1
Before it happened, they were in the car. Lisa Tott sat with her hands in her lap. She was analyzing the way that the streetlights entered the blue plastic of her water bottle and emerged as something changed. White light left as turquoise, yellow became green, and green was, curiously, still green, reflecting onto the skin of her thighs. She was missing data for red because Avery barreled through every red light and the color passed over them like a blink. (“There’s no one on the road, Lise!” She had sneered the first time, punishment for her sister's tightened grip on the car door.)
“Your turn,” Avery snapped, at one point. Lisa looked up from the bottle.
Her sister, as always, was draped. She had one foot on the gas and the other hooked under her thigh like a wetland bird. The top half of her body was hunched forward over the wheel, angling the car toward the highway ramp. With one hand she pawed at the crumb-lined gorge between their seats, offering her sister the fraying aux cable.
“You sure?” Lisa asked.
“Yeah. My phone’s almost dead.”
Lisa scrolled through her saved songs with silent fingers. Of course there was nothing, because all she ever did was listen to the same five things. In her head she was thinking about something she’d learned in science, how white light is really composed of every other color; how the reason it passed through plastic and appeared blue was because the other shades had all been absorbed, and following that logic, red light wouldn’t leave the bottle at all…
“Lise, come on.”
On the car clock, the colon between the 11 and 42 blinked at them, waiting. Indecision was a fate worse than poor choice, surely, and so she clicked something. Soon there was a cymbal crash from the speakers, a little too loud, and both of their hands flew to the volume knob at the same time. Avery turned it down two notches; her sister two more. From the first note it was unmistakable as My Body by Young the Giant, with all its gallop and echo.
“Hey, the rails are caught now!” the singer began. “And I am falling down; fools in a spiral…”
“You do know this is about drugs, right?” Avery asked.
Lisa was quiet for a verse, and Avery thought she succeeded in embarrassing her.
“All the good running songs are about doing drugs,” She said eventually. “Running’s a drug.” She stuck out her chin a little. Avery assumed she was copying the mannerisms of someone else.
The next song was also about drugs. I Wanna Get Better by the Bleachers.
“While my friends were getting high and chasing girls down parkway lines,” Jack Antonoff explained, “I was losing my mind because the love, the love, the love, the love, the love that I gave…”
Avery groaned. “Is this just the 2020 XC playlist?”
“Yeah?”
She hit skip six more times—beep beep eep eep eep ee—until Lisa turned the sound off, her face all blank-looking and wounded.
“What’s wrong with ‘Bringing SeXC Back?’” She asked. When she said ‘sexy,’ her voice got slightly quieter, like this was the sixth time she’d ever said it in her life.
“Don’t you have your own music?”
“I thought I would get us in the spirit.”
“How are you not over this playlist?”
“Didn’t you make half this playlist?”
“Yeah, and we’ve suffered through a whole season of it, and now I never want to hear it again.”
“But you liked the first song.”
“No I didn’t. It annoyed me.”
“You didn’t turn it off.”
“Yeah, because I didn’t realize where it was coming from.”
“That doesn’t make a difference.”
“Seriously. My mouth is getting dry. Like a reverse pavlov dog. Change it.”
“To what?”
“I don’t know! Anything!”
“Clearly not anything!”
“Whatever. We’re basically there.”
This was a game they played. Lisa’s older sister was perpetually asking her to play music. She would rotate one specific song in her head the way a magician conjures a card in a magic trick, but she would never tell Lisa what it was. And when Lisa did not present that one song out of the infinitude of their shared discography, she would moan and groan with such consistency that it became clear that this game was less about Lisa’s choice of music than Avery’s choice of insult.
There was, actually, one time that Lisa had won the game. It had been last summer. They had both finished a rainy long run, gravity doubled in the way their wet clothes hung from their frames. They sat on the towels usually reserved for the dog. On another day, Lisa might have put more thought into her music choice, but she was cold and frustrated and brain-dead and she played the first thing that came to mind: the 1968 folk rock album Bookends by Simon and Garfunkel. Their father used to play it whenever they went through the carwash as kids. She’d always associate the ringing bells of Mrs. Robinson with tricolor soap, always hear dryer jets beneath A Hazy Shade of Winter. Even that day, on the gray interstate.
