Read Sister Golden Hair: A Novel for Free Online Page A

blood ran down her leg, staining the canvas edge of her tennis shoe. I knew I was “developing,” as my mother so annoyingly called it. I knew too that it was natural, but I felt like a skinny monster.
    What if the hairs filled not just my underarms and crotch but kept growing until I was covered with hair like a werewolf, thick strains growing over my forehead and around my eyes? I was getting puffy as well, and while I knew I was moving away from my old self into a new place, I didn’t want to look like the Playboy Bunny I’d seen on television with the huge breasts and wide idiotic smile. I still prayed that I might swerve away from being that sort of creature and toward something else entirely. I feltmy forehead. If my chest could puff out, why couldn’t my forehead develop a horn? I got so excited by this idea that I got out my journal and tried to sketch a unicorn girl. But the horn looked like one on a rhino and I couldn’t figure out how to draw the bone moving out of my forehead. I drew several variations of hooves, but it was tricky to make them delicate; I had heard that female unicorns were so sensitive, they never stepped on living plants.
    None of my pictures satisfied me, so I wrote instead about how the unicorn girl ran away from her duplex up into the forest. There she lived among the deer and baby foxes, eating raspberries and soft leaves. She loved the taste of moss and she often had tea parties for the squirrels where she made cakes by mashing crab apples with butternuts. In the night she stared down at the duplex windows floating in the dark like little rafts of light.

    All the next week Sandy emerged from her duplex each day at noon looking sleepy and carrying a six-pack of beer; she lay out in her leopard-print bikini and sunglasses. Eddie watched television inside. Sandy’s skin nearly purple, she seemed as drunk off the light as from the beers she popped one after another. I watched her pitch the cans toward the trash in time with whichever song was on her transistor radio.I tried to force my thoughts away from her, thinking about Barnabas Collins, or trying to decide if I should go down to the fridge and see if we had any cheese. But Sandy had found a latch door into my head and stuffed her body inside.
    I couldn’t stand just watching her. I pulled on my bathing suit, grabbed a towel from the bathroom, and left the cool duplex for the blinding outdoor light. The only sunglasses I had were a pink pair from when I was little, but I figured they were better than nothing.
    As I stood at the foot of her lounger, I saw how pale my skin was in comparison to hers. I asked if I could lie out beside her, and to my amazement she said yes. I hated my bathing suit with its pattern of strawberries and eyelet ruffles. Sandy said it was cute, but I knew it was babyish. She smelled like dirt and radiator heat and once I lay there I began to feel like a larva, pale and glassy beside her.
    Sandy talked, pausing only occasionally to sip her beer. When she leaned up to spread oil over her legs, her bikini top gaped open and I saw her nipple and large areola. I listened to her voice with my eyes half closed, watching the skin around the crotch of her bikini; I saw a bevy of black nubs that made my eyes unfocus.
    She told me Sonny was not really a good person; he sometimes told people they needed root canals when their teeth were fine. He called his teenage sons lazy and said they smelled bad. Sonny never listened, just waited for his turn to talk. She hadthought she loved him, but now she realized she actually hated him.
    “To be perfectly honest,” she said, “I’m still stuck on Eddie’s father. But I fucked that up by fooling around when he went off to Vietnam.” He had a new girlfriend now and she was the one who got to fly over to Hawaii to meet him when he got R and R.
    She spoke about herself with a certain distance, as if she were talking about a character on General Hospital .
    “When I think