their wedding, I got the news from my beaming, idiotic sister that Jennifer and Robert were going to have a baby. And I smiled out of pure spiteful glee. Jennifer had gone from Jenny McGregor, golden goddess of our school to Jennifer Fairchild, teenaged mother. And as I watched Jennifer’s belly swell, I wished for a miscarriage or complications that would shatter her and Robert’s fairytale. Neither happened, and with Jennifer barely twenty-years-old, she and Robert became the parents of a pair of beautiful little twins, who everyone but me and my husband worshipped.

 

Paul and Ivy were married next, a few years later, which didn’t surprise anyone, and again I wished only the worse on the happy couple. Nicole still hadn’t found anyone and it still comforted me that I’d found a husband and she hadn’t.

 

In 1976, I was twenty-eight and pregnant with my first child. Steven and I were going to have dinner at my parents’ house, and even if Nicole was coming, I felt so excited about announcing it that I thought I’d be ill. It didn’t matter what exciting things had happened to Nicole at university or on her latest trip with her perfect friends, my mother and father would care much more about becoming grandparents.

 

When Nicole walked in the door, swooping to kiss our mother and father, I noticed how different she looked. There was some indefinable quality about her that made her shine look even more stunning than usual, and when my husband’s eyes briefly lit up in an interest that he’d never shown me, I tried to ignore it. This was my night and not even Nicole could ruin it.

 

And then he’d walked in the door.

 

I’d heard of Nicole’s boyfriend a few times through my parents. I’d actually laughed when I heard he was an American, sure that that pleased my parents to no end.

 

When Scott Hart walked into my parents’ house, I felt a swoop of sickness because he had the same look that my sister had and I knew what that infatuated, smiling look meant.

 

My parents loved Scott from the moment he set foot in their house. He was funny, he was intelligent, and he was handsome with his ginger hair and bright blue eyes and with all the reckless joie de vivre that their favorite daughter had.

 

At dinner he told jokes and stories that were always interesting and never trivial. He talked business with my dad and was endlessly kind and polite with my mother. He constantly looked at my sister, who sat flushed with happiness. They both smiled the whole night, as did my parents, sitting close together and often holding hands. A few times, Nicole actually blushed. It was sickening. My husband sat across from Scott with a blank face, but a darkness in his eyes. I knew he was jealous. And I knew my hateful sister had outdone me again.

 

Her and her handsome cowboy boyfriend, who talked about the trip to Greece they’d gone on with Paul, Ivy, “Robbie and Jenny”. The excitement of their lives and the love in their faces nearly stirred up the romantic notions in me that I’d crushed.

 

Yes…it was safe to say that I had despised Scott from the moment I met him.

 

When Scott and my sister announced their engagement that night, all the excitement in me to announce my news crumpled. Suddenly, I felt ill, my stomach paining, as if the child inside me had disintegrated. Then came my father proudly banging on Scott’s back and my mother hugging him and Nicole, and crying. I’d never seen my parents look so happy. And as my husband and I sat, shell-shocked, watching my laughing, beaming, crying family and future brother-in-law, I felt, not for the first time, that I simply did not belong with them. Steven watched Scott with genuine hate in his eyes and I felt a sting of love for my jealous, glaring husband. He was like me… simple, reasonable, and full of hate for my sister and her friends.

 

My pregnancy was celebrated only as an after-toast when I finally managed to mention it that night. When Nicole hugged me, congratulating, I felt a chill of revulsion run through me. I hated her for looking genuinely happy for me. I hated the slight look of apology she had in her eyes for ruining my announcement. But most of all I hated her.

 

Nicole and Scott got married in June of 1977. Their wedding was perfect. Perfect weather. Perfect dress. Perfect location. That morning had been spent in my mother’s kitchen watching Nicole and her friends bustle about, looking happy and fresh and lovely. I was able to stay away from the kitchen for a long while (morning sickness, I’d said… the one advantage of being pregnant that day). I was one of the bridesmaids… not because mother had forced Nicole to make me one, but because my daft sister had wanted me as one. The girl I had dressed in clashing pink at my wedding had elegant, understated dresses that made me look the closest thing to beautiful that I had ever been in my life. I wanted to be ill.