At the time, she’d braced for Avery’s response. As usual, her sister sighed. This sounded audibly similar to her previous responses, save for the crucial difference of a clipped lightness, confirmed by the gush that followed: “Argh, yes! Is this dad’s song? What song is this?” and Lisa had to bite the rubber mouthpiece on her water bottle to keep from smiling.
She had waited a month before playing that album again, but it hadn’t delivered the same effect. (“‘Coo coo katchoo?’ Lisa, what the fuck are you playing?”) Of course the same trick wouldn’t work twice! Avery’s whims spawned a new beast every day, and there she was, always holding the same feeble tools, eternally unprepared to tame them!
Avery rolled up the windows as she swerved into the unmarked parking lot off the M-66. There were two other cars parked in the back corner, blocking the view of the weather-beaten sign for the Lake Charlevoix Trailhead: a Camry with Christmas ornaments hanging from the rearview mirror (Bryn) and a RAV-4 with paint scratched on both sides (Molly). Avery attempted to back into an adjacent spot, and the closer they got to the trees behind them, the more red light from the brakes flooded into the car. Lisa pretended to look out the window, so that her head wouldn’t block the path of light. There was a second, right before Avery cut the engine, in which Lisa’s water bottle met the color. The red light entered the plastic; the colors mingled on purple water; but the light did not reflect onto her thighs. The blue plastic had absorbed the light. Her hypothesis had been correct.
Then the headlights snapped off, and the sisters sat in complete darkness beyond the glow of Lisa’s phone screen, still open to Spotify. They could make out the neon traces of glow sticks across the grass. The car made a clicking sound as it cooled.
“Are you sad that this is your last year? You know, doing this stuff?” Lisa asked.
“Lisa, fuck off.” She snorted. “Are you sad that this is your last year doing it with me?”
Lisa pressed her hands to her knees. She could only make out the peaks of laughter through the drone of the highway. It lended a temporary quality to the moment, the season somehow both ahead and behind them at once.
They both turned, then, and opened their doors.
*
Michigan Law states that it is illegal to hold a high school sports practice before August 15th. To honor the statute, the Miltred High School varsity girls’ cross country team (MHS Lady Ravens, for short) always met on August 14th, near midnight, and counted down the seconds like it was New Year’s Eve. They called this event the First Run Back, or FRB. It was apparently a tradition that existed back when Coach E. had been an athlete at Miltred; he encouraged the team to do it with a fervor that was only matched by how strongly he didn’t want to be involved. Every year it was the same route: The girls always met at the Charlevoix County footpath, ran a six mile loop by the lakefront, and came back on the shoulder of Foster Road. Lisa thought it was a nice route. Mostly, she just remembered how slowly they ran it last year.
Avery was a senior this year, so she was one of the de facto team captains alongside her best friend, Bryn Sola. It was their responsibility to conduct the usual traditions: To make sure all the underclassmen had rides to FRB, to bring the reflective gear, to invite the incoming freshmen. Of course, since it predated the official season, they could never be sure which freshmen would make varsity. Every summer the suburban rumor mill left the Ravens with a short-list of ponytailed phenoms who had eschewed puberty long enough to rank at State. Only the stand-outs got invites. And there was something sacred about being chosen: In the past decade, the team captains who planned FRB had accurately selected the freshmen who would go on to make the Varsity team nine times out of ten.
Avery had been one of these. In 2014, she was the fastest girl in 8th grade. It had been a Thursday when a high school girl texted her, casually, to ask if she was doing anything at 11:30 p.m. She would never forget the thrill of seeing the senior girls’ headlights pull into her driveway. Not even in high school yet, and here were these girls who went out of their way to include her, all because of a sport. They were obnoxious and lazy in the way of teenage girls, but ambitious and clever too. She loved them instantly. She analyzed everything they wore, everything they said, and the way they said it. When they got to the park and ran through the night, she stopped thinking about how weird she must have looked, round face and filly legs, and she was just another bump in their collective shadow. She had always lamented running in her youth, but tangled with the promise of belonging, she fell in love with it by proxy.
The following year, everyone had been whispering about Molly Blick. Meeting her for the first time, they’d expected another meek, expectant child, quivering at the thought of breaking curfew and dislodging sleep schedules. But fourteen-year-old Molly arrived at FRB in a car driven by a boyfriend three years her elder. They’d since broken up, thank God, but to this day Avery wasn’t sure what to think of Molly. She was a useful teammate in the sense that she absorbed blame like a black hole: she was the one who slacked off, the one who got caught drinking, the one who missed practice, the one Coach E. brought into his office for serious talks. But joining the varsity team had always seemed something like an honor for Avery, and to see Molly borrowing vapes in the parking lot and eating cheetos pre-race felt unforgivingly sacrilegious. It was possible she sabotaged her seasons on purpose, with talent like that. They’d never really know.
