funny. You be careful. No teenager should be forced to drink like that—your little bodies are still growing. Ben, this makes me nervous.”
“Thanks, Mama,” Robbie said. “It does so much for my confidence when you refer to my little body. Really.”
At this Knox, her father, and then Robbie began to laugh.
“What?” Charlotte touched Knox’s sleeve. “I didn’t hear.”
“Not you,” Knox’s mother said to Robbie. “Not yours specifically.” Her eyes were bright; she spoke quickly. There was a giddy moment Knox recognized, that, for her, represented one complete definition of pleasure: a minuscule stretch in time wherein they waited for Robbie, having been perfectly set up, to utter a killer line.
“Coming from a dwarf—” was all he had to say. They laughed harder; Knox’s father picked up his napkin and swatted at the table; Robbie leaned back in his chair, looking satisfied. “That’s it,” Knox’s mother said, mock indignant, struggling up from her low chair and pushing it away from the table.
“What,” Charlotte said, the word a high plaint. She held Knox’s arm now. “I missed it.”
Knox forced herself to look at Charlotte. Her own face, the base of her throat, felt warmed from the wine. Beyond that, she felt good, charged with a kind of invincibility that made her want to turn back toward the other faces around the table, keep herself tangled up in the laughter and talk. She might say anything—there was a momentum to these dinners, to nights like these. Charlotte’s lips were turned up at the corners; her eyes planchets, waiting to be stamped with an explanation. They scanned Knox’s face. Knox had noticed, when Charlotte first walked through her parents’ back door late that afternoon, that she looked paler since the last time they had seen each other, like one of the deeper layers of her skin had been rinsed of its pigment and put back again. Winter in New York, maybe; her cuticles were pink and raw looking where the nail beds met them, her ear ice cold against Knox’s cheek when they hugged. Otherwise, Charlotte had looked like herself, her dark, flyaway hair pinned under the strap of a backpack she’d carried onto the plane, the curves of her seeming to extend into the room before her under the layers she wore: fitted army jacket, back-cowl sweater, flannel skirt, tall boots that accentuated an already heavy step. She had changed for dinner, and now wore a corduroy shirt and earrings that stopped just below her jawline and shone like minnows in the light from the candles. She had drawn her legs up so that she sat cross-legged on her chair, her knees resting on its arms, her feet upturned.
Knox sighed. She had no idea how far back to go in order to reconstruct what Charlotte might have missed. The hand on her arm irritated her; her sister demanded a constant inclusion that Knox found rude, that she herself would never have felt entitled to. Charlotte had been watching her for much of dinner; Knox had sensed it, the gaze had made her more than a little ruthless.
“It was nothing,” she said. She picked up her wineglass and sipped from it. “Robbie made a joke.”
Charlotte waited. Knox took another sip of her wine. She wanted to turn away but couldn’t.
“It’s too hard to explain,” she said, but when Charlotte narrowed her eyes, angled slightly toward their father, and began to open her mouth, she heard herself speaking. “Mom doesn’t want Robbie to drink so much at school.” She touched Charlotte’s hand, and Charlotte’s eyes returned to her face. Charlotte smiled and raised her eyebrows; Knox zeroed in on the hieroglyph of freckles that marked the bridge of her nose, so faded with the years that Knox wondered if they had in fact disappeared altogether, if she was seeing them out of habit.
“I heard that part,” Charlotte said.
“She said something about growing bodies …”
It felt as if she were lifting the words off the bottom of a lake, struggling to push them up, sediment streaming all around her. She didn’t want to be talking, but she made herself sound just eager enough.
“And then Robbie said, ‘Coming from the midget’ or whatever—”
“Oh,” Charlotte said. “I got it.” She squeezed Knox’s arm, then turned to reach behind her for the wine bottle. She topped off Knox’s glass with it. She twirled her wrist up at the end of the pour, sending a stray drop into Knox’s glass rather than down the bottle’s side. “Keep it up,” she