We were girls who plaited each other’s hair, who gave each other manicures, who tested each other’s eyeshadow. We lived next door to each other, and it was hard to tell who lived where. We lived in two places at once.
Inseparable, they said.
Whatever, we said.
We pretended that we were in a rock band. I was the lead singer, Valerie played guitar. We held tryouts for the role of band manager, but it never worked out. Someone was always left out, offended, hurt. We didn’t mean for it to be that way, but that’s the way it had to be. “Three’s a crowd,” they’d say. In the end, it always came back to me and Valerie, in my bedroom with my father’s Epiphone with the broken strings.
We spied on our brothers and tortured our sisters. We made our mothers cry and say things like, “Wait till your father comes home.” We waited till our fathers came home. Sometimes we were punished, sometimes all was forgotten.
We walked around the neighborhood like the queens that we were. We licked our fingers and touched our asses. Our fingertips sizzled the moment they hit the denim. We smoked cigarettes behind the shed, then took long showers and brushed our teeth, even our tongues, to get the smell off.
“You think you’re both hot shit,” our brothers and sisters complained. “Where’s this stupid band that you keep talking about?”
We told them they would never understand. We were artists. They were kids.
“You can’t even play guitar.” They continued to taunt us. They were nose-picking, Garanimal-wearing, and jealous of us. We felt superior. Clearly, we were. These brothers and sisters of ours should remain huddled over their pathetic board games in the basement or basking in the nuclear glow of the television set.
One day these brothers and sisters of ours hid everything we wanted. They hid the eyeshadow, the guitar, the cigarettes.
Valerie and I stood before them. We wore heels so we would tower. “Where are they?” we asked. “Where are our things?”
Our brothers and sisters stifled their giggles. They tried to remain poker-faced, but we knew.
“We’re only giving you one more chance to confess,” we warned.
One sister curled her lip, the merest hint of a grin. “I don’t know,” she said. Another sister elbowed her. They both looked toward the sky.
We stood in front of them, hands on our hips, index fingers through the belt loops, giving our brothers and sisters the full effect of our opalescent lavender nail polish. Our brothers and sisters, they were so young, so annoying. We were the oldest. We were in charge. How dare they steal our things.
“We’re telling Mom,” I said.
Our brothers and sisters didn’t flinch.
“Just you wait,” Valerie said.
“Whatever,” they said.
“Come on,” I pleaded. “We’ll go easy on you if you give us our stuff back.”
We herded them into the open garage. We pulled down the garage door, which made a clattering sound on its tracks. Trapped them, then told them, “Pull down your pants. You need to be spanked.”
We didn’t want to touch their butts, so we found a thin piece of half-moon molding, about three feet long, perfect for long-distance spanking. It looked like it could exert a painful snap against bare sibling flesh. But our brothers and sisters didn’t drop their trousers to receive their punishment. They just stood there.
“Come on, you little shits,” Valerie said. “We’ll let you go if you tell us where our stuff is.” She grabbed Monica, my sister, the youngest of us all. I saw the indentations that Valerie’s fingers made in Monica’s chubby arm.
Monica looked at me. A rivulet rolled down her cheek. She turned her head, looked at the garbage can in the corner. I opened the lid on the can, and there was the guitar, the cigarettes, the eyeshadow. I dropped the piece of wood and fished out the rest.
“Ewww,” Valerie said. “That eyeshadow is gone.” She let go of Monica’s arm. Monica ran to Paul, our other brother, who put his arm around her and glared at us. Valerie grabbed the guitar, and we sauntered out of the garage. I thought about the piece of wood we had left behind, how Paul watched us as we left, how quickly the tables could turn. I wondered whether they’d tell Mom, whether they’d rat us out.
They wouldn’t dare.
Amy Kiger-Williams holds an MFA in Fiction from Rutgers-Newark. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Yale Review, South Carolina Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Redivider, and elsewhere. She is at work on a novel and a short story collection. You can read more of her work at amykigerwilliams.com and follow her on Twitter at @amykw.
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