My Sister Will Be Hungry: Part II

I tell Audrey a story on the way home, the usual one, about when we were little. Back then, she’d cry over the silliest things: smushed flies, roadkill, belly-up carnival goldfish. One day, I recount, she found a mangled feather boa on the sidewalk and mourned it too. My mother thought it was awfully white of her, inventing tragedy where none existed. Her dumb little gweilo daughter, pampered and hungry for problems.

“Funny how I’m the one who ended up vegetarian,” I say, but Audrey doesn’t laugh, just unlocks the front door and then closes it behind us, her expression inscrutable. I wonder if it’s because I’m leaving tomorrow, for the first time since the last time. If I had a sister like me, I wouldn’t miss her much. But Audrey is kinder than I am, more forgiving.

“Did you pack your concealer?” she asks. We’ve reached my room now, and she is searching through my makeup bag. “You should have one for blemishes and one for under-eye circles.” She is 14 but already beautiful, a double-edged quality in a girl so young. She colors herself in perfectly every morning. It was she who taught me to draw shadows on my face to distract from its increasing sphericity. My mother never comments on Audrey’s handiwork except when the powders smudge. You look dirty, she says. Like a cheap whore.

I nod. “Yep, the Almay and the Neutrogena.”

“And primer, too,” Audrey adds. “Don’t forget that.”

At the peak of my success, I was cruel to her. I was desperate, then, for reassurance. I sought safety in myself, in the protrusion of vertebrae, in the growth of fine pigmentless fur that spread over my skin—any palpable proof of purity. But I needed more, I needed a frame of reference, and there she was, silent and pliant as always.

“Close your eyes,” she says, and takes to curling my lashes, which resist beauty, which even now are sparse and fragile. A few casualties land atop my cheeks. She brushes them off and murmurs an apology.

It was so easy, even at that stage, to push her into the bathroom, force her onto the scale, measure the inches of her pre-adolescent body. It was my favorite game: Are You Smaller Than a Sixth Grader?

And somehow, when I met my ineluctable fate a few months later, she had found it in herself to dust my resentful intubated face with blush. How clownish I’d looked, thick paint on sallow canvas. She hadn’t been so skilled back then, it was guesswork, reverse engineering. Now she is like a doctor with those brushes, those palettes, her expert hands exacting and incapable of failure. The girl she presents to me in a hand mirror betrays no trace of her nasogastric past.

“You’ll call me every day, right?”

“Every week,” I say.

She holds the mirror at arm’s length so that we both can fit inside it. “We look like we have different parents,” she says, and she presses her tanned, dimpled cheek to my pale one. “We look like different races.” I turn and blink against her face, tickling her forehead with my matted lashes. True to form, our laughs look nothing alike.

As a final touch, she takes a tweezer to my brows, pulling the skin taut to minimize pain.

Many years earlier, when still I was indifferent to my roundness, I had made a game of dropping my possessions from our bedroom window and listening for the sound of small objects hitting concrete—the light affirmative clatter that marked the turn from cause to effect.

I wish she’d hurt me just a little.

I wish she’d show some sign.