On her fifteenth July Fourth, Willa stood at the front window of their childhood home and watched Justin hold a Roman candle to his crotch and ejaculate comets of green and blue fire into the sky. He wagged his tongue at her and she gave him the finger. It had been raining for weeks. She thought she heard the fire sizzling out as it rose into the air. All the trees bowed around Justin, heavy with rain, and the flowers in the yard had developed white mildew.

When Justin came into the house with the smell of explosions on him, their mother eyed him from the couch. He crossed and stood at the sink to fill a glass.

“You must be very proud,” Grace said. “You managed to get through it without blowing up your hand. Fireworks are for the mentally deficient.”

Back in the living room, Willa looked down at the book she’d been reading since the summer started. It was called Goodbye, Captain! She had read the same two chapters over and over. In the book, a girl lives with her pilot father and poet mother in a little house in Queens, New York. She witnesses her mother receiving the news of a plane crash. How could a story go on from there when that was the worst thing that could happen? Her ninth-grade English teacher had given her the book after their father died.

“I like fireworks,” Justin said.

“It’s embarrassing,” Grace said.

Willa launched the book across the room, where it hit the small stand with her mother’s favorite spider plant perched on top. Luckily, the stand only wobbled. She couldn’t listen to another fight between her brother and her mother. Their fights started this way every time, with little comments that sounded like nothing, but the air around them lit up with tension.

Her mother stared down at the book Willa had thrown as if she could pick it up with her mind. She looked tired. She had gotten home from work, cooked dinner, and cleaned up. Willa had helped her with the dishes only after being asked a few times. “What the hell are you doing? Was that meant to hit me, Willa?”

“I’m sick of you two fighting,” Willa said.

“We’re not fighting,” her mother said.

“In another minute you will be,” Willa said.

On the inside of the book, her teacher had written: Dear Willa, May you find comfort in this book, or at least a kindred spirit. She hadn’t. The girl in the story loved her mother too much and had no brother. Willa suspected the remaining chapters were about the girl being sad. Throwing the book had stopped Justin and Grace in their tracks. But now she had to go retrieve it; the cover had been bent completely in half.

Justin drank some of the water in his glass and emptied the rest into the sink. His hands were blackened. Grace took the glass from him and tucked a chunk of his hair behind his ear. He had recently shaved one half of his hair off. Their mother took every opportunity to touch it and show her confusion.

Justin went into his room. Soon, crusty guitar and heavy drums vibrated through the house. Grace increased the volume on the TV until the announcer’s voice distorted. On TV: a report about a volcanic eruption in another part of the world. The sky filled with black. In the corner of the screen, a shot from a satellite showing menacing smoke smeared across the ocean. Grace picked up a towel from the pile next to her and folded it into a perfect rectangle.

Willa sat in the comfy chair with her bent book in her lap and watched her mother trying to drown out Justin’s music. She looked older than she had only a few months ago and was allowing the gray to come out in her hair. She’d never have done that while their father was alive. Soon, she’d be turning fifty, and Willa wondered if they should do something special for her but couldn’t think of anything except cake. Her and Justin and a cake. It didn’t sound special.

Their mother had changed the most since their father died. She’d never been sweet and nurturing, but when Arthur was alive, the two of them had acted as parents together in a way that made her softer.

A towel flopped over Willa’s hands and the book. Her mother had thrown it.

“Some help would be appreciated,” she said.

Willa got up from the chair and took a few more. She’d fold them even though later her mother would shake them open again and refold them anyway. Before their father died, Grace had been just as obsessive, a cleaner and a stickler, but she’d gotten much worse. Willa would clean her room, make her bed, vacuum, then leave and stand in the hallway while her mother entered, remade the bed, and inspected the rest. Willa rolled her eyes at this, sometimes laughed at the insanity, but Justin didn’t find it funny. If their mother tried to remake his bed, he screamed at her. He couldn’t let it go.

She watched her mother now as she took the towels Willa had folded and undid them. She didn’t even wait to do it until after Willa had left the room. Refold all the towels you want, Willa wanted to say, he’s still dead.

• •

The next day, the sun appeared in the sky. Willa sat in the yard in a lawn chair with her sketchpad, trying to draw the oaks. They were too flat. She couldn’t give them the weight they had in real life. That was the hard thing about drawing.

