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Admittedly, Roxy and her cousin didn't have much in common beyond the broad strokes of their existence. As second cousins, they were spawned, roughly, from the same genetic lineage, and they both had similar proportions and blonde hair bleached even whiter, and were both female, in a fashion, at least. They were both technically Jewish, although Rose was slightly more serious about it (and only slightly). Rose wore her curls out, and Roxy straightened them most of the way through into short-cut waves. They both liked colors that were essentially on the magenta scale. They both had a taste for magic, although Roxy was more of a wizards kind of girl, and Rose was more of a serious frowning men with Necronomicons kind of girl. They both lived in New York, although Roxy lived in the city with her Mom, and Rose out in Rainbow Falls with hers. They both liked it frigid. They both loved snow.
They both sat in recliners in front of the fireplace in Lalonde Manor, while their moms talked in the kitchen about the latest gossip, keeping it quiet as if their wayward children couldn't hear. Mom's friend from work was [redacted spoilered hidden], while the other Mom's agent just got [you don't wanna hear this, sorry folks], sipping concord grape wine like it was oxygen and they were in a depressurizing plane. The Shabbat candles burned quietly in their situated place among the shelves and tabletops, and the table was clear of food, challah or otherwise, and tablecloths, and fancy cutlery that was only taken out the once every two or three months that the sisters got together and dragged their children along to a fairly un-religious Shabbat ritual.
Work, of course, was not allowed on Shabbat, which meant that Rose was under no pressure to do any of the mounting piles of schoolwork growing behind her, while Roxy's laptop was gleefully set to the side so she had a good excuse to not think about all her breaking code buckling under the piles of mismanaged tabs and indents and the occasional broken curly bracket posted in the wrong font. The fire was roaring, crackling, and a light snowfall outside steadily dusted all the pine trees in a softly blanketing layer of white, not any of the huge smothering blizzards that had overtaken them in snowy days past. Just a dusting. Jaspers sat quietly on Roxy's head, a warm, comfortable replacement for her own cats, who were all chilling back at their condominium and would usually crowd on top of Roxy's hair in a similar fashion.
It was not infrequently that Roxy would joke that they were all related, perhaps second cousins themselves. After all, they were all black cats, black as tar, with similar builds and the same kind of light, convivial stares, and tendency to crowd around people's heads. It was entirely possible that they all came from the same litter. Whenever one of them asked their Mom, the woman would look at them with a funny sort of expression and then laugh it off - to Rose, an act of unmitigated passive-aggressiveness, and to Roxy, the ultimate proof that each cat was secretly a clone of the other.
Roxy's laptop sat, open, playing quiet music, next to her recliner while she rocked back and forth, playing on her very old, very fragile Nintendo DS. Was playing video games and listening to music on Spotify perhaps a prohibited form of work during Shabbat? Fuck if she knew. Rose, on the other hand, was reading her Torah quietly, the same tome she had read end to end perhaps four, maybe five dozen times in her sixteen years of life. Even if it wasn't a Shabbat dinner with the family, with brisket and matzoh ball soup (despite it being not Passover) in her stomach, she would probably be reading it. It was just what she did on Fridays in the recliner, with an old quilt blanket laying over her lap.
She licked her thumb and flipped a page quietly. Roxy cussed under her breath at her video game. The snow outside continued to fall.