Ella and Anastasia (stepsisters)

Ella and Anastasia (stepsisters) are bound together by a blended family but divided by Anastasia’s hostility toward Ella after Ella moves into the Coleman household. Anastasia treats Ella’s disability and need for accommodation as sources of shame, and interprets the care and attention Ella receives as things taken from her. Their relationship is not simply a private rivalry: it intensifies conflict between the twins, shapes Ella’s sense of belonging, and exposes the family’s unresolved history of who was left behind and who was made to feel at home.

Identity and Early Conflict

Anastasia is one of the Coleman twins, alongside Juliette, and Ella is their new stepsister. From the beginning of their shared life, Anastasia resents Ella’s presence and tries to turn others against her. Juliette later describes Anastasia as continually attempting to make the school hostile to Ella, or at least intimidating anyone who might show her kindness. The hostility thus extends beyond the home: Ella remains mostly an outsider at school, with Anastasia and her closest friends among the few who continue to treat her as an enemy.

The sisters’ first conflicts make clear how physical access and social treatment become intertwined. At the end of a difficult school day, Anastasia gets into the front passenger seat and gestures for Ella to climb into the back. When Ella says she cannot physically manage the climb, Anastasia shrugs and tells her to walk rather than yield her place. Ella has to explain that she is not being deliberately difficult: her injuries make the movement impossible. The incident shows Anastasia treating an access need as an inconvenience imposed on her, while Ella is left to defend the reality of her body against a stepsister who refuses to accommodate it.

Disability, Stigma, and the School Conflict

Anastasia’s resentment is expressed through openly derogatory language. When she hears Ella speaking with Cinder, she recognizes him as the person who comments on Ella’s blog and loudly announces that Ella has an online friend, calling her a freak. The outburst is loud enough that Cinder may have heard it. The mockery makes Ella’s private connection into another target and shows Anastasia policing not only her stepsister’s place in the family but also her friendships.

The hostility becomes especially explicit in Anastasia’s argument with Juliette. She objects to Ella’s friendship with Vivian and uses a disability slur to imagine the social embarrassment of being associated with a disabled stepsister. Ella corrects her about Vivian’s name and challenges the implication that Vivian’s fathers’ sexuality determines Vivian’s own. Anastasia responds by glaring at Ella and ordering her to stay away. In the same exchange, Juliette’s defense of Ella causes a sharper rupture between the twins: Anastasia’s attack on Ella has begun to cost her closeness with her own sister.

Juliette identifies the school dynamic as a pattern rather than a single clash. She says Anastasia’s persistent efforts to turn people against Ella—and her intimidation of potential friends—make life harder for everyone. Ella, by contrast, has largely kept out of the twins’ way and held back at school. Juliette’s account complicates the idea that the sisters’ hostility is an equal misunderstanding: Anastasia actively escalates the exclusion, while Ella’s withdrawal is shaped by the hostile environment around her.

The Family as the Battleground

The sisters’ conflict is embedded in competing ideas of family loyalty. Juliette tells Ella that her own anger toward Ella comes from watching her treat their parents harshly. She recalls that their father nearly lost his job by spending so much time in Boston while Ella was hospitalized, and points to the renovated bedroom and the practical care the household has offered. Juliette sees those efforts as evidence that Ella is loved; Ella, however, feels that she was taken in only because her father had to take her in, and cannot experience the household’s care as uncomplicated belonging.

Juliette also insists that Ella’s arrival has changed the family system. Before she came, Juliette says, the household was happy; afterward, the parents argued more, and the twins’ relationship deteriorated until they spoke mainly to shout at each other. She tells Ella that her difficulties do not erase the strain her presence has brought to the family. Ella does not dismiss the accusation: she apologizes and says she would change things if she knew how. The exchange reveals how the sisters’ antagonism is entangled with grief, obligation, and competing perceptions of who has been asked to sacrifice for whom.

A later moment makes Ella’s internalization of this accusation visible. Hearing her father, Jennifer, and the twins laughing freely together in the kitchen, Ella recognizes a warmth she has not seen since joining the household. Instead of entering, she waits on the porch to do her homework, believing her presence would end the family’s ease. Anastasia is part of the family scene Ella feels she must avoid, but the painful conclusion Ella draws is broader: she believes she herself is the force that ruins the household.

Reversal and Continuing Estrangement

As Ella and Juliette become closer, the balance between the sisters shifts. Ella remains mostly an outsider at school, but some students become friendlier, Rob sits beside her in class and sometimes joins her and Vivian at lunch, and Juliette’s support grows more evident. Anastasia reacts by resenting the closeness between the stepsisters. The more angry she becomes, the less time Juliette wants to spend with her; Anastasia, who had once helped make Ella feel isolated, begins withdrawing into her own bedroom.

Juliette’s defense of Ella eventually answers Anastasia’s grievances one by one. Anastasia claims that Ella has taken her room, her sister, the boy she likes, and the attention of their parents; she also resents that Brian Oliver has wished Ella a happy birthday. Juliette explains that Ella could not take the upstairs room because of her disability, that she is not responsible for Rob’s feelings, and that Ella has been honest about loving Cinder. She rejects the idea that Ella stole her: Juliette says she has pulled away from Anastasia because Anastasia talks about little else but Ella. Most pointedly, Juliette reframes the sisters’ family history: their father’s attention is not something Ella stole, because Ella was the one whose father had been taken from her when the Colemans became her family. Juliette calls Ella’s ability to forgive them remarkable.

That defense does not resolve the sisters’ relationship. Anastasia falls silent rather than answering Juliette, and the evidence does not show her apologizing to Ella or accepting her. Instead, the relationship remains marked by a contrast: Ella’s increasing connection with Juliette and others offers a counterweight to exclusion, while Anastasia experiences that connection as proof that she is losing control and status. The conflict exposes disability prejudice and sibling rivalry, but also the unequal history beneath them: what Anastasia calls theft is, in Juliette’s account, inseparable from the abandonment Ella has already endured.

Meaning and Limits of Reconciliation

The relationship’s central reversal is that Anastasia’s attempt to defend her place in the family helps estrange her from Juliette, while Ella’s effort to find a place in the family gradually draws Juliette toward her. This is not a simple victory over a single antagonist. Juliette admits that she initially resented Ella too, and her later support grows from seeing both Anastasia’s cruelty and Ella’s difficult position. The sisters’ conflict therefore reveals how a blended household can turn care into a perceived competition when family members do not share the same account of past loss and present obligation.

Disability is a concrete fault line in that competition. Ella has regained much of her mobility after a painful recovery, but still walks with a cane and needs accommodations; a room’s location and the physical demands of getting into a car are not trivial preferences. Anastasia treats these circumstances as advantages unfairly granted to Ella, whereas Juliette insists that the accommodations respond to pain and limited mobility. The contrast shifts attention from Ella supposedly receiving special treatment to the ways an environment and other people’s attitudes can make ordinary access a source of conflict.

The relationship remains unfinished in the available events. Anastasia’s resentment and exclusion persist even as her twin openly challenges her, and Ella’s later account to Dr. Parish makes clear that she still fears being unwelcome in her father’s household, particularly by Anastasia and Jennifer. Juliette’s intervention changes the terms of the conflict—naming both Ella’s disability-related needs and the family’s debt to her—but does not establish reconciliation. The sisters’ bond remains a measure of the larger question Ella faces: whether being included in a family can mean more than being housed and cared for, and whether that care can make room for her autonomy and for the people who still resent her presence.