My Little Sister,Madeline

by C.E. Hyun

My little sister, Madeline, was born when I was fifteen and Bea was fourteen, and I remember our dad picking us up from school and driving us to the hospital. At the hospital, we found Madeline in my mom’s arms, asleep. She was three hours old, born while I took a math test in Miss Farr’s class and Bea bounced basketballs in gym. Our practical mother wouldn’t let us stay long. (We had homework and life goes on, even on the day your baby sister is born.) Bea and I wanted to see Madeline open her eyes, or at least see what she looked like without her regulation hospital hat, and so I gently tugged the hat off her head.


Her head was huge. I tried to put the hat back on her head, but her skin was all soft from being born and her entire forehead folded like warm bread. It was the most bizarre but endearing sight.

Fast forward five years. No longer is Madeline content to lie back in her rocker and gurgle. She walks and talks. Her temper tantrums are something to behold. She had a habit of wrinkling her forehead when she was mad so that she looked like she was about to sprout horns. I loved to tease her about it, just to see her roar with rage. One time she actually charged, head lowered to butt me like a triceratops.

There was something simultaneously predatory and damsel-in-distress about my little sister. She used to be afraid of the water, and we had to coax her into the pool with much cajoling and scolding. Then she would cling to us as though she wasn’t the one wearing arm floaties. Then the summer that she was seven, Madeline found her inner mermaid. We went to the pool every day (amazing to see a seven-year-old do the butterfly). After the requisite laps, we would play tag. Of course ninety-nine percent of the time, Madeline got to be It.


It used to be that I would swim away a bit, wait for her to splash close, and then step out of her way. Not anymore. I would resurface to breathe and there Madeline would be, zooming toward me with her giant goggles and a big smile on her face. Terrifying to be on the receiving end of such an attack, not to mention how much pleasure my little sister derived from capturing me.

                                                                            ***

Madeline was now nine, living with our parents in Orange County, California. Our parents were going to Korea for a funeral and Mad had school, so I’d arranged to come home for the week to take care of her.

The first thing Madeline said after our parents left and it was just the two of us was: “You can’t boss me around, just because Uhm-ma and Ah-bba aren’t here. You have to listen to me too.” It was her greatest grievance, that she was the little one. Madeline was very concerned with equity and the rights of little sisters.

“Don’t even start. I always listen to you. Now where’s my hug?” The last time I had seen Madeline was over Christmas break. I lived only an hour away, but had been too bogged down by school in the last month to come home. I opened my arms, but Madeline ran away from me as though I had the plague. “Hey, we need to talk about our plans for the week,” I called after her. “What do you want to do for dinner?”


Madeline came running back. “Can we eat out?”

“Sure, but wait. Wait! Hug!” I said, turning in a circle as she ran around me. “Why are you so anti-hug?”

“I don’t want to hug.”

“You know awesome little sisters give hugs. And they always obey their awesome big sisters.” Before Madeline could retort, I said, “Let’s get dinner, but first you need to go upstairs and change.”

Madeline started to leave, then turned back. “Help me choose an outfit.”

Ten minutes and two outfits later, we were on our way to dinner. At the restaurant, Madeline told me she was doing a project on ocean pollution at school that was due next week. She was going to decorate her presentation board with otters, whales, and seals. That reminded me:

“So are you still planning a career as a zookeeper?” I asked. The last time I saw her, that was what Madeline told me she wanted to be. She was furious when I teased her that as a zookeeper, she would mostly be working as a glorified janitor.

Madeline raised her chin. “No, I’m going to be a marine biologist.”

“Is that right? Well, that’ll make Ah-bba happy.” Our dad was a scientist.

“I’m going to pet sea otters,” Madeline said happily. “Their fur is so soft. Did you know that they have the thickest fur of any animal? I read it in Zoobooks. They have no blubber. That’s why they have so much hair.”

                                                                     ***

On Friday, I drove to Alice Canyon Elementary to pick up Madeline.  Standing under a tree, I watched her bounce out of school with her best friend, Indu Chowdhury, a cute but glum girl who I think will write a lot of dark and suicidal poetry in her teens, and then afterwards grow up to be an angry intellectual. (The girl was nine and already all cynical about Harry Potter.)

