My mom had cut back to part-time at the school so that she could take me to all my skiing stuff—I most certainly didn’t adequately appreciate her sacrifice at the time, but we were uncommonly close, given our many hours alone in the car together driving up and down every mountain in the region.

The hullabaloo resumed when the girls arrived back at the house and changed into their pj’s.

I lingered at the threshold of the doorway to Penny’s bedroom.

“How was your date?” I asked. I was aiming for nonchalance, sarcasm even, but at ten I had the faculties for neither.

“Sissy!” Emily squealed. Emily’s only sibling was an older brother, so she was keen to share big sister duty with Penny. Though Penny frequently enumerated the many ways in which little sisters were the worst, she usually tolerated me hanging around them.

Penny gave the most world-weary sigh a twelve-year-old could muster, but let a smile creep in and gave me a sideways nod, signaling I could enter. They were sitting cross-legged on the lower half of Penny’s trundle bed with an open bag of Cheetos and a mound of Twizzlers and Whoppers between them.

“Ethan totally likes you,” Penny continued as I settled in and reached for a Twizzler.

Emily squealed. “I almost had a cow when he put his arm around me.”

Penny nodded sagely.

“And you guys! Oh my god, you were making out like the whole time.”

“Ew,” I said, and Penny rolled her eyes.

“He’s an eighth grader,” she said, as though that explained everything, and it sort of did. Middle school was a treacherous place, throwing together all those children in their various stages of metamorphosis; some of the boys in eighth grade were nearly six feet tall and had begun to resemble impossibly awkward men. Penny smiled slyly and pushed the long curtain of her hair over her shoulder. Emily saw it first.

“Ahhhhh! You have a hickey!”

I craned my neck to see, and there it was, a quarter-size red-and-purple welt just underneath Penny’s ear.

“Mom and Dad are going to kill you,” I said.

“Not if they don’t know about it,” Penny said, walloping me with a pillow. “It’s no big deal,” she said, “I’ll just wear a scarf.”

I didn’t want to admit how baffled I was by the hickey. How did you even get such a thing? It involved kissing, obviously, but the mechanics were unclear. I’d learn later that hickeys were a particular teenage phenomenon that was just exactly as stupid as it appeared.