And then there was Lisa. Coming out of 8th grade, she wasn’t only the best runner at Miltred middle school, but in all of Michigan. She knocked Avery’s records out of the park. The seniors, at the time, had regarded her like something of a celebrity, tittering before she arrived, fighting over who could pick her up for practice, asking questions about her summer and answering in agreement to each one the way you would when talking to a child. Avery had to watch her sister stumble over the social dynamics, with all her painful silences and weird answers and unawareness of her natural arrogance, bristling the whole time. Avery took such extreme measures to be cool and effortless and normal like the other girls while Lisa, with her absolute lack of social fluency, had all of their attention. Every time her sister spoke, Avery found herself digging her fingernails into the palms of her hands, releasing the pressure only when the conversation was back to someone else, as if worried that she might say something that required saving, and Avery would have had to jump in after her.
It would have been a welcome addition to have a new runner that night. Someone else could be the youngest, for once, and take the attention off of Lisa. But unfortunately, there weren’t any standouts that year. They’d all start the season on JV. And so varsity was the same girls it was last year, giving the illusion that everybody’s spot was stable.
That was part of the allure, Avery realized. In cross country, varsity contained only seven runners, and the lineup changed every week based on the previous race. Nobody’s spot was secure. If you got injured, if you had a bad week, if you got slower, or if somebody else got faster, you’d be replaced. The dynamic didn’t shift often, but the instability kept everyone on their toes. Kept everyone hungry. And on this moonlight trail, part of the allure for Avery was that, three years later, she still felt lucky just to be there.
*
The Tott sisters swung their doors open and extended from opposite sides of their shared Honda Civic, a Rorschach test against the dark sky. (Depending on whether or not you have siblings, you could either see two girls, a butterfly, or a cattle skull.) Avery drove in her sock feet. Lisa wore a specific pair of shoes designed for trail running. Avery shoved them into her shoes without untying them. Lisa re-tied her double-knots, tucking the loops under so that they wouldn’t bounce. Avery tossed the keys behind the left back tire. Lisa stared into the dark.
Now they heard the sound above the crickets: a melodramatic gasp, the ensuing squeal of insistence, and the soft windchime of faraway girl laughter, a hyperbole in the dark. Lisa’s bones straightened. They were performing! She saw them do it all the time. Individually everyone was calm and sensible, but existing within the context of the team led all of them to squeal and flutter their arms like songbirds, every expression amplified and — she hated to use this word negatively — feminized. Lisa imagined it was all to prove how close they were, how fun they were, but nothing they talked about seemed so funny or scandalous that it deserved the theatrics that arose. At first, she’d thought, Maybe, when I know them better, I’ll get it. But she’d been on the team a year now. She was their top runner. She heard their chant when she closed her eyes at night. She let them write mantras on her arms in Sharpie. She felt the flutter of notebook paper confetti with which they showered her on the bus home from State. And still she would hear her laugh stand out like a dissonant note, never quite able to forget she was acting.
At some point on the walk between the car and the table, Lisa watched Avery snap into character. Her sister began bouncing toward the table with a cervine lightness, and when she called out, her voice raised an octave to meet theirs. Lisa thought, this is what annoys people about teenage girls, and in the same breath, felt a blow of cosmic loneliness.
“Hey-hey,” Avery called.
“Now we’re all here!” Bryn sang. She sat on the table with crossed legs, raising her marshmallow stick roller like a flag. Avery had come to recognize her face in the dark: hair frizzing at the temples, perpetual shine on her forehead and cheeks. When they had met, Avery had found Bryn to be impossibly annoying in the way she found most people who were simultaneously loud and small. It was an extreme merit to the shared burden of running cross country that now Avery couldn't imagine life without her.
After Bryn's cheer, the rest of the girls answered in the dark.
“Good evening ladies!”
“AT and LT in the house!”
“Ooo, here’s AT&T!”
“Welcome back, superstar!”
“Hey-hey, T-squared!”
“Get your asses over here!”
