Read Sister for Free Online Page B

what we should do next. As I gripped the shutters I could hear him below me, exhaling in little grunts, and I knew he wouldn’t be able to hold me there much longer. I pressed my face against the screen and saw a shadow moving rapidly toward the window, and then I was staring into the wild girl’s face. Up close, she looked much younger, and she had sweet, crooked teeth. She was eating a Ding Dong, licking the white filling from her index finger. My mother wouldn’t let us eat Ding Dongs, which she said had a shelf life of eighteen years.
    â€œDo you see anything?” Sam called up at me.
    I couldn’t breathe.
    â€œAre you trying to see me naked or something?” she said in that low, noncommittal voice.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWhat?” Sam said.
    â€œThen what do you want?” she said.
    I wanted to look just like her, to become her, to lick eighteen-year-old frosting from my finger and survive, but this was not the sort of thing she meant. I knew all about extortion; still, money seemed too much to ask. “A soda,” I said weakly. It was the only other thing that came to mind. My mother didn’t let us drink them, not because of their shelf life but because the sugar would rot our teeth. The girl lifted the last bit of frosting into her mouth. I imagined how it would nestle there inside her, a puff of white growing smaller and smaller.
    â€œCome around front,” she said. I pushed away from the house and tumbled to the ground, pulling Sam down too. His eyes were the feverish eyes of a hunter. “Are we going to arrest her?”
    When I shook my head, he gave me a look of absolute disbelief. I could see I was a failure in his eyes, but I was tired of the game, vaguely embarrassed, and I wanted to go home. We weren’t spies anymore—just a little boy and a not so little girl who was too old to play games of make-believe. Self-consciously, I licked my hand and smoothed my hair back from my face. “She’s giving us a soda not to tell,” I said, trying to make it sound like a victory. “Besides, she ate all the evidence.”
    When we got to the front of the house, she was already waiting on the porch, holding a can of Jolly Good Cream Soda. She had put on earrings and fresh, orange lipstick. She didn’t look at me—she looked at Sam. “What’s your name?” she asked him, and though I was used to people noticing Sam first, I ached with jealousy.
    â€œBoris,” I said.
    â€œNo it’s not,” Sam said.
    The girl laughed. “You got a girlfriend yet?”
    â€œHe’s got five,” I said, meanly. “One of them’s even married.”
    The girl looked at me for the first time. It was a look of approval. “Boys are all the same,” she said, and then she pressed the soda into my hand as if it were a secret between just us two. It was the first time I had seen Sam as a boy instead of my brother, and his face became part of the broken blur of faces that swam to the girls’ side of the gym once a year for square dancing, boy faces with grinning teeth and strange-smelling breath and hands that dug in with short, blunt nails. The wild girl’s fingernails were long peach opals, glistening as if they were wet. She saw me staring at them. “It’s my mother’s color,” she said. “You want me to do yours?”
    She turned and went back inside without waiting for me to answer. The soda was sweating in my hand. I gave it to Sam without looking at him, dried my palm on the back of my shorts. “How come girls color their nails?” he asked reasonably.
    â€œThey just do ,” I snapped—it had never occurred to me to wonder why—and then the girl came out with the nail polish and led me to the porch swing. She put my right hand on my own bare thigh. I felt my own flesh, warm and slightly damp, and I was conscious of the dark silky hairs that grew there.
    â€œI want to