Growing up, I was the musical one and my sister was the artistic one.  I played piano and clarinet; she drew horses and princesses. 

She drew a lot of horses, honestly.  Had a real horse fixation.  Shocking, I know, in a young teenaged girl.

She’s a year and a half older than me; the way that school enrollment deadlines work where we grew up, she was two years ahead in school.  We went to the same elementary school, but when I hit the fourth grade she had graduated to the sixth grade: middle school.

That year, my fourth grade, there was a school-wide themed drawing competetion to celebrate the Year of the Horse.  I entered a drawing of a horse in mid-leap, drawn from a reference photo I found in the school library.  It wasn’t a great drawing—my sister later aptly (if a bit viciously) christened it the Weiner Horse—but it was pretty decent for a freehand drawing by an untrained nine-year-old.

And it won.  And that just killed my sister.  Killed her dead, not so much because my horse had too long of a body but because she would surely (and this is no doubt true) have won the contest hands-down if she hadn’t gone off to middle school.  That was kind of hard on her.

The second place winner was a large, impressionistic portrait of a horse head that would have been really goddam impressive if it weren’t a tracing of the large, impressionistic portrait of a horse head featured on the poster advertising the contest.  Talk about brass balls, kid.