I heard someone behind me and turned to see Indu’s mom. She recognized me and we chatted as we waited for Madeline and Indu to saunter over. She said she noticed how creative Madeline was and that she liked how Madeline and Indu balanced each other. 

“I’m glad they’re such good friends,” she said.

“They’re both good girls,” I agreed. The type other parents liked arranging play dates with because they were polite and did as they were told, would play nicely with extra siblings, and were unlikely to have any kind of corrupting influence because their parents monitored their activities and kept them carefully sheltered.

Still, I thought how Madeline and her friends all looked so happy and harmonious from a distance, when I also knew about the competitive meanness, the third-grade cliques and alliances, the scary things they said about each other on their social networking sites, if they had access to them. How having your own phone, designer clothes and accessories—things you questioned whether a nine-year-old really ought to have—could improve your social status in the eyes of your fellow third-graders. I thought this as Madeline and Indu approached us with happy smiles, how Madeline had told me she thought Indu was sometimes a braggart and manipulative, and I wondered what grievances Indu had against Madeline.

                                                                            ***

After dinner, I found Madeline in her room playing with her Littlest Pet Shops.  “Let’s go for a walk,” I said.

“I’m playing.”

“Please?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Come on, we can get Yogurtland. And on the way there we can play Harry Potter Twenty Questions.”

Madeline considered. “Fine.”

I know, I know, bribery is wrong, but it’s effective. By the time we walked to Yogurtland and started back, it was getting dark. Still, there was enough light that Mad wanted to stop and play in the dried up creek bed that lined the trail close to our house.

It warmed me, watching her. I didn’t even know what there really was to do down there, but she seemed to be having a good time. I did feel a strange pang watching her. She was an only child in a lot of ways, so I was impressed at her ability to play alone. At the same time, she was a girl who adored play dates and was continually jealous of her friends who had younger siblings. I wanted this little sister—who read Harry Potter and loved to explore creek beds—to stay with me forever and not be the SoCal girl I already saw hints of her becoming.

It was then I noticed that it had gotten abruptly windy and there was no one else around. Along the part of the trail we were on, the path was lined with eucalyptus trees. They loomed tall and dark above us, almost intimidating as their long leaves swayed. I heard a weird squawking and the air seemed to crackle.

I was suddenly taken back to the opening scene in A Wrinkle in Time, when fourteen-year-old Meg Murry comes downstairs one dark and stormy night and is visited by the mysterious Mrs. Whatsit. Was something similar happening to us? I half-expected a magical air balloon or a wizard’s moving castle to come sailing down through the trees to meet us. The sense of foreboding grew.

“Mad,” I called. “Let’s go home.”

“Wait! Five more minutes.”

“Mad, get up here right now!” Paranoia made my voice sound a lot nastier than it needed to be.

She came scrambling up the creek bed, glaring at me and ready to start pouting, but I cut her off. “Mad, when I tell you to do something, you need to listen to me right away. Do not argue. Now let’s go home.” I grabbed her hand.

Madeline pulled away. “I’m going to tell Uhm-ma that you were mean to me.”

“You can tell her whatever you want. Now come on.” I reached for her hand, ready to pick her up and carry her if she resisted. There was that weird squawking noise again. Some kind of ominous bird? How did it get dark so soon, and why was there no one else around? How could Madeline be so oblivious to the danger in the air?

Then: “Eww!”

Madeline was staring up and pointing, and I felt something wet hit against my hair. I touched my hand to where the wetness had hit; it was not water.

“It pooped on you!”

I turned and saw what looked like a green parrot fly back up into the eucalyptus trees. Was that the weird squawking? Suddenly, there were more of them. Lots of squawking, and Madeline and I watched a group of parrots fly around in a circle before they went back up into the trees.

“Wow, are those… do you think they escaped or do parrots live in Southern California?” I asked.

“I thought you knew everything about animals.”

“I didn’t grow up here. We had different animals on the East Coast, remember? We had deer and once turkeys in our backyard. You cried because you thought we were going to capture the turkeys and eat them.” I looked back up into the eucalyptus trees. The parrots kept squawking, but we didn’t see any more of them. I held out my hand. “Come on, let’s head back. It’s getting late.”