 

His whole family was there and an entire side of the church was filled up with Americans, not a one of them without red or ginger hair. I took my place at the side of the altar with Ivy and Jennifer (slut… by then, she and Robert had five children. They were all there, in one of the first pews with their grandparents. Four beautiful, well-behaved children-a boy and three girls as dark-haired as their parents- sitting in a line, and a newborn baby boy called Ben squirming in the arms of Jennifer’s mother).

 

I watched my father walk Nicole down the aisle, and as she stood beside her groom, I clenched my bouquet of flowers, willing myself not to just pass out. There was no doubt in Scott’s eyes, only grateful, all-encompassing adoration, and he and Nicole smiled their way through the entire ceremony, looking embarrassingly happy and in love.

 

What a perfect combination the lot of them made. The redheaded bride and groom, followed by the blonde matron of honor, Ivy, adjacent to her blond husband, Paul, and then Jennifer and Robert, the parallel dark bridesmaid and groomsmen. Then there was me tacked on to the end of the line of bridesmaids, making the number uneven and breaking the accidental color pattern.

 

I believed every word of their vows. They lived for each other and I didn’t doubt that Scott would lay down his life for my sister. That’s what Nicole did- inspired commitment. They kissed and everyone cheered. My parents cried the way they hadn’t at my wedding.

 

I stayed silent for the rest of that day. At the reception, Steven and I sat watching my sister and Scott dance their first dance as husband and wife, looking like figurines in an expensive music box. I watched the three couples I’d known as children dance, looking so perfectly content with their wonderful lives. I watched Robert and Jennifer’s children play, doing ring-around-the-rosy on the dance floor, making my sister and her husband laugh. Nicole picked up each of Jennifer’s children, dancing with each in turn, even baby Ben. It was a wonderful party and my husband and I didn’t say anything to anyone, and when it was over, we left without even a goodbye to the newlyweds or my parents.

 

I was ecstatic when Scott and Nicole left for America.

 

I was thirty when my father died of a heart attack. I didn’t cry at his funeral, but sat stony-faced with my husband on one side of me and my two-year-old son, Noah, on the other. I was pregnant again by then. Nicole, it turned out, was just a few months pregnant too… early enough that it was safe for her and Scott to fly home from that godforsaken ranch of his, wherever it was. I watched her, sitting next to our mother (who’d follow our father a couple years later)... my sister quietly sobbing in her husband’s arms, her belly just starting to show. Of course she’d cry, daddy’s girl… daddy’s favorite. I hoped the grief would make her miscarry.

 

I hoped grief would break every single one of them.

 

When Ivy gave birth in October to her children, a set of twins, one was the spitting image of his father and the other was still-born. The latter part made me smile.

 

When a month later I received a letter from Nicole, inviting me to see her healthy newborn baby boy, I tossed the letter away without a reply.

 

When, five years later, Nicole and Scott moved back into town with their small son, I took great care to avoid them. The town wasn’t very big, though, and now and then, when I’d take my two boys to the park, I’d get a glimpse of my sister, hand and hand with a little boy who had a sweet face and a shock of red hair. He had his father’s eyes.

 

That child gave me such a mixed feeling. One piece of me (a piece now long decayed and buried) was touched by the dear sweetness in the boy's manner. But the other part of me hated him for it... because I knew that if my parents were still alive, he'd have been the favorite grandchild. Him... and not my boys.

 

When Scott and Nicole died, I didn’t feel much of anything. Not shock, or glee, or grief… just… numbness. Somehow, I just wasn’t surprised. People as beautiful and reckless as them didn’t tend to live very long. They had always been a candle burning at both ends, as the poet said, and they’d finally been snuffed out... by a car crash that had somehow spared their little boy. Steven was pleased about the whole thing, I think. Maybe that was why he helped me put up a fight for custody of my sister’s eight-year-old son.

 

Robert and Jennifer, Alan’s godparents, fought us tooth and nail, but we were the boy's blood and won out. They were already devastated over the death of their friends, and I struck out at them by taking away the one piece of Scott and Nicole left. Nicole’s only child was mine. It was more revenge than I ever thought I would get.

 

But it wasn’t enough. I prayed to God to smite them all, not just Robert and his slut wife, but Ivy and Paul as well…to always bestow nothing but misery like this on them. I cursed them. All of them. I’d make sure that whatever of Scott and Nicole that was left in Alan (his eyes… his idiotic father’s eyes) would be stamped out.

 

I’d make sure that their lives... and the lives of their children... would always be nothing but hell.