You know sometimes you meet these people who just seem perfect? They're pretty, nice, and wouldn't think of causing any trouble – in fact they're a little too perfect. Well that's how it was when our mom got married. The guy had this daughter, Ella, who did everything she was asked without a word and was exactly that seemingly perfect person. Now my sister and I acted on our best behavior as well – I mean, we weren't bad kids either – but she just appeared to have no faults.
We (my sister and I) kind of expected the act to die down eventually. Who can possibly act perfect forever right? Well guess what? It never died down. It was perfect Ella all the time.
Now being perfect is nice and all, but as you can imagine it can get a little…old. Because after a year – a year – of never getting in trouble, never smarting off, even cooking and cleaning without being asked, the old 'rents start to pull out "the phrase." You know exactly the one I'm talking about. "You should be more like Ella," which usually accompanied by phrases such as "Ella is just so helpful," "Why don't you try harder like Ella? You're older than her!" And while these exchanges are going on Angel Ella is sitting quietly in the corner embroidering her father's initials into a handkerchief.
About halfway through this year my sister and I started to have a theory about Ella. The more time we spent with her the more she seemed fake and shallow, but not in a vain sort of way but in an airheaded-can't-think-deep-enough-to-be-an-interesting-human-being sort of way. To be completely honest, the only flaws she had were that she wasn't that bright, and she wasn't that interesting. She always had her head in the clouds, and even as she did housework she was humming softly to herself and had a glossy look in her eyes. So that's when we realized that she must be – to put it lightly – a little lacking upstairs.
At the time I was fifteen, my sister, Portia, was thirteen, and Ella was twelve. So seeing the clear disadvantage she had in these areas, we tried to be helpful older step-sisters and instill a little personality and wit in her. Unfortunately this was a completely fruitless effort, for she would space out while we read her poems and literature and would laugh when we told her a joke but the look in her eyes said clearly she hadn't gotten it at all. After about two months of this we gave up and kept to ourselves, which made us look even worse for isolating our poor step-sister. But what were we supposed to do? She wasn't fun to hang out with and didn't even seem to like it that much.
Two years passed like this, Ella the golden girl and my sister and I forever paling in comparison.
Until, our step-father died.
None of us saw it coming. He was a healthy guy – wasn't too fat, wasn't too skinny, didn't drink too much – so when he suddenly had a heart attack and was gone in a matter of moments, it was a real shock. Ella took it the hardest of course, then our mom, they cried together for three days straight without eating, but my sister and I shed some tears over him too. He was a nice man, he brought us presents when he went away for business along with Ella, took us on carriage rides and tried to bond with is, and we were generally fond of him. The thing was, we never thought of him as a father. We had a father, well, had. We already lost ours to the war, so in a way it was good that we weren't more attached – that way it wasn't like losing a father twice. We especially felt bad for our mom, losing two husbands is unimaginable.
We did our best to be helpful during this time, making meals we knew would go mostly uneaten and keeping the house neat and in order. We kept this up well after the funeral. They finally started to come out of mourning about three months later. That's when they started to change. I'm not sure what it was but Mother started to get lazy and grouchy. She bossed Ella around, she bossed us around, she let a stray cat in and called it Lucifer for some unknown reason – the keeping of the stray cat part, not the name; it really was a demon cat. Ella of course never complained and took all of Mother's crap without a word, although there was less humming now. We were a bit more resilient and seeing that we weren't going to be good subjects to take her grief and frustration out on she focused all of her energies on taking care of the demon cat and yelling at Ella, so once again we kept to ourselves.
Years passed and the cat ran away, so running out of things to take care of – and not wanting to release her human punching bag for verbal remarks – she decided to fix us up and find us husbands. Our time was now spent running from dress shop to shoe shop to hat shop spending the money left to us by the late Ella's dad and so frugally conserved by yours truly when we really just wanted to read under the weeping willow out back or even the nice reading nook in our room. But alas, instead of reading books we now walked around with them on our heads.
There's something I need to make clear here; my sister and I were both a suitable marrying ages, Ella was too but Mother refused to see her as anything more than a servant – we would try to lighten the load a bit but she always shooed us away so we let her do what she did best. Anyway, as I was saying, this whole time she did all of this preparation for us to be snatched up by a suitable suitor when she never actually introduced us to any suitor. She didn't even look for one! We bought dress after dress to strut around the store we bought them in the next day, I think we would have been better off not even buying them and just standing in the window in the dresses as part time mannequins, since that's pretty much what Mother was trying to turn us into. We had liked the idea at first – because it would be nice to be married and get away from our crazed mother and spacy-abused step-sister – but this was not what we had in mind. We were beginning to wonder if we would ever get the opportunity to meet a nice man.
Luckily, one day there was a knock on the door. After this things will start to get a little more familiar to you if you haven't already caught on. It was an invitation from the Prince sent out to all of the eligible bachelorettes in the kingdom. As you can imagine Mother was ecstatic and her crazy was kicked up about twenty notches, but I have to admit we were pretty excited too. Even Ella looked like she understood what was going on and was excited. Unfortunately Mother burst her bubble.
"What? You go to the ball? How preposterous! How could an ugly little ragdoll like you go to the ball? What will you wear? Those clothes? They're stained and reek of stale cider, in fact when you walked in they would start calling out Ciderella! There is absolutely no way you're going to that ball!"
Well as you know she did get to go to the ball with the help from a fairy godmother , or so she says, we kind of believe the old lady down the street just handed her a gown through the window and gave her a lift and she imagined the rest of it. My sister and I did see her at the ball dancing with the prince, and we did recognize her. We pretended not to know her because if Mother knew then she probably would have strangled the poor thing. She looked beautiful of course; she was never an ugly ragdoll like Mother said because she was the perfect, pretty, nice girl who always did as she was told. A perfect candidate for a princess, so it was no surprise when a lost shoe and a day later she and the Prince were wed. And much unlike they story (although the story is hardly true at all anyway) we did attend the wedding and were very happy for our step-sister, mostly because maybe she wouldn't have to put up with Mother anymore – and if we were jealous at all it was for that reason and that reason only.
Luckily at the wedding Portia and I both met some nice guys and we hit it off really well. I'm dating a baker named Jim and Portia a florist named Phil. We both moved out so I guess you could say everyone got a happily ever after, except Mother, but she picked up some more stray cats so she's ok. My name is Joy and there were no wicked step-sisters.