Page 77 of The Favorite Sister

Brett turns to me, mouth agape, and I match her outraged expression—time to have some fucking fun.

Brett shouts back, “You basically just told us to smile. It’s been illegal to tell women to smile since 2013.”

He takes the rebuke as an invitation to approach, which, of course it was. Closer, I see that his baseball hat is from a sailing regatta he attended in Newport two summers ago when he was ten. “Yeah, ’cause no one ever tells men to smile. It’s only women who are expected to be pleasing and accommodating at all times.”

Brett makes a raspberry sound with her lips. “Ex-fucking-cuse me?”

The kid tucks his hands in his back pockets, broadening his hairless chest, ever so pleased with himself. “We watched that shortStop Telling Women to Smilein my women’s studies class.” He dips his head and looks up at us with a debilitating smile. “We watched your show too.”

Brett flips her hair to the other side of her shoulder. It’s drying in gorgeous, wild waves. I’m still thinner.

“So?” I rest a hip against the bar and fold my arms across my chest, scooping my breasts so that my top pulls up, exposing a sliver of lean midriff. “Which one of us is your favorite?”

“Oh, man.” He laughs, twisting his hat around backward, smearing his thick blond hair across his forehead. If we were all in college at the same time, he wouldn’t bother with either of us. “Lauren, probably.”

“Shocking!” Brett rolls her eyes.

“You asked me who my favorite is. Not who’s hottest.” He looksright at me, and goddamnit if his shit-eating grin doesn’t impale me from my inner thighs to my sternum.

Brett says, “Because it’s 2017 and women care fuck all if a bunch of whiskey dick frat boys think they’re hot.” She twists a hair around her finger, her brown eyes huge and nonthreatening. Oh, she cares. We all care. Women sexually attracted to socks are not impervious to the male gaze. The difference today is, we have to say that we are. Feminism doesn’t emancipate us, it’s just one more impossible standard to meet.

Brett leans in closer, her voice greased with charm. “But for shits and giggles, if you...” She flutters her eyelashes up at him and waits.

“Tim,” Tim supplies after an unsexy moment of confusion.

“Tim,” Brett speaks his name with comic seduction, soft on the “T,” long and yummy on the “m.” “If you were to pick the hottest,Tim. Who would it be?”

He gestures at us with a startled expression on his face, like he can’t believe we even had to ask. “Either one of you. And I swear I’m not just saying that because you’re both here. The other girls”—he shows them the exit with a sideways scoop of his hand—“I know a million girls who look like that. You two are different.”

Different is good, Instagram tells you. Conformity is boring. Be you because everyone else is taken. Easy to repost in earnest when you haven’t labored under the duress of different all your life.

“Atie?” Brett pouts.

“Yeah, Tim,” I cosign, “girls like us? We don’t do ties. Someone has to lose.”

Tim points his chin at the ceiling with a groan, as though we have tasked him with settling something as complex as the national budget.

“It’s honestly a tie,” he says. “But if I’m hedging my bets...” He looks from me to Brett from Brett to me, oscillating between two sets of pleadingoh, please, pick me!eyes. “I’d go with you.” He shrugs one shoulder half-heartedly in my direction.

Brett covers her heart with her hand and crumples a little.

“You don’t likeguys,” Tim reminds her.

“You’re into the cougar thing.” She sips her drink. “I get it.”

The word “cougar” hits me like a fist wearing brass knuckles. My heart is pounding in my brain, clobbering my intellectual capacities, making only high school mean girl ripostes accessible. “Or he’s into the thin thing,” I say.

“See,” Brett directs her plastic cup of vodka at me, jovially, “thin” failing to deliver the body slam I hoped it would, “the thing is, Steph—I could be thin if I wanted. You can’t be in your twenties. No matter how disciplined you try to be.”

Brett raises her vodka shot and knocks it back, her face twisting gruesomely like a Salvador Dalí portrait. Tim watches us, a little nervously, unable to tell anymore if we’re joking. We’re deadly serious, but we can’t let him know that. He came over here to make us smile.

“In that case,” I say, raising my shot, “to women being in their sexual prime in their thirties.” I knock back the warm vodka, gagging. Tim wasn’t wrong. We were looking a little too serious over here. And I’m not ready to get serious. Not yet.

The nineties cover band comes on at midnight and we have no problem securing spots in the front row. The children who frequent this place are just wrapping up cocktail hour at their squalid summer shares. The rain stops at some point, and when a bead of sweat trickles down my spine I turn and realize it’s the next day, that the entire room has filled to its usual capacity, which is whatever one body shy of suffocation is. Brett and I are holding hands, dancing and screaming the lyrics to No Doubt and Goo Goo Dolls songs, making lewd Tim sandwiches to R. Kelly covers while the floor swipes at our feet with warm toffee gloves. A constellation of cell phones hangs in the air, capturing our every move.

The lead singer is not much younger than me, her hair in high pigtail buns, and I do the math to figure out if she is closer to Gwen Stefani now than Gwen Stefani then. Then. Though, just barely. If she can be here, I can be here, I decide. As she sings the final verseof “Spiderwebs,” a girl in the crowd tugs on Brett’s arm. I can’t hear what Brett says when she turns to her, but her eyes light up in recognition and she throws her arms around her neck. Someone she knows. Someone to distract her. I gesture for Tim to crouch down so that I can shout in his ear, “Drink!”

I take his hand, pulling him through the crowd, but I don’t stop at the bar in the main room, or the bar in the back room, or the bar outside. We keep going, into the loud, spongy night, past the bouncer standing beneath the white wood arbor, punching entrance stamps onto the backs of hands, and around the side of the bar and into the strip of grass between the outdoor patio and the next building, which I’ve never bothered to identify. There, I close Tim’s arms around my lower back and slip a finger under his chin, guiding his mouth toward mine. The first kiss is long, soft, and without tongue, leaving me bow-kneed and swollen.