Annie lowered her stinging shin into the bathwater and watched the blood blossom away in reds and pinks. This was what she got for stealing her mother’s razor, for wanting to be like Audrey Johnson, whose golden hair Audrey’s mother braided into special fishtail French braids, who performed all kinds of quick and springing gymnastics on the playground, and whose legs were not only hairless, but also shiny as she tumbled past while Annie sat on the swing set and felt the way her butt lapped over the flexible black seat. Boys watched Audrey—perfect little Audrey in her perfect little world—and here they were already in the fifth grade. The only boy who ever watched Annie was her older brother Mike, who she once caught spying through a crack in the bathroom door while she stood sideways in front of the mirror and practiced holding in her squishy stomach.

“Go away, Mike!” she said, then slammed the door shut.

“Suck it in all you want, Fatty,” Mike said through the door. “You’re still going to end up with a gut.” He snickered and shuffled away.

Annie couldn’t help inheriting her thick build any more than she could keep from getting her period every month. But she could shave her legs. Except she hadn’t anticipated cutting herself this badly, let alone being unable to stop the bleeding. A chunk of her own skin floated, almost mockingly, near her elbow and she pressed even harder on the wound.

Her options seemed rather limited: she could either face the punishment or bleed to death tragically here in the tub. She called for her mother and waited for the angry stomping—Phyllis was cleaning up after the Bridge Ladies’ weekly Tuesday night game and generally hated to be interrupted for anything—to reverberate down the hallway.

Phyllis peeked her head into the bathroom. Her neat wavy red hair and penciled eyebrows, curtained by the escaping steam, appeared like some glamorous apparition. “What is it?”

Annie modestly hugged her knees to her chest. Three months ago, when Phyllis confronted Annie with a pair of bloody underpants she had dug out of the trash, Annie had felt cold and hot all over as she blushed. It grew continually worse when Phyllis pulled the pink box out from under the sink, then went on and on about hair and breasts and cleanliness and being a good girl, all things Annie had wanted to know more about, but not from her mother. Then Phyllis had smacked Annie across the cheek.

“Welcome to womanhood.”

“Why did you do that?” Annie held her hand to the burning spot on her face.

“Because my mother did it to me,” Phyllis said, patting her daughter on the shoulder, before walking away.

Now Annie felt almost as vulnerable as she had then. She wondered whether her mother would hit her this time or if she would practice a new form of mothering she had picked up from those parenting magazines she was reading all the time. Gingerly, Annie removed her hand to reveal the gash, which continued to bleed out in a dramatic display.

“I kind of cut myself shaving, and I can’t get it to stop bleeding.”

“Let me see.” Phyllis knelt in front of the tub. Her voice had softened a little. She held Annie’s calf with one hand and pulled and prodded at her shin with the other. With her head tilted like that, and with the fine line forming between her eyebrows, Annie thought at that moment her mother was actually a lovely woman. Or loving, at least. She stood and opened the medicine cabinet. “Tell me about this shaving business.”

“I wanted smooth and shiny legs.”

“Like me?”

Annie nodded. “And Audrey Johnson.”

“Ah.” Phyllis squirted some sort of ointment on an opened bandage. She stood with the bandage in front of her and looked at her daughter. “Do you want me to show you how to shave?”

“Aren’t I in trouble?”

“Shaving is punishment enough. I can show you, but you have to really want the consequences. If you start shaving, the hair grows back thick and dark and ugly. Once you start, you can’t stop. It goes all prickly if you don’t shave.” Phyllis applied the bandage and smoothed it with her hands. “It’ll change the way you think. Determine what you wear, who your friends are, which boyfriends you’ll have—”

“So you won’t tell me, then?”

“Let me finish. You’ll become self-conscious. And if you liked yourself before, you’ll probably never accept yourself again.”

“All that because of shaving?” Annie couldn’t keep the sarcastic tone out of her voice.

“It’s true.”

Annie picked up the razor, swirled its head around the bathwater to knock the skin out of it, and then handed it to her mother. “I think I can handle it.” She would need to get more skirts.

Phyllis sighed and shook her head. She picked up the bar of soap. “Let me see your good leg.”

