Summer Sister

This month, she will turn fifteen

It is sunset. We have spent the afternoon unpacking, Kier and Ryusuke and Darius and I. The time of year is right, but the house is wrong. The pineapple house's owners have retired to live there full time, and we have had to rent the blue house with the Texas flag next door. Darius is the odd duck of the four of us; Ryu is originally a college friend of mine, introduced to Kieran through the sphere, and we are as comfortable in our amity as he and Kier in their love, as me and Kier in our siblinghood. But Darius does not know them well, and he does not know this place. He is tall, dark-skinned, solid, and serious, a point of deep discontinuity among the minivans and pastel polos and regalia of Big Ten universities.

He knows this and greets it with disquiet—slacking off on the unloading, distracting himself with games in the sphere. I tamp my annoyance and focus instead on touching him in spare moments; knowingly or not, he leans into the pressure of my body each time, and a small fraction of the tension bleeds away. But Darius belongs here, as surely as me and Kier, as surely as Ryu. All four of us have bled and starved for this month, and thinking of it fills me with awe for Ryu and Darius, that they would do so much for such uncertain recompense. (You could be married, with kids; I might not even know you.)

The time comes, and we march to the beach: Up the main street, down the boardwalk, through the frame of grass down the warm dune path and down toward the water where the sand grows packed and cool. I put a hand on Lily's thin shoulder. "Are you in the sphere, baby girl?"

She looks up at me with huge eyes and nods twice.

When we turn back toward the water, there is already a new figure there, facing the horizon. She turns to look inland, the sinking sun at her back; her eyes grow wide with recognition. Her hands rise to her mouth as though to keep her heart from fleeing.

I am thirty-four. Lily is nine. Rose is fourteen. This will be her ninth month conscious since she covered me with a pineapple blanket; this month, she will turn fifteen.