I didn’t think it was a joke.

I flopped down into Laura’s white beanbag. I knew there was no point in trying to change her mind, because she didn’t call me “little sister” except when she was being stubborn. Most of the time, Laura liked the fact that I was the one in charge of the house. I could boss her around when it came to chores, and she didn’t care. She was like a sailboat drifting on the lake, letting the wind decide where she would go and not really minding where she ended up. Me, I revved my motor and followed the shore.

I stared at her on the bed. She wore a V-necked white T-shirt and cutoffs with a thick black belt. She was much prettier than I was. She had the curves and the boobs and the big Farrah hair. Jonny told me last week that my face was much more interesting than Laura’s, because it wasn’t symmetrical and perfect like hers was. He thought that was a compliment. I told him he needed to do better.

My own hair is so dark it’s almost black, and I keep it straight as an arrow, with a perfect part down the middle. I have a sharply angled nose, like a little shark’s fin jutting off my face. My irises are so large and dark that they crowd out the whites of my eyes. I have two little peaches for breasts.

Hey, I knew who the guys went for. It was Laura, not me. Maybe that’s why Laura was much less comfortable with guys than me. She kept her distance. She rarely went out on dates. During the winter, she went to the movies with Peter Stanhope a few times, but she broke it off when he wanted to get into her jeans. As far as I knew, Laura was still a virgin. Not that she would tell me that kind of thing.

“You haven’t been around much lately,” I said. For more than a week, Laura had been disappearing after school. Coming in late or staying out all night. Acting quiet and brittle. Twice I heard her crying in her room.

“So?”

“So are you okay?”

Laura shrugged. I didn’t really expect her to tell me anything. We didn’t confide our secrets in each other. Even so, I wasn’t going to let it go. She could pretend all she wanted, but I knew something was wrong. You had to look for little things with Laura. When our mother died, the only hint about what was going on inside her head was when I found a ceramic statue of Jesus, in pieces, underneath her window.

I looked for a clue. Something different. It didn’t take me long to realize that she had flipped a photograph facedown on her nightstand. When I saw that she was still tugging at her finger, I noticed something else, too. No silver ring on her index finger, just a pale white band of skin. Laura saw where my eyes had gone, and she sat on her hands to cover them up. I knew there was no point in asking her about it, so I went another way.