Annie propped her foot on the edge of the tub and watched as her mother produced lather. The pressure of the razor—held at a particular angle—felt neither too heavy nor too light. Phyllis moved as quickly and as deftly as an expert. When Phyllis moved to Annie’s thigh, Annie suddenly needed to pee. Her stomach tickled on the inside like it was turning over and trying to get somewhere with a sense of urgency she had never before known.

Friday night of that week, Annie and Mike sat on opposite ends of the couch watching a rerun of I Dream of Jeannie, which cast the only light—an eerie sort of white-blue—in the room. Phyllis was out; Mike was in charge. Ever since their father had died several years ago, Mike had been in charge of some sorts. He found it very easy to boss Annie around, as a big brother might, but lately he’d been testing the waters of telling his mother what to do. Earlier, he had told his mother to stop fussing and just go; he would make dinner and take care of things. For dinner he had made spaghetti. It wasn’t as good as their mother’s, but Annie figured it still wasn’t bad, especially for a freshman who hadn’t even taken Hot Mrs. Dickerson’s—that was his name for her—cooking class, available only to sophomores and upperclassmen.

Annie couldn’t stop thinking about Jeannie’s outfit: all that see-through gauze and the way the bright curves of fabric ended to reveal her ribs and tiny waist. Not even Audrey Johnson looked like that. Not yet. “Mike, do you think she’s pretty?”

Mike looked at her. He said, “None of your business,” before turning back to the television. Since he began high school, Mike had grown into a mystery. There was something in the dark circles under his eyes that kept her from getting too close. He moved slowly and sat like an old man with stooped shoulders, but his eyes were quick, maybe mean.

Jeannie crossed her arms and nodded her head; another wish came true.

“Play Truth or Dare with me and I’ll tell you what I think.”

More of a test than a statement, Mike’s proposition flagged Annie’s awareness that she was home alone with her brother, who was older, bigger, heavier, and—even if she’d never tell him to his face—smarter than her. He may have already set traps around the house to torture her until their mother came home. Annie touched the newest bandage on her shin gently. She would face him anyway.

“Okay, Truth or Dare?”

He ran a hand through his greasy dark hair. “Truth.”

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

“I can’t say; I haven’t done everything I’m going to do yet.”

“But so far?”

“So far? I don’t know. Stole stuff from the locker room, I guess.”

“What’d you steal?”

“Nope. You’ve already used up your turn. You should have incorporated any follow-ups into your original question.”

“Oh, come on, Mike.”

He shook his head then looked at her again. “Truth or Dare?”

She would show him she could be just as tough—just as brave—as he was, if need be. So she said, “Dare.”

“I dare you,” he began slowly, “to take off all your clothes and run around the house three times—outside.”

It was warm and dark on their suburban street, which never got much traffic. This time of night, the neighbors would be inside doing whatever it was neighbors did inside. She could always brag at school, and if Audrey Johnson was there to hear about it…

“What are the terms?”

“No terms. Leave your clothes inside the door, run around outside, and you can’t hide behind bushes or anything. I’ll count your laps.”

“But you can’t cheat the counting.”

He held up his hands as if in surrender. “No cheats.”

“Three?”

“Just three.”

“No locking me out of the house.” She waited for a slow smile to spread across his face, but he remained excited yet earnest-looking.

“You can even wear your shoes so you don’t hurt your feet.”

That same part of Annie’s stomach that had been twisting and turning over earlier in the week now seemed to be pushing, but the direction felt all mixed up, like not-quite fear. Annie slid off the couch and stepped on the heels of her sneakers to remove them from her feet.

“Turn around.” Without checking to see if Mike watched, Annie undressed quickly, turning her T-shirt inside-out as she pulled it over her head then yanking her jeans down past her ankles and off her feet. She unhooked her sad little training bra with the pink rosebud in the middle and dropped it onto her other clothes. Then she shoved her underwear down to the floor and proudly noticed the way her smooth legs gleamed in the light from the television. She stuffed her toes into the tops of her shoes and didn’t even wait to secure them onto her heels before hurrying out the front door, slamming it behind her.

In the warm evening air, Annie may as well have been wearing breathy silk, or even Jeannie’s little pink number, and maybe her stomach wouldn’t look quite as ridiculous as she originally thought it would, not even as she ran.

