That Time A Raisin in the Sun Turned My Sister Against Me
Our AP Lit classroom smells like old chalk and the peppermints Ms. Henderson keeps in that chipped mason jar on her desk. It’s on the second floor by the stairwell, and the radiator clanks so loud in March you can barely hear yourself think most days. I was a sophomore skipping ahead to senior Lit, the only underclassman in the whole class, which meant I spent the first month just trying not to embarrass myself. My sister Lila was 18 months older, already a senior, so I mostly just stuck to her side anyway. We walked to class together, shared a granola bar she stole from the cafeteria before first period, copied each other’s reading notes. It was fine, until we got to A Raisin in the Sun.
Lila had been talking about this unit since before the first day of school. Ms. Henderson does a full cast read-through every year, lets kids fight over the main parts, and Lila decided before we even cracked the textbook that Beneatha Younger was hers. She made this crinkly neon pink sticky note that said BENEATHA 2024 and stuck it right to the lid of her laptop, so she saw it every time she opened it. She spent three hours on a Saturday watching YouTube tutorials to figure out how to get that loose coiled silk press she said Beneatha would have—“no straightening to fit what white people think is pretty,” she’d told me, wiping product off her hands on my favorite sweatshirt. I nodded, I was half paying attention, scrolling TikTok at the time. I knew it mattered to her, I just… didn’t mark it as big as I should have, I guess.
Casting was on a Tuesday. Lila was on yearbook duty that morning, taking photos of the track team for the spring issue, and she was running late. Ms. Henderson went down the list of parts, Walters, Ruths, Mama, got to Beneatha, and no one raised their hand for a full ten seconds. I’d stayed up late reading the play the night before, I’d thought Beneatha was sharp and funny and way more interesting than any of the other characters, and I was bored, so I raised my hand. Ms. Henderson grinned and wrote my name next to the part, handed me a highlighted script. Five minutes later, Lila pushed open the classroom door, rain dripping off her hood, her camera strap digging into her shoulder, and looked right at the script in my lap. She didn’t say anything, just walked to a seat three rows over, didn’t sit next to me like she usually did.
I caught up to her after class, I said I was sorry, I forgot, I’d go tell Ms. Henderson right now to switch us. She just kicked a crumpled soda can across the sidewalk and said it was fine, no big deal. But it was big. That night at home, she didn’t save me the last of the garlic bread for dinner, like she always does. She took the extra blanket off my side of the bed when we watched Netflix, even though I always get cold. She stopped leaving her math homework out for me to copy, even though I’m terrible at math. It was all these small, quiet cuts, you know? The kind that hurt worse than yelling.
A week later we got to the big fight scene between Beneatha and Walter. The one where she yells that Walter’s a disgrace to his dad’s memory, that he’s throwing everything away for a stupid liquor store. I got into it, I guess. I’d had a fight with my boyfriend that morning, I was all keyed up, so I yelled it, my voice cracked a little at the end, and when I finished the whole class clapped. Ms. Henderson said that was the best reading of that line she’d ever gotten in 22 years of teaching. I glowed, I looked over at Lila waiting for her to roll her eyes at me like she usually does when I show off, and she just stared at her notebook, doodling some flower I couldn’t make out, didn’t even look up. After class, as we were walking out, she mumbled so only I could hear it: “You really went all in for it, huh?” I snapped back, I said I offered to switch, why are you being like this? She stopped walking, looked at me, and said “It doesn’t matter anymore. You wanted it more than I did anyway.”
And the worst part is, she was right. I did want it more, by then. I liked the clapping, I liked Ms. Henderson hanging my photo on the wall of good student work by the door. I liked that the other kids in class started saying hi to me in the hall, because I was the underclassman who nailed Beneatha. I didn’t steal it on purpose, but I didn’t push to give it up when I had the chance, not really. A part of me wanted to keep it, more than I wanted to make her happy. That’s the part that sticks, you know? It wasn’t just a mistake, it was me being selfish.
It’s three months later now. Lila graduated last week. She’s moving to New York for college in two weeks, she got into the gender studies program she’s been wanting since we were kids. We’re not not talking, now. She said happy birthday to me last month, I went to her graduation party and took photos of her with her friends. But it’s not the same, not like it was before. She didn’t ask me to help her pack her boxes. She posted a photo of us for graduation on Instagram, but it was from two years ago, at the beach, before the whole Raisin thing. Last night I was looking for my phone charger in the trash can by her desk, and I saw that neon pink sticky note, crumpled up, BENEATHA 2024 half peeled off.
I don’t know if she hates me, not really. Maybe it’ll get better when she’s gone, maybe we’ll get back to normal over Christmas break. Maybe it’s just one of those stupid, small things that happens between sisters, that no one ever really talks about or fixes. I just know that sometimes I pick up my copy of A Raisin in the Sun, the one with my highlighted Beneatha lines, and I can’t even open it without feeling that twist in my stomach. It was just a high school part. It shouldn’t matter this much. But it does. (Word count: 1182)
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