Response to Dress Rehearsal

In Dress Rehearsal, I feel like Christina did a good job in her storytelling and getting the whole story across in an evenly paced manner. It seems to be a story about a young girl named Kate who is in high school and who is stressed about school, boys, and a play that she is going to participate in as an extra. Her younger sister somehow always steals the attention from her though and she is bothered by the fact that she is always the afterthought. I am not sure how believable it is that the older sister would be mixed up as the younger sister when they look significantly different, though. I would perhaps like to know a little bit more about why Diana (the younger sister) gets so much attention. Also, there are a number of points of conflict thoughout this piece but none get a lot of attention except maybe the play, and they don't really play out. For instance, the whole prom date situation just hasn't much of a solution at all and it just gets written off and forgotten about, after it seems to be something strongly on Kate's mind. Given the setup of the story and the sister and all, I thought the prom was going to be the climax of the story. I must say though, that when she gave her little speech on stage, I felt a great deal of tension and it does a good job of making the reader feel anxiety in that situation. On the whole it was difficult for me to get into the piece, but it may just be because of the content. There is absolutely no way in the world that this story could have been written by (or for) a boy and I just don't have much interest in prom dresses and such. Not that this makes the story bad; it is just that the story is very much in a different element than what I traditionally would read or like. I suppose that the change came when Kate stepped up and revealed her anger about not getting attention over her sister, but I would maybe have liked to see a little bit more inner turmoil to show the change that she actually was assertive about it. Lastly, I do not know about the last line of the story. It seems to go in a new direction and I do not know what it is about or why.