When Ruth shrugged, her shoulders slid against my skin. All my life, long after this, this was what I liked best about holding someone else, feeling their bones, the simultaneous firmness and fragility of them, like holding a mouse in your palm.

“I don’t even want it,” Ruth said. “I didn’t even want it.”

“You’ll get to be a big sister.”

Ruth hissed through her teeth.

My mother used to tell people that she did not need to have another child, because she had gotten it right the first time. She had stopped saying this since Aunt Vera got pregnant, of course, but it made me wonder the same thing Ruth must’ve, what part of her her mother was dissatisfied with.

“Do you ever think about being kidnapped?” Ruth asked.

“Sure.” We had a Stranger Danger assembly in school every year, where a police officer came and talked to us about what we should do if a stranger tried to take us. Last year, they told us about a girl our age who had been stolen and kept in a basement for five years. The police officer rolled tape across the floor of the gymnasium. “This,” he said, standing in a square the size of an airplane bathroom or a coffin, “was the size of the room Nicole was kept in. Think about that.” The gasp from one of our teachers made me feel that we were being shown something illicit. The photo of the girl up on the projector looked like something from the television, her pursed, serious face, her blond hair in strings around her cheeks. Abduction was a horror story for children our age that also carried a tentative thrill. It was such an extreme thing to have happen to you. “What would you do?”

“I heard about this girl”—Ruth rolled her head to stare up at the ceiling; I looked at the side of her nose—“who got kidnapped right out of the hospital when she was a baby, and this woman who was a stranger raised her like her daughter. And she never even knew until she was grown up.”

I drove my elbow, quick and sharp, up under her ribs. “Ow.” Ruth stilled. I roughhoused a lot with other kids at school, but that didn’t really work with Ruth. She didn’t fight back when you hurt her, just went limp, boneless like a scruffed cat.

I buried my face in the back of her neck. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

* * *

We still had to go to school the next morning. I thought we might not have to. The year before, when Ruth broke her arm, I’d been allowed to take two days off to spend with her. We’d stayed at Aunt Vera’s house, eating her peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, better than my mother’s because she made them with soft white bread and a little butter and honey.

Ruth seemed newly awkward while we were changing into our school clothes. As if the change in her mother were contagious, she was heavier and more clumsy, turning her back to me and crossing her arms tightly over her chest for longer than it would have taken her to just put on a shirt, hunching all her body so close together she shrank.