Violet Markey and Eleanor Markey

Violet Markey and Eleanor Markey are sisters who are also one another’s closest confidantes. Their relationship joins ordinary adolescent intimacy—shared college dreams, a joint website, and playful reversals of their personalities—to a loss that Violet struggles to remember without also blaming herself. Eleanor’s death ends their shared daily life, but not the bond itself: Violet’s later effort to name what Eleanor meant to her becomes a way of keeping her sister present without pretending the loss can be undone.

Identity and Background

After the sisters moved to Indiana, they imagined futures beyond Bartlett, Indiana, whose small-town setting made them feel out of place. They talked about the places they might go and people they might meet, often after their parents had gone to bed. Depending on the weather, they sat outside or stayed indoors. Their conversations made the future something they could picture together, even when the lives they imagined would eventually take them in different directions.

Their closeness was not based on sameness. Eleanor could be smart, stubborn, moody, and funny; she could lose her temper and be mean, but she was also sweet and protective of the people she loved. Violet remembers her as someone who always had her back, even when they fought. Most importantly, Eleanor did not judge her. Violet could tell her anything and be both her best and worst self, secure in the knowledge that a quarrel would not end their friendship. Calling Eleanor her best friend therefore describes more than affection: it identifies the trust and durable acceptance at the center of their sisterhood.

Shared Plans and Creative Work

The sisters’ ideas about the future took practical form in EleanorandViolet.com, an online magazine they started after moving to Indiana. Its posts offered two deliberately different perspectives on fashion, beauty, boys, books, and life. Their collaboration turned sisterhood into a public creative project: the appeal lay partly in the contrast between their viewpoints and partly in the fact that those viewpoints belonged together. After Eleanor’s friend Gemma Sterling mentioned the site in an interview, its following tripled, giving the sisters’ work a larger audience.

Violet also carried a college ambition of her own. Since the summer before seventh grade, she had dreamed of NYU’s creative-writing program, a goal connected to a three-week family visit to New York with her mother, a college professor and writer who had completed graduate work there. Violet had planned to apply early, then changed her mind after the crash. She completed the regular application and essay but missed the deadline, which had passed a week before her conversation with a guidance counselor. The missed application makes the accident’s consequences visible in a decision about her future, while the earlier college conversations recall a time when the sisters could imagine leaving Bartlett together.

Difference, Affection, and Loss

The sisters could make their differences into a shared joke. At a party in April, Eleanor wore white while Violet wore black, reversing the good-sister and bad-sister roles they sometimes played in a Freaky Friday-like switch. The detail captures a relationship in which contrast did not separate them; it gave them a language for teasing and revising the parts they were expected to play. Their closeness included both rivalry and alliance, without reducing either sister to a fixed role.

Eleanor died at eighteen, a senior at Bartlett High School and a member of the student congress. At about 12:45 a.m. on April 5, she lost control of her car on A Street Bridge; icy conditions and speed may have contributed to the crash. Violet, sixteen and riding as a passenger, survived with minor injuries. In a later recollection, Violet explains that Eleanor was upset after a breakup but would not let Violet drive. Violet was the one who told her to take the bridge. She remembers the warning sign about the bridge icing before the road, the car sliding, Eleanor saying she could not hold on, and the crash before everything went black. The route suggestion becomes a lasting source of guilt, attached to a chain of remembered choices rather than to any claim that Violet intended the outcome.

Grief, Memory, and Continuing Connection

After Eleanor’s death, Violet cannot bring herself to update EleanorandViolet.com. The site had been about the sisters, and Violet feels that her own words died in the same instant as their shared life. This withdrawal reaches beyond one abandoned project: something they made together has become difficult to approach precisely because it records a relationship Violet still longs for. The website’s silence stands in contrast to its former purpose, when two distinct voices made a joint space.

Eleanor’s glasses become another point of contact. In class, Violet takes them off, deciding that they look stylish on Eleanor but ugly on herself, especially with her bangs. Yet she also hopes that wearing them might let her be more like Eleanor, or see what Eleanor saw; in her imagination, the glasses might let her be both sisters at once so that no one, least of all Violet, would have to miss Eleanor. The object cannot restore her sister, and Violet knows the resemblance is imperfect. Its importance lies in showing how grief reaches for tangible ways to maintain closeness even as the survivor recognizes the difference between remembering someone and becoming them.

Violet’s feelings do not follow a single course. She has good and bad days, and sometimes a television show, her father’s joke, or a classroom comment makes her laugh as if nothing had happened. At other times, she tries to recover Eleanor’s voice, holding on to the ways Eleanor greeted her when she was cheerful and pronounced her name when annoyed. These small distinctions preserve Eleanor not as a general image of a lost sister but as a particular person, recognizable in her moods, humor, temper, and speech.

Eventually Violet tells her parents that she does not want them to act as though everything is fine or to avoid speaking about Eleanor. She admits that she suggested the bridge and apologizes for the part she believes she played. She also says that the family cannot change what happened, but can choose whether Eleanor is allowed to become completely absent from their conversations. Her parents try to interrupt; Violet speaks louder, explaining that silence makes it harder to remember the things she wants to keep, including the sound of Eleanor’s voice. Her mother cries, and her father sits rigidly; her mother then draws Violet close and tells her that what happened was not her fault. The exchange does not erase Violet’s memory of the route or her grief, but it lets her voice them within the family instead of carrying them alone.

The relationship’s final shape is therefore neither a return to their former shared life nor a simple act of letting go. Violet insists that Eleanor was here and is gone, but need not be completely gone, because remembering and speaking keep her part of the living family’s world. Their conversations about leaving Bartlett, the website they built, the glasses Violet wears, and the particular voice she tries to hear all become forms of continuing connection. The bond changes from daily companionship into an active practice of memory: Violet can acknowledge both the love and the guilt, while refusing to let the accident be the only story that remains of her sister.