Justin climbed out the attic window and spread his body on the roof. He wore only a pair of briefs. The attic window like an eye behind him. He gleamed. Sea creature skin. Their mother was not home. Willa imagined Justin slipping off the roof and splattering his brains on the broken driveway. Their father would be mortified if he were alive to see his half-naked son on the roof.

She went to the top of the house and put her head out the attic window. Heat radiated off the black roof shingles. She smelled Justin cooking in the air. He turned over on the towel. “Don’t come out,” he said. “You’ll fall and I’ll have to live with the guilt of killing you for the rest of my life.”

“Get in here, dumbass.”

“You don’t care about looking like raw bread dough, but I do.”

He turned away and put his hands behind his head. A few feet away, a wasp nest bulged out from the eaves, filled with thin black-and-yellow bodies. One crawled out of its cell and zoomed across her vision. Willa pulled herself inside and locked the window.

• •

That night, Justin lay naked and burnt on his bed. He wept. “Help me,” he said. “Jesus fucking Christ.” Willa heard him first. Then their mother came running into the room.

“He was on the roof,” Willa said. She put her hand over her mouth. It had slipped out. She tried not to notice his naked butt. He must have taken his underwear off at some point. It was as red as the rest of him. When he’d tried to get back into the house and found the window locked, he’d called and called for her, like a dumb, giant bird. She listened to him for a while, trying to be mean, the way he was with her, but eventually she went up to let him in.

“On the roof?” Grace said. “Naked?”

“No!” Justin said. “She’s lying.”

“What do you mean, no? I can see your bright red ass for myself.” Grace sat on the edge of the bed and handled his body, examining him.

He shrieked. His skin looked bloody.

“Mom, stop it, please stop,” Willa said.

“What a terrible thing you’ve done to yourself,” Grace said. Her voice had softened, the anger fizzing out. “I’m sorry you’re in so much pain, but it’s your fault.”

His only audience had been some blackbirds hanging out in the trees. None of their neighbors had witnessed his nakedness, as far as Willa knew. But she’d sold him out to their mother so quickly. Somehow, she’d have to ask his forgiveness.

Willa ran into the kitchen and took frozen aloe leaves out of the freezer and brought them to her mother. The leaves had fallen off the giant plant that had lived by the front window since the beginning of Willa’s memories. Grace snapped one in two and slathered the yellowish juice on her fingers and painted Justin with it. To escape his screams, Willa ran from the room.

Later, she sat on the floor among Justin’s clothes. Their mother was sleeping.

“You don’t have to stay with me,” he said.

Willa tanned but never burned. Her mother said it was because she’d inherited Sicilian skin from distant relatives who worked on boats and pulled octopi out of the sea. Justin had inherited their father’s English skin. Arthur’s family tree stretched back to Puritans, they were often told, as if that was something to be proud of.

“I’m going to puke,” Justin said.

Willa jumped to her feet to get out of his path. Instead of rushing to the bathroom, he raised his head off the pillow, locked eyes with her, and emptied his guts onto the carpet.

• •

The next week, his skin started to peel off in white strips. Willa found it discarded here and there. He left it for her. She saw him unwrapping it off his back in front of the bathroom mirror.

“Help me,” he said. He wore boxer shorts and nothing else. The bathroom smelled of the coconut-scented lotion he’d been using.

No. She didn’t want to. Where he’d removed the skin, a pale pink, vaguely shiny flesh appeared. His face polished and new. A model of Justin.

“If you’re not going to help, go away.”

She remembered how he had cried and begged for help. She remembered selling him out. “Fine,” she said, and chose a flake of skin on the center of his back that begged to be pulled. It detached easily and floated to the floor.

Justin laughed. “You’ll do anything,” he said.

• •

She had once loved Justin too much. Crushed on him. She hated to think about it. If only she’d been too young to remember, but it must have been when she was seven or so. It was obvious, too. “You’re getting older,” her mother said. “You can’t flirt with everyone anymore. Especially Justin. I never imagined I’d have to explain this to you.”

“I know that!” Willa said. But no, it hadn’t occurred to her that she should love her brother in a specific way.

