Samantha

Noone would have believed that Samantha and Sally had grown up under the same roof, with the same parents, and the same advantages that wealth brings. Despite Sally's occasional meanness, she was kind and generous at the core; as soon as we got to know each other better, she had no problem casting off the prejudices she had borrowed from others and embracing me as a friend, and eventually as someone to love. Samantha, however, was a different story.

It was a perpetual irony that she was the first daughter and yet was destined to live under Sally's shadow. She was not as beautiful, intelligent, or charming as her sister. And while her sister inspired real affection from her friends, Samantha's associations were loose and fueled by expensive gifts. In fact, it was not an exaggeration to say that all of her so-called friends despised her secretly, as most hired entourages do. Her worst quality, which seemed to me like an incurable congenital defect, was her painfully obnoxious voice and the outrageous things she said with it. If anatomists and neuroscientists ever discover a region of the brain that filters annoying utterances from everyday speech, Samantha would surely lack it. She had a complete inability to be modest or graceful when it came to the riches she had the fortune of being born into. It was not an unusual thing for her to squeal in her shrill voice how she preferred Prada over Gucci because of some pointless subtlety in the stitching of the fabric. Or she might casually giggle that she had burnt out the engine in her Mercedes because she had forgotten to get her oil changed at the dealership (tee hee!). Or my favorite, she always spoke with disdain about any homeless person she happened to come across, wondering aloud why they couldn't just be millionaires like her dad.

Noone could figure out whether she was just an entitled bitch rubbing everyone's nose in her wealth, or whether she truly and sincerely didn't realize that the her speech was repulsive. It was even difficult to decide which scenario was more terrible. The sad thing is that neither of these was probably right. My own theory was that she was deeply insecure, and that her constant references to wealth and money were her attempts to sublimate financial worth into self-worth.

Her strategy eventually changed; at some point it must have become clear to her that she could never be as loved as Sally. So instead of transforming into her sister, Samantha put herself to the task of accomplishing the reverse. After all, it is much easier to pull someone down from a height than to climb it yourself.