My sister was talking on her cell phone, the one that rang incessantly. I was 15, she was 17, and she was driving us to school with one hand on the wheel, the other clutching her sleek, green metallic phone. One foot was on the gas, and the other was up on the seat so the sun shone on her tan, bent knee. She raised up to look in the rearview mirror and adjusted a few strands of her shiny blond bob. After pursing her plump, pink lips, she looked over at me.

Apparently I was gawking, because she gave me a “Why don’t you take a picture” look, and I quickly turned away. At that moment, I realized that I was sitting beside the epitome of cool, and that I was absolutely nothing like her.

My mom told me that when she found out she was pregnant with me—just 20 short months after having my older sister, Megan—she immediately started to prepare Megan for the experience of having a little sister. She wanted Megan to know that my arrival would change her life in a positive way.

“You two are going to be best friends,” she had told her.

But for many years, we were anything but.

The small gap in our ages made room for a vast amount of competition. We fought constantly.

After seeing my sister in the car that day, I knew that I wanted to be more like her. More importantly, I wanted to be less like me.

Megan flitted about the house weekend after weekend while I sat in my room and did homework. I watched her curl her hair and put on the perfect amount of blue sparkly eye shadow. She made sure that her blue baby-tee fit snugly and showed just the right amount of midriff. Then she’d prance down the stairs, leaving the smell of Lucky Brand perfume in her wake, off to join her crew at some party where there would probably be plenty of adoring boys. Meanwhile, I was set for a riveting night of algebra.

I completely immersed myself in my studies, aching for something I could do better than my sister. I did do better than her in school, but that didn’t make me happy. I was the smart one, but Megan was everything else times 10.

One night, when my parents weren’t around to mediate, Megan and I had the blow-up of all blow-ups in the hallway between our upstairs bedrooms. I don’t remember how it started. All I remember was the screaming, how loud it was and how long it lasted. I threw out every hurtful description of her that I had ever conjured. She did the same. She was a “neurotic, attention-hungry hussy with a low IQ,” and I was a “fat pig with no friends.”

I walked away to my room, and she followed me, still spitting insults. I sat down on my bed, dejected. She stood in my doorway, her hand on her hip, ready for my next attack.

“Just get out,” I said.

That evening, I decided that I was finished fighting. I couldn’t compete with her anymore because all that did was make me miserable. I had to focus on Kaitlyn for once, not Megan.

So I did what smart people do: I made a list. I wrote down all of the things I liked about myself. I was a good student, and I had a sense of humor. I didn’t consider myself pretty, but I was willing to admit and document in the list that I was “slightly pleasant-looking.”

Next, I tried to be happy for Megan. I tried saying, “Good for her,” to myself when Megan did well in her basketball game, landed a solo in choir or had a new boyfriend. At first, it nauseated me. But eventually, I reached a level of indifference, which was an improvement from hating her.

A few months after that, Megan graduated and went off to Kansas State University. I felt like I had more room to come into my own. Outside her shadow, I started to branch out. I joined my school’s show choir, made efforts to get to know some of my classmates and actually went to football games, basketball games and dances. Gradually, I came out of my introverted state and found that people wanted to be friends with me.

But something else happened that year: I was surprised to find that I missed Megan. I went into her room once and lay on her Hawaiian bedspread, looking up at the glow-in-the-dark stars that we put on her ceiling when we were little. I smiled when I remembered how high we had to jump on her bed to stick them on and how hard we laughed when she fell off. It made me wonder what we would have been like if we hadn’t argued so much or spent so much time trying to hurt each other.

Around October of that year, Megan called me. She asked how I was, and said she wanted me to come visit her at school. At first I just sat on the phone in silence. I didn’t know how to respond.

“Well, you know,” she said. “I just thought if you wanted to see Manhattan and everything, then you could come up, but it’s not a big deal. You don’t have to come.”

I finally found my voice. “Uh, no, that’s cool. I mean, yeah, I wanna come.”

I waited anxiously for her to respond. “Awesome,” she said. “Ask Mom, then. It’ll be really fun, Kait.”

The phone call was the beginning of the healing process. Somehow, we both knew that we wanted to be closer to each other, and we both wanted to find out how to make that happen. I did go to visit that weekend, and though it was awkward at times, we had a lot of fun. I loved going out with her and her friends, but I was perfectly happy sitting there on her dorm bed, eating Easy Mac and talking about where I wanted to go to college.

That summer, before my senior year of high school, Megan told me on the phone that she had been jealous of me, too. She envied how independent I was and how dedicated I was to my schoolwork. She said she had always wished she was as intelligent as me. This news overwhelmed me. I lay there on the wood floor of my bedroom with a blanket balled up under my head and my feet planted against my second dresser drawer. We were both alternating between fits of laughter and bouts of tears.

As we were getting off the phone, Megan fell silent, and I knew she was trying to say something. “I love you, Kait,” she said softly.

I smiled, and my eyes started to sting again. “I love you, too, Meg,” I said.

My mom had been right all along. Megan and I were truly meant to be best friends.