She remembered wanting to learn how to be alone, to not need him. She walked in the fields behind the house, at the edge of the woods. She lay in the grass for a long time, long enough that she saw herself lying there, and she was no longer a human being. A katydid helicoptered onto her arm and didn’t realize it had landed on a person. When she’d gotten back to the house, her body loose and her mind in the grass, her mother jolted her awake and held her by the arm.

“Are you insane?” her mother said.

Willa examined herself. Covered in grass and seeds and ticks, which her mother picked off one by one until she gave up and ordered Willa out of her clothes. They stood on the patio in the backyard and Willa stripped as slowly as possible.

“Hurry up,” her mother said. “What do you think, the rabbits are taking pictures?”

• •

Willa lay on Jenny’s bed with her feet on the slanting wall of Jenny’s attic bedroom. They had done this, wasting hours, since they met in the sixth grade. Four years later, Jenny’s bedroom had changed only slightly. She’d hung posters on the wall. PJ Harvey smiled crookedly at Willa with her red mouth, and curls of incense smoke floated to the ceiling. Jenny dressed like a farm girl, not like the punk girls at school, who would have nothing to do with her, though she listened to the same music they did. Today she wore jean shorts and an oversized T-shirt that almost covered them.

Since Justin had gotten burned, Willa decided to spend more time away from home. She’d seen too much of him. When they were alone together in the house, the image of his writhing red body on his bed came back to her and repulsed her. They were around each other too often. He spent so much time almost naked now, and his body was changing, and he smelled bad. She told Jenny all of this. Told her about his sunburn and his shedding skin, and his underwear, the funk he left behind after coming in from the heat.

“I’m glad I don’t have a brother,” Jenny said. She sat on the carpet picking off candle wax. “Honestly, men disgust me. Including my father. I’m glad I don’t have a sister, too, actually. I like having all the attention.”

Jenny lit candles and incense and burned pieces of paper when they had nothing else to do. Willa worried she would burn the whole house down and there would be no more beautiful place to come to after school. She opened the window and let the smoke out.

The dog was coming up the stairs, the sound of tennis balls bouncing. He scratched at the door to be let in. Jenny got to her feet and opened the door and the dog hurried to the bed to bathe Willa’s face with his tongue. She let him, briefly.

Jenny shut the door again. “Get off,” she said, and pulled the dog off the bed.

“If I were your sister, you’d like it,” Willa said.

“We probably wouldn’t be friends.”

“I’d wear your clothes without asking,” Willa said.

They went downstairs and left the house. The dog barked at them. If they let him out, he would follow them into town. He complained from the window as they got onto Jenny’s bike. Willa didn’t have a bike. At first, she’d been afraid to get on the back of Jenny’s, to stand on the pegs and hold on to Jenny’s shoulders. She’d been afraid of falling off and cracking her head open, and more afraid of people from school seeing. The muscled shoulders inside Jenny’s T-shirt rolled under Willa’s hands. So unlike her own soft, nonexistent shoulders. Being around Jenny made her want to be strong, too, but she didn’t have the knowledge required to get there. Her own family were horizontal people. Her mother rested when she got home from work. It didn’t occur to her to take a walk or get into aerobics or yoga. She spent her energy on cleaning and collapsed after in front of the TV. Arthur, before his death, had once been fit. She’d seen pictures. The father she remembered had been plump, unable to hide a beer belly under his uniform. Justin had started using weights recently, but she suspected his motives were based on vanity rather than health.

It was a cloudy, humid day, and it had rained. When they got to the bridge and the small park at the edge of the creek there was no one else around. From her fanny pack, Jenny pulled two travel-sized mouthwash bottles filled with a pale golden liquid. When Willa unscrewed the cap and took a sip, she smelled clover and tasted honey with a bite.

“My dad made this out of honey from our bees,” Jenny said. “It’s his new thing.”

“Does he know you have it?”

“Of course not.”

“Oh,” Willa said. “Good.”

“Do you think they let me do anything I want?”

“Sometimes,” Willa said, and they laughed.

By the time the small bottle was empty, the top of her head had flipped open and her brain hovered. She and Jenny walked to the edge of the creek, which was moving quickly from the earlier rain. Willa tripped on a piece of shale and frightened a heron neither one of them had noticed nearby, and it took off like a prehistoric bird. She put her arms around Jenny, pretending to be surprised, out of control, and too drunk to stand on her own.