Her skin is the colour and texture of burned pie crust. Her skin has always been darker than mine, yet she’s the one who lies in a tanning bed once a week. I’ve always been a lighter shade of Eskimo. Her hair has been dyed so often that I can see how it’s thinning in the front. I wonder if she still starts each day with a wire push-up bra and two Spanx camisoles. One thing that pushes her tits up and the other that sucks her guts in. Her own version of being a shape-shifter. Her eyelashes are coated in layers of mascara. Her nose remains the biggest part of her. She broke it often as a kid. I grin and can still hear our middle brother and me laughing together in the basement on a cold winter’s day.

That winter’s day. The day when out of boredom we ended up playing Blind Man, wrapping a scarf around our eyes to shut out the daylight. After turning themselves in a circle ten times, the blind man would jut their arms out in front of themselves, zombie-like, and go searching for the other two hidden players. Feeling only the frozen cement under our woollen socks, hearing each other’s whispered snickers. We would hide behind boxes or the washing machine, or near the rack of rifles my father had attached to the wall.

It was Sister’s turn that day to be the blind man and Brother had told me to not hide. He had come up with the idea of staying only inches away from her as she flailed her arms about, trying to find us. I agreed and we shifted from one foot to the other, our laughter spouting out of our noses as Sister tried to find us. Laughter spilled over from my nostrils and into my throat. Sister looked so stupid and helpless. She looked the way I usually felt around her.

I had this sense of incredible power. Brother stayed close on my heels as we darted around the basement. Then Sister did the unthinkable. In her frustration, she started to walk faster and faster and ran right into a cedar beam that held up the house. SMACK! Tears ran into the stream of blood pooling onto her thin lips. She ripped off the blindfold and screamed, “I’m telling Mom!” Upstairs she ran.

I looked at my brother. “Are we gonna be in trouble?” I asked, terrified of what our mother would do to us.

“Who cares?” Brother answered, “Wasn’t it funny when she banged her nose?” We both continued to laugh as we heard her tears upstairs. That was the beginning of a long series of broken noses for Sister, something that she seemed to do every other year. Her nose was never the same as the rest of ours. The rest of us have the same Inuit nose we were born with.