Everyone on the team called the Tott sisters by their initials, a tradition started by Coach E. Avery loved it. She did not love how they called Lisa “Superstar.” (Lisa herself didn’t seem to notice it much, which was half of the issue.)
A round of hugs followed: sharp runner arms over cotton t-shirts where the skin of your cheek bristled with the poky ends of ponytails. In the dark, the neon light glinted off the links of their jewelry, the corners of their eyes, their canine teeth. They hugged Avery first, then Lisa, who stood rigid and laughed in attempts to hide the rigidity. She had the savoir faire of a stick puppet.
“Moll, can’t believe you’re here on time,” Avery said. Over the summer, Molly had given herself a hawk feather tattoo with a sewing needle and a sharpie. Avery had seen it on Instagram, and now here it was on her arm. She didn’t want to pretend to like it, so she didn’t comment on it at all.
“Ahem, I was the first one!” Molly said. “Because these losers took a million years in Party City—”
“I’ve cracked the code, actually. Molly is late to anything that matters and early to anything that doesn’t,” Bryn jabbed. The seniors had a habit of doing that — verbalizing the obvious — possibly to enforce the depth to which they all knew each other.
The table displayed the debris from this Party City haul: four boxes of multicolor Glo Sticks, standard length with tube fasteners for making necklaces. Cluttered beneath the packaging was the typical teenage debris: sticker-littered Nalgene water bottles, a pile of lanyards with jangling key attachments and clear plastic flaps for fresh licenses, and, inexplicably, a bag of half-finished Sour Patch watermelons.
With the Totts’ arrival, the whole varsity team was assembled. Lisa studied their body language. No one appeared to be in any hurry. Before every run was a period of socializing that could last anywhere from ten minutes to forty, extended for such imperceptible variables as the interest level of conversation, the residual soreness in their collective bodies, the general pleasantness of the weather, and/or the stock market in Japan, as far as Lisa was concerned. She watched the time build on her watch face.
Avery reached for a glow stick, snapping one band around each wrist. She kept one eye on Lisa, on the blank expression that her sister used to conceal frustration.
Bryn was the one who finally passed Lisa a pair of glowsticks. “Get cracking, LT.”
She snapped both of them between her hands, connecting them with tiny plastic tubes to form a necklace. There was one blue and one yellow. She wove one into her ponytail, and the other into her shoe.
Bryn nodded as if Lisa had said something. “Alright, ladies. Per tradition, we must take off at midnight. Sharp! Which is, according to my watch, in thirty seconds.”
“Woohoo!” A chorus of cheers and watch chirps.
They all stood, glancing at the dark trail flanked by opposite-leaning reeds, snaking away from the dull roar of the highway and along Lake Charlevoix into Boyne City. Below, the ragged grass was already damp with the promise of dew.
The team grew quiet.
“Is it time for a chant?” Avery prompted in the sing-song voice of someone about to lurch into a chant.
Bryn smiled, and Lisa heard her tongue crack against her teeth in the dark. “Oh, it’s time for a chant.”
The Miltred High girls had a cheer that they said before races, a makeshift poem that collaged lines of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven with ransom note reverence for the original material. It was rumored to have been written by foregone teammates in the margins of AP Lit handouts and had, over the years, been polished into a raucous chant screamed to the beat of interlocked hands with a volume and cadence that increased with each line. Avery angled one hand into the circle of limbs, watching as six other hands met her in the middle. They pulsed down — one, two, three! — and began:
Tis the wind and nothing more!
Lady Ravens keep the score!
When our rivals try for war!
Quoth the Ravens “nevermore!”
“... And with that, let the First Run Back BEGIN!”
Avery felt goosebumps on the back of her neck. She squealed alongside the others, her feet almost giddy as they found the wood-chipped path in the dark. Lisa had slotted herself behind Avery, but she ran so close that their sneakers knocked.
“So I talk to Avery a bunch, clearly, but I haven’t heard a peep out of the rest of you,” Bryn said. “I wanna go around and make sure everybody had a good summer.”
There were three sophomores other than Lisa that year, and all of them were named Rachel, so the team referred to them by their last names.
Beach: “I have this crazy story from lifeguarding!”
Milton: “I need to tell you guys about my fucking college nightmare.”
Lisowski: “We got a new dog! Oh my god she’s the cutest thing...”
