At least, that was how my sister put it. In our backyard at night, in her uniform of short shorts and tank top and bare feet, her shoulder blades spiked against the cinder block wall of the house and a cigarette wedged between two stiff fingers that hovered in front of her chin, Karen glared at the chain-link fence that separated our backyard from the next and said, “You can hear it in the woman’s voice. She’s still got the volume, but she’s phoning it in.”

“Maybe she’s tired,” I said.

“Maybe she’s dead. As in Night of the Living. She keeps the house freezing, like a morgue, you know? She’s like a zombie, but instead of eating you, she just nags you to death.”

Karen was sailing toward the end of high school and she’d lost her pudginess and grown sleek and dangerous during the past year. She’d chopped her hair off at the neckline (just as our mother was growing hers long), she’d gone skeletally limp, and she’d perfected a look of absolute hatred that she wore now along with her makeup.

“If you were smart, you’d do whatever you wanted,” she told me. “Mom’s not going to care.”

“I do what I want. I’m taking two electives.”

A little bubble of adult laughter and smoke burst at the back of her throat. She stared at the fence and shook her head wearily. “I’m not talking about your little Romper Room poetry classes. I’m talking about having some fun. You’re so afraid of getting into trouble, it’s pathetic. You don’t even ask if you can hang out with your friends. I don’t ask anymore—I tell her what I’m going to do or I just do it. You have friends, right?”

I tried to mimic her laugh. “Yeah.”

Her head tipped sideways as if her neck were broken. “I mean, not just the people you sit next to in class. You have real friends?”

“Screw you,” I said. “Yes.”

“And I’m sure you can’t get a date to save your life—not till your face clears up, anyway—but if you could, you would, right?”

“Screw you twice.”

“Just asking,” she said. “Just trying to get an idea of where the family registers on the freak-o-meter.”

“What about you? I don’t see you dating anybody.”

“Because I’ve already done the whole dating scene. I get straight to the good stuff now.”

“What does that mean?”

“Two words,” she said to her cigarette. “Seth Colby.”