                                                                                  ***

After washing up, I went to check on Madeline. She stood in front of the mirror, carefully combing her hair. She was wearing a pale purple nightgown with sheer princess sleeves. She looked like a little flower.

To ruin this pretty picture, Madeline turned toward me and perched a black velvet headband with a ridiculous pink bow on her head. I called it her Dolores Umbridge headband.

“You still wear that?” I asked.

“Yes. This headband is awesome.” She flounced past me.

I followed her to her room where I helped her clean up her toys. She’d scattered them all over her bed and floor, and she had tons of tiny beads and accessories.


“When are you leaving to L.A.?” she asked.

“When Uhm-ma and Ah-bba come back, next Thursday.”

“How come Bea didn’t come too?”

“She has a job. And New York is really far. L.A. is only an hour away.”

Madeline put the last box of toys away. “You always leave me behind.”

It was the way she said it that took me back. Not plaintive, not petulant, but like an unchangeable statement of fact. “What are you talking about? Everything I do revolves around you, and you know it.”

“I can never do the things you and Bea do.”

“You’re nine, silly girl. And besides, you have so many cool things. Like all those Littlest Pet Shops? You have what, over forty of them? I had two. And you have such an attitude and totally get away with it. Do you know how strict Uhm-ma was when we were your age? She would not laugh if we talked back.” I went over to her bookshelf. “What do you want me to read you?”

Madeline perked up, somersaulting over the bed to join me. “Junie B. Jones,” she said, referring to a popular children’s series about a crazy little girl who was always up to crazy, weird things and notable for inventing her own variation of the English language.

“Why can’t we read something wholesome and morally uplifting like Little House on the Prairie?”

“Little House is for goody-goodies.”

“Oh sorry. Forgot. You’re a baddie-baddie.”

“No. I’m a cutie-cutie.” Madeline grabbed the Junie B. Jones book she wanted and jumped onto her bed. When I sat down next to her, she handed me the book and took one of my hands. “Rub my forehead.”

“I can’t hold the book open and turn the pages at the same time I’m rubbing your head.”

“Try.” Madeline lay back and closed her eyes, hands folded over her stomach.

So I read and I rubbed. After two chapters, I tucked Madeline in and turned off the light. “Good night, little one. Don’t wake me up tomorrow until after nine.”

Madeline smirked. “Not if I get hungry. You have to feed me.”

“If you wait until after nine, I’ll make you something better than cereal.” I kissed her forehead. “Sweet dreams.”

I turned on her mushroom nightlight and went downstairs. Later our mom called to check in and see how Mad and I were doing. I told her that I was planning on taking Madeline to the beach on Sunday and that I would make sure her science project was ready for next week.

“Is she being good?” my mom asked.

“For the most part.”

“What about you?”

“I’m always good.”

When I went back upstairs, I went to Madeline’s room and watched her in her gigantic, full-size bed. She was burrowed under the covers like a sand crab, hugging a pillow and with her ridiculous Dolores Umbridge headband still in her hair.

                                                                       ***

When we lived back East, she used to run and laugh under the sprinkler in her Winnie-the-Pooh bikini. One winter, we built a snowman in the backyard, then took a picture of Madeline hugging it in her bright red snowsuit. I remembered back when she slept in her crib, we shared a bedroom wall and I could hear her talk and coo to herself in the morning, how it was the most warming sound to wake up to. How back during my undergraduate, she sent me letters on giant lined paper as she first learned how to write, later cards with elaborate drawings and comics. How she liked our dad to cut mangos in half, slice the fruit inside, and then flip the skin inside-out so that the fruit stuck up in little cubes she could pluck off with a fork. How her first word was the Korean word for strawberry.

I never wanted her to suffer. I wanted her to be pretty and popular, smart but not too smart when it came to perceiving sadness and suffering in others. I didn’t want her to be weighted down by anxiety. I liked her plucky little heroines: Ramona Quimby, Karana from Island of the Blue Dolphins, Chihiro in Spirited Away, Coraline, even Junie B. Jones. I thought about how you were selfish over who you love, and how for me, that person was my little sister, Madeline.