Sibling UNRivalry - What's Your Favorite Sibling Story?

I am the oldest by three years. My younger sister and I have never had a fairy tale sisterly relationship, but there was a moment the spring of my sophomore year in college, that she and I could have played the leading role in any Sisterhood movie!

A decade before the AFLAC Duck was a household quack, we were AFLAC kids. One of the largest employers in Columbus, Georgia, our mother worked for the company. Every year during Employee Appreciation Week, AFLAC would close down Great Adventure’s SIX FLAGS Over Georgia in Atlanta and all the employees and their families took over the theme park for an entire day.

Relatively still a small town, in Columbus, neither of us could ever really hide… Like everyone who grows up in a small town, there’s never really any anonymity… We were always one another’s “sister” or “Angie’s daughter”… In the basically black and white town our features stood out; each of us with our wild, long, curly locks and caramel skin and hauntingly similar laughing voices, although younger, she towers above my 5’4 frame by several inches and has the personality to match her stature!

That Saturday in the park was just as jubilant as every year, special picnic lunches and festivities. While running through the park getting on every nauseating ride, we dragged her boyfriend with us in line to jump onto the Looping Starship. There is a ride like this in every carnival in the world – usually in the form of a Viking Ship that swings back and forth until it spins all the way around! Although the lines were long, they were not the customary hour to two hour waits of a usual park day. The lines were also manageable as monitors playing great episodes of Tom and Jerry and Animaniacs made the time fly by.

While my sister and her boyfriend watched cartoons something else caught my eye from the back of the line… a group of teenage boys were pushing past waiting families making their way to the front. You could hear fathers and some kids fussing and starting to yell, but they continued to snake their way through the line laughing and horse-playing. The boy in the front caught my glare as he neared where we stood.

We had been waiting about half an hour and I stood behind my sister and her boyfriend in line. She was standing facing me with her boyfriend facing her in between us, gazing up at the monitors when the boys reached us in the line.

I don’t know what got into me, I should have just stepped aside like everyone else was doing but I turned around to face them. The boy leading just smiled looking down at me and gave me a “move out of the way” nod as I smiled in my annoyingly sweet way back at him and obnoxiously clamped my hands onto the railings on either side of me and said,

“I DON’T THINK SO!”

He laughed mocking me and moved to grab my arm.

I felt the ground move under my feet as I was swiped aside and slammed into my sister’s boyfriend in front of me!

As I struggled to gain my footing I turned and realized that the force hadn’t come from in front of me by the laughing boy bully, but from behind me!

My sister had crossed over her six foot tall, all muscle – cartoon mesmerized man who was completely oblivious to what was going on. She had managed to climb over both of us in a fraction of a second and grabbed onto the boy’s threatening hand before he had the chance to touch me!

I couldn’t help but burst into a fit of giggles as I heard her scream shaking her head in defiance with one hand up in the air gesturing, and the other pushing the kid back in the center of his chest,

“Uh huh! WANNA PLAY WITH SOMEONE YOUR OWN SIZE!?”

My giggles persisted as she pushed back her boyfriend who was still dazed and confused determined to handle the situation on her own!

She continued,

“Don’t you DARE think of touching her! Get your ASS back to the end of the line!”

The crowd around us was lit as the operators of the line finally sprung into action and ejected the boys from the line to a round of applause!

And I continued to giggle…!

And boy was she on FIRE!

I turned back to the line still laughing while she fussed at me for my boldness and her boyfriend for being so lost in Tom and Jerry that he was about to let his two girls be beaten up by a gang of bullies!

She turned to me still aggravated,

“You only did that crap knowing I’d be here to cover your ass!”

It hadn’t really occurred to me that she would jump to defend my stupidity, but there was this great bubble of pride and comfort that grew inside of me knowing that she would have taken on a whole group of boys to protect me!

We laughed and made fun of one another while finishing the ride and everyone in the line congratulated us.

When we finally stumbled off, we were greeted by our mother who had already heard countless stories from her coworkers of how her “daughters had stood up for one another to a group of bullies! How PROUD she must be of us!”

My sister rolled her eyes and yelled, “Next time mom, I’ll let her get beat up!”

Ok… so we’re not quite the Sisterhood that you see in the movies, but who needs that kind of sisterly love when you’ve got a little sister who will stand up for you when you have a BIG mouth?