Sisters

I have a picture of my sister, Char. Perfect—this pose of her. She is eleven years old. Her untrimmed hair flails across her face in an erratic ocean wind.
She is standing atop a large drift of ocean-rotted wood flushed from the seas by tide. She is glorious. She is King of the Driftwood. She is master of her fate.
She is wearing a short, purple dress, baring bony knees. Her faded socks have dropped to her ankles. Her feet are floppy in too-large nondescript boy shoes. The whole ensemble comes from the goodwill of strangers. They are charity clothes. She hated most the charity clothes. The charity of those who would remind her later in school or church that she was wearing their old clothes. As if they had a right to tell her publicly what she already knew.
Char hated charity clothes for the same reason my mother loved them: they signified poverty. For my hippy mother, raised in comfortable middle class, this was an attainment. A virtue. Not for Char. For my sister it was a thing to escape. She pushed away from charity like a drowning girl, pushing against the ocean floor to gain clean, fresh air.
She is bold here, in this picture. She challenges the world. She knows herself and knows truth. In this moment, she rules the world in charity clothes. Her face is sassy with a sardonic grin of nearly hate. That glare of her eye barely conceals a secret mind shaking its fist at an unjust world and swearing it will never wear charity clothes again.