And she moved her short, stocky legs faster than she’d ever thought possible: around the side of the house, through the back yard and around to the front door again. She caught a flash of Mike’s face with his hands cupped against the light. That was one.

On her second lap, she almost slowed down to laugh at the word “streak,” because she moved like one. Of course. And she no longer saw herself as chubby. She was quick and light, aware enough to duck around the branches that jutted out into her path. She lifted her feet over roots and concrete and kept her footing sure. She felt herself settling into a rhythm: one foot in front of the other, over and over again until she got the sense that there was something important about this. This was proof that she was special and that whether anyone knew it or not, Annie was brave. She doubted if even Audrey Johnson—who flipped and hung upside-down on the monkey bars and dismounted onto dirt and gravel—was daring enough to run naked around her house. She had beaten Audrey Johnson. She was at the front again, completing her second lap.

The sound in her ears may have been an oncoming car (she sped up and rounded a corner), or it may have been her heart. Her heart, the first time she had heard it with her head against her pillow, was not actually someone tromping down grass in the back yard, coming to steal her away in the night. When she lifted her head, the sound stopped, and when she relaxed again, there it was, on a course for her, but no. How had she figured out that was her own heart? At this question, Annie streaked around the corner and up the porch, bursting through the door.

She surprised Mike. He jumped and ripped his face away from the window as she, in one motion, bent to pick up her clothes and cover herself while she ran to the bathroom, where she locked the door behind her, as was her habit. He had been a man of his word and just stood there, counting. Annie’s hands shook as she worked to fasten the clasps on her bra. A knock on the door startled her.

“Hey, when you’re done, come back out. We’re not done yet.”

“I bet!” Her voice echoed louder off the tiles than she would have liked. “You didn’t think I’d do it, did you?” She pulled on her pants, not stopping to take off her shoes this time. The T-shirt had to be turned right-side out before she tugged it over her head. “You thought you had me—”

Annie opened the door and Mike grabbed her face and kissed her on the mouth.

She pushed him away. “What are you doing?” There in the dim light of the hallway, she smelled her own breath, mildew in the bathroom, the fish-stick scent that had settled into the carpet throughout the house for weeks after her mother burned them.

“Playing the game.”

She heard him as if he had been speaking another language. The sounds rearranged themselves into words inside her head before she understood.

“Then play it right.” She walked past him and into the living room, where she sat on one end of the couch. Credits scrolled up the screen. Their show was over. “Now, Truth or Dare?”

“Truth.” He moved to the edge of the room and leaned against the doorframe.

She stared at the television as if it would give her the question she needed the answer to most. “Should I trust you?” Her heart beat the blood away from her face. Out of the corner of her eye, Annie saw movement and heard his voice fade as he walked toward his bedroom.

“No,” he said, and shut the door.

By the time Mike finally progressed to touching Annie, she couldn’t stop eating. There had only been three months between the time he first kissed her and the day he closed his bedroom door behind them, but already none of her pants fit properly. She had to lie down on her bed to get them buttoned and zipped most days.

The same morning Phyllis took Annie’s second bowl of cereal away from her while she was still eating it and told her to walk to school, Phyllis also offered to pick up her daughter so they could spend some time together, just the two of them. Annie had forgotten about this until after school, when she stepped into the too-bright afternoon light and saw her petite and bony mother looking extra petite and bony sitting there in the big Ford, smoking a cigarette. She would have had to take off work early; this was supposed to be something special. Phyllis wore the big sunglasses she thought made her look like a movie star. She was picking at a loose strand of hair when Annie opened the passenger door and slumped into the plush bench seat.

“Hey, kiddo.” Phyllis pushed her sunglasses up to the top of her head and looked at Annie. Her smile was a little too optimistic. “Ready to go?”

Annie slammed the car door harder than necessary as her only response. Her plan was to say nothing—to continue to say nothing—for the entire trip. She had for some time been waiting for someone to sit down with her, and without looking at her or touching her, to ask, Annie, what is it? But everyone was too busy teaching pre-algebra or collecting the city’s garbage or reading parenting articles, or telling her to not say anything at all.