Lisa checked her watch: 9:00 pace. She liked to go 7:20 on her easy runs, but she had expected this to happen. She tried to slow her pace to match them, but it required adopting a more bouncing and ridiculous gait. When she looked up, Avery was looking over her shoulder with pointed eyes. She could tell this was awkward, couldn’t she? Maybe it was better to just meet them at the end. She would run one mile with the team, then break away to finish the run herself. That would be enough, wouldn’t it? For Avery to think that she had tried?
“Before anyone launches into a story, we should start with Lisa, so she can speed up,” Milton offered.
Was it that obvious?
Bryn laughed. “Alright, Little Tott, you’re up. And then you can go off and start running five-minute-miles, like you do.”
“It’s the first practice of the year! I can stick with you guys.” Lisa laughed. But nobody laughed back. “My summer… uh, I didn’t really do much.”
“Not true,” Avery said. “You went to running camp!”
“Oh, yeah. That was the beginning of the summer. I went to this running camp in Wisconsin. I got to stay in the dorms there. It was fun.”
Rachel Milton: “How many miles a week was it?”
Rachel Beach: “Who was your roommate?”
Rachel Lisowski: “Was there anyone famous there?”
“Uh, I had my own room. But some of the coaches were really nice. Everyone was pretty fast. I spent most of my time running with people from their college team, since those are the girls that help at the camp. I think we did seventy miles a week, but it was only two weeks, so it wasn’t really that much. I can tell I got faster.”
Molly snorted. “You? Faster?! Thank God.”
Lisa just laughed, but it was that canned laugh that drove Avery crazy: the emotion didn’t reach her eyes, an automated reaction to feign the correct response.
“Would you go to Madison for college?” Rachel M. asked. “Is that why you went?”
“No. I went to get faster,” Lisa said. “Almost all the girls who place in the top 10 at state go to this camp.”
For a few footsteps, nobody said anything. Avery’s breath started to feel painful. God, Lisa had no read on the social situation, ever. She had to know that constantly talking about her running talent came across as bragging, even if she didn’t mean it. She had to… oh, give it up, Avery. She’s only fifteen. You’re not always going to be there.
“You’d definitely consider running there for college, though,” Avery added, a final attempt. “Right? Didn’t you say that?”
Lisa didn’t answer. She had never said that. She didn’t think she'd said anything worthy of this diversion. She was trying to win State that year; everybody knew it. What purpose was there in pretending otherwise? In her angriest moments, she sometimes believed Avery was secretly very jealous, and in her head, she had been able to rewire it into something she believed to be compassion.
The conversation pivoted, then, to everyone’s personal college rankings, the ACT prep books, the summer campus tours and essay workshops and resume templates. Lisa bounced alongside the group, unspeaking, until she couldn’t take it any longer.
“Enough about college,” Bryn said to the group. “I don’t want to think about it! I feel like that’s all senior year is: The last time you get to do this, and this, and this, before you go off and become an adult. If a single one of you mentions that this is my last FRB, I will dunk you in the ice bath.”
“Lise, remember when you brought that up in the ca—” Avery looked over at the space where Lisa had been, but it was empty. When she craned beyond Bryn’s shoulder, she saw her sister’s body twenty paces ahead.
“God, she drives me nuts,” Avery sighed, keeping her voice low enough that only Bryn would hear. “It wouldn’t kill her to run with us one time.”
“It’s okay, Ave.”
“Does she enjoy anything? Ever?”
“She’s shy.”
“You still haven’t told us about your summer,” Avery urged suddenly, raising her voice to reopen the conversation to the group, as if reading from a script.
“Oh, none of you are ready for this,” Bryn reeled, excitement bubbling in her voice. “So I was a server this summer—”
“At Thai-namite.”
“Yes, either the best or worst Thai restaurant in Miltred, depending on if you actually ask a Thai person. And you know, it was an educational experience. The bad news is that I don’t think I will ever be able to eat Pad Thai again.”
“Brutal.”
“So what’s the good news?”
Bryn paused briefly, and Avery knew what she was going to say because they’d practiced this entire interaction a week previous. In the moment, though, she delivered it with the casual air of someone who hadn’t orchestrated the entire interaction: “I’m pretty sure I’m bi?”
“Oh, what?”
“You said that so casually.”
“Was the sexual awakening at all related to the Pad Thai?”
“Congratulations? On the second part?”
“I’m going to need more information on both of those things.” [Molly was the one who said this, and it was, in fact, the exact thing that Avery had guessed she would say, in their role play of the scenario, which made Avery stifle a laugh.]