They ended up in the produce section of Kroger, among senior citizens buying potted meat and beets and a few frenzied-looking young mothers. They all looked too busy or occupied to ask anyone anything, save for, Which way to the powdered milk? Annie followed her mother, watching the angles her elbows made as she maneuvered a cart between bins of oranges and bagged apples before pulling it over down by the privacy of the potatoes.

In a low, but important-sounding voice, Phyllis spoke to Annie: “You’re at a key point in your development now, honey. You’re growing and changing, like we talked about.” She stopped. Annie watched a rash appear on her mother’s neck and climb toward her face. Phyllis exhaled as if she had surfaced from deep water. “There’s no use in trying to coat it. Listen, Annie, you have to start watching what you eat. It’s jut not healthy for you to eat all that junk. Plus,” Phyllis looked around briefly, “if you don’t watch your figure, nobody’s going to…watch your figure.”

Annie blinked, swished her foot around the perimeter of a cold floor tile and said nothing. She knew at that moment that her mother would never in a million years realize what Annie needed.

“Do you kind of understand what I’m talking about?” Phyllis tucked a strand of hair behind Annie’s ear.

“I’m fat. I know.” Annie crossed her arms tighter across her stomach.

“No, it’s not that you’re fat. You just need to be careful. You want to attract a nice boy, don’t you?” Phyllis smiled and searched Annie’s eyes, but she wouldn’t see anything that Annie wanted her to see: no, she didn’t want to attract any boys. “Or even if you’re too fat, people will look at you differently, think you’re, you know, stupid, or incapable. Do you want them to think that about you?”

“I get it. Can we go?”

“Let me just pick up some things first. Do you know how to pick out a cantaloupe?”

Annie thought maybe there was some sort of secret language she needed to learn in order to say it. She watched her mother put a rough melon skin against her nose and inhale deeply. She might shave the skin off her legs in layers and chunks to spell it out. She could leave it on the side of the tub to dry for her mother to see, for only her mother to understand. Annie opened her mouth.

“Okay, let’s get out of here, kiddo. You and I can cut this up, and you can have it for dinner, with some cottage cheese, maybe?” Phyllis smiled again at her daughter, who just fell in step behind the cart. They gathered the rest of the items on Phyllis’ list, paid, and left the store without saying anything else.

When they got home a Moon Pie waited, still in its wrapper, on the kitchen table. Annie saw it and felt her breath come faster. She set down the grocery sacks and picked up the pie. Mike moved into her field of vision.

“Jesus, you scared me.”

“I got that for you.” He nodded in the direction of her hands.

“What makes you think I even want it?”

“Aren’t those your favorite?” When he looked at her, his face was different, almost pleading.

What was he asking of her now? “So? Did you steal it?”

He shrugged.

“Annie, you’re not going to eat that, are you?” Phyllis entered the kitchen and fished the cantaloupe from the sack. She stood there holding it in her upright palm as a sort of offering. “We just talked about this. Think about how much fat’s in that thing. What’s it even made of? Let me see it.” Phyllis put out a hand for the pie and Annie pulled it out of her reach.

“No.”

“She wants it, Ma. Let her eat it.”

Annie could see what he was admitting now: guilt. This was his apology?

Annie held the Moon Pie in the air just below her chin. She could smell marshmallow—it would rebound delightfully against her fingers and tongue—beneath the plastic. She squeezed the crackling plastic until it squished. Phyllis’s waist squished through her fingers as she stood with her hands on her hips. Annie opened the plastic. She wanted to eat—to consume—both Mike and her mother. She watched the space between her mother’s fingers and took a bite.

Phyllis made a disgusted noise in the back of her throat and stormed out of the kitchen. Mike sat down at the head of the kitchen table, watching her. Annie wouldn’t let him off the hook that easily, and she had to let him know it. She stared past him and out the living room window, at the growing whiteness of the sky, and concentrated on the way the marshmallow felt against her tongue.

Annie dropped the ball-point pen onto her desk and sat on her hands to keep from stabbing the girl who was smacking her gum in the next seat over. The day before, Annie had had to turn around and go back up a flight of stairs so she wouldn’t kick the girl walking down in front of her. They all talked about her, but what they said, Annie could only imagine. She’d gained more weight as fall rolled in, and both girls and boys avoided her eyes—with that guilty look-away—in the hallways at school.

The bell rang. The gum popper stopped popping long enough to pack her books. Annie rushed out with her head down. She wondered if she could stab him in his sleep. With her luck, which hadn’t been too great lately, she’d be arrested and thrown in jail for life. It wouldn’t be self-defense if he was lying there, sleeping innocently, anyway.

Phyllis had insisted Annie continue to walk to and from school, “For some easy exercise. Just until you lose a little weight or until it gets too cold.” Walking took longer than riding the bus, but that didn’t matter. She liked watching the leaves this time of year. Golden leaves bled into red and dropped off one by one until the limbs were bare. She was comforted by knowing trees slept during the winter. They simply undressed and fell asleep, undisturbed. As peaceful as that. And it was natural, never wrong or bad. Unless a snowstorm piled onto their branches until they couldn’t hold it anymore and collapsed under the weight. Or if they were needed for firewood, or if someone crashed into their trunks, wounding them beyond repair.

Annie thought of trees all the way home, where she found a note from her mother: Annie, Finish doing the laundry. (That means fold it and put it away too) Might be home late. Do your homework. Ask Mike for help. (Please, Mike, help your sister) Leftovers in the fridge. –Mom

She grabbed the laundry basket at the top of the stairs and placed it on top of her head and went down the steps toward the light switch.

She tip-toed down the stairs with one hand on the rail and the other steadying the basket on her head. At the bottom of the steps, she plucked the basket from her head and set it at her feet. She disregarded a quiet noise on the other end of the basement as a normal basement-noise and nothing more. She reached, with steady hands, for the light pull.

The harsh light of the single bare bulb came too quickly.

She saw the chair first—one of the yellow aluminum folding chairs her mother made her fetch for Bridge ladies—lying on its side. Then she saw the movement, grand and slow.

His pair of cheap sneakers, with one shoestring untied, dangled below dark pants and a gray T-shirt, but worst of all was his red and swollen face. Annie looked at his face, something she almost never did anymore, and felt sorry for the purpling there. It made him look un-human. His eyes watered, or the tears might have been real, as he pleaded with his baby sister. For help, for forgiveness.

“Mike.” She could only whisper.

With one hand he scrabbled at something dark around his neck. A belt, hung from a nail in the beam and looped under his jaw. He tried to wave her to him with the other hand, but the momentum, his long, swinging legs, twirled him around and away from her. He flailed some more and swung himself back around. Annie stepped over the basket but didn’t cross the basement floor.

She was supposed to be doing something. The room seemed to inhale with her in it. Annie smelled the urine running down her brother’s leg and soaking into his jeans before she saw it trickle out. He was still watching her. How long had he been this way? She took one step closer.

“Oh, Mike.” Annie covered her mouth with the tips of her fingers the way she saw delicate women do on television when they felt sorry and embarrassed for something. But Annie was neither delicate nor did she consider herself a woman. But she was no child, either. She was Annie.

Annie who had a decision to make. Annie whose anger ran deep, who figured it was only a matter of time before she became pregnant with her own brother’s child. Who planned to never love, never marry, never touch, and who also suspected all those plans would fail her. Annie with the quiet chuckle and the pudgy cheeks. Annie had a brother once. And he loved her very much.

But Annie came home one day to find she had arrived too late to save him. Nothing Annie could have done; it wasn’t her fault. That’s what people would say. And Annie could live the rest of her life with their secret. Annie would be generous like that. Because Annie was a noble person. And Mike would never want people to know of their—his—indiscretions.

She sighed and stood the chair up, just out of her brother’s reach. He pointed his toes at it and kicked and swung toward her. She tilted her head and looked at his almost-bursting face. He flailed up and down and let out a flattened gurgle, but she didn’t need words to understand what he meant. He could plead and apologize all he wanted. She knew who she was. And what she meant. She made sure he locked eyes with her before she pushed the chair closer. Mike stood on it and started to cough and weep. She didn’t wait for him to catch his breath.

“Don’t ever touch me again,” she said, then turned and went up the steps and out to the kitchen, where she picked up her backpack. She had homework to do, and eventually, laundry to finish down in the basement. Her mother would be home later in the evening and expect Annie, at the very least, to have completed her chores.