“Finally,” Avery said, wrinkling her nose.
“What do you mean, ‘finally’?”
“I mean, obviously Avery already knew,” Bryn laughed.
Avery felt the glow of soft envy on all sides. Wasn’t it lovely to flaunt how well you knew your best friend? To hold bonus content above the rest of a group, to reinforce the status you held with her? Didn’t it give your whole life meaning, to be privy to another person?
“And she’s been fed up with me,” Bryn said, to the others. “Because I’ve been non-stop talking about this girl and I wouldn’t let her tell anyone—”
“There’s a GIRL already, too?”
“I am repeating: I’m going to need more information.”
“Okay, calm down. I’m trying to tell you right now.”
Avery loved this story, when she heard it last week. Bryn had a way of repeating events with the clarity of someone looking back on her life five years in the future, recognizing the funny parts even as she lived them. It was Avery’s greatest honor to be in so many of her stories, to see herself reflected in someone else’s words, this brasher and bolder thing.
She squinted into the distance again, to see if she could spot her sister. In the pursuit of greatness, Lisa always missed everything good.
*
Half a mile ahead, Lisa had created enough distance that the team’s voices had faded out like the end of a song. They were talking about college, admissions essays, SAT scores, and then, finally, she was alone.
The air was so clear and cool and open and Lisa sliced through it like an arrow beneath a high ceiling. She ran without thinking. It was less that her legs felt loose and more that she didn’t feel them at all; focused solely on the way the wind licked her t-shirt and the sand held her shoes. She slid down a crumbling bank, raising her arms for balance, and felt the swing of hair floating in her wake, heart swelling in her chest. This, this was it! Lisa thought. The best part of running! She could have lived in that moment forever.
She could already picture it: the moment the route ended, when she would sit alone at the picnic table, a warm soreness in her legs, washed with a newfound sense of calm. She would be patient as she waited for their shadows to emerge from the dark. She imagined the mumble of conversation. Moll, can I have a watermelon? Did you guys see Coach’s email? Yeah, no kidding. Here, give me your phone. It’s almost one-thirty. My mom’s waiting up for me. See you at practice. I’ll drive you guys home. She imagined the car ride back with Avery, a newfound truce between them, and maybe, just maybe, her sister would listen to Lisa’s song. She already knew: she’d play Fast Car by Tracy Chapman. She would look over at her sister, red-rimmed by a stoplight, and see Avery’s mouth twitch at the corner. And she’d think: I was wrong about the rules. Avery never had a song in her head. The point of the game was that she didn’t know what she wanted, both of us equally unmatched to tame the beast, and she fought with me not to fight it alone. Running’s a drug, Bryn would whisper in her head. Maybe together we can get somewhere. And she would win, she would win tonight. The night embraced Lisa; she let herself dissolve — she could feel it in the air, through the swing of her arms, down to the tips of her fingers. Things would be different when the run ended. They always were.
*
A few steps later, the team’s watches beeped with the asynchronous announcement of three miles. They descended from the wooded trail onto the shoulder of the country road. The scrape of car tires replaced the chirp of crickets. Avery couldn’t remember what they were talking about. Nothing important — but none of it was, was it?
When you run, you focus on the ground fifteen feet ahead of you. And that was how they found Lisa: their headlamps illuminating her crumpled body on the street.
2²
She thinks it’s funny, of course, that you’re here. That you’re scared. You can’t see her, sure, but that’s never mattered. Her face is printed on the back of your eyelids. You grew up together, her knobby spine rubbing against yours in the tub, dents of her baby teeth on all the good pencils. Queen Frostine and Princess Lolly. You were the crier. She ate the crusts of your sandwiches.
She was invincible, when you were young, when everyone was young. You remember the circular backyard, the fir trees and that smaller house. It didn’t have a staircase, but it had two front doors. The grass was always wet there, and Avery was always taller than you. You go back so often that you forget, these days, you’re not.
That house was cheaper, and so Mom and Dad could afford to play games with you. They would tie your legs together. One bit of cord at the ankle, one at the knee, and it would rub skin through the sock so that you had red lines, later, undressing before a shower. You would rub at them until the whole thing puffed up, so tender that it could be poked with a fingernail, turning yellow in that place. You must have done this two times, three, four. In your memories, it was always Easter.