Dee was always my father’s favorite. Pete was Ma’s favorite. And I guess I was nobody’s favorite. Well, maybe I was Dee’s favorite, or maybe I just believed that and was desperate to continue believing it. The idea was very comforting to me. My mother named my younger sister Candace, but my father quickly shortened this to Candy, which I quickly shortened to just Dee, and Dee stuck. Almost no one called her Candace, and only my father was ever allowed to call her Candy.
We were born thirteen months apart, so our father called us Irish twins. Dee and I loved this—we believed that we could read each other’s minds and that our heartbeats were synced. But when we were older, our mother made it clear to us that though we could say we were Irish, on account of our father’s grandfather, we were not actually twins. This was disappointing news to both of us. Even worse, we discovered that because of how our birthdays fell on the calendar, we would be two years apart in school.
So when I was a junior in high school, Dee was a freshman. And when Dee started high school, it became clear to me, rather quickly, that our experiences would be different. For starters, unlike me, Dee was popular. I knew this was in part because she was rather classically pretty (and I was apparently a bit odd-looking; people said that my brow ridge cast a great shadow over my face so it looked like I was always wearing a mask), but also because she had the je ne sais quoi that some popular people seem to be born with: that special cocktail of charisma and confidence. (I definitely didn’t have that.) Sometimes this attribute doesn’t follow people once they leave the social bubbles of their schools, but sometimes it does. Anyway, Dee had a large group of girlfriends in high school, many of whom prided themselves on dating older boys.
One day during lunch Dee was standing in a circle of these girls as they chatted outside the cafeteria. I was sitting alone at a picnic table picking at a peanut butter sandwich and writing little poems in illegible cursive all over my notebooks. Every once in a while a group of boys, standing a good distance from Dee’s group, would cheer or hoot, and it took me almost ten minutes to figure out why.
It was a breezy fall day in Wisconsin. Though chilly, Dee and some of the other girls were still wearing short floral skirts with their Docs. Whenever a breeze came and lifted the girls’ skirts, these boys cheered. I didn’t know if the girls heard the boys or if they cared. Maybe they just enjoyed the pleasurable sensation of a cool breeze on the backs of their thighs. In any case, none of them seemed concerned, none of them clutched at their hems to keep them flat, and eventually one gust lifted Dee’s skirt up to show her underwear and a sliver of her butt. The boys screamed with joy. I felt, with absolute certainty, that I hated every single one of them.
Watching, I was suddenly afraid another, larger gust would reveal Dee’s underwear completely. This breach of privacy inspired a sinking dread in me. (As girls, Dee and I shared the same room and often the same clothes. I remembered her stepping into her underwear, our underwear, that very morning: an old ratty blue pair that had come in a cheap department-store pack of eight. She was fourteen.)
I leaped up from my picnic table and ran over to her. I gave her an aggressive hug from behind, wrapping my arms around her shoulders and pressing her spiny back into my stomach. Dee whipped her head around to see me. Some of the boys booed. Dee blushed. I kissed her cheekbone from behind and she shrugged me off.
“Pegasus,” she whispered into my ear. “Can you stop being so weird?”
“Sorry,” I said. She looked bewildered.
The lunch bell rang. Harried lunch attendants ushered us inside.
Later that day, one of the boys who’d apparently been particularly disappointed by my intervention keyed prude and slut into our parents’ car. I wasn’t sure how I could be both. Or maybe one was for me and one was for Dee.
“What did you do?” Dee screamed at me while we were inspecting the damage on the car. I stared at her with my mouth open, shocked that she would assume I’d provoked this treatment. I supposed that if one used the sick logic of our high school, I was, in fact, to blame.
“I don’t know,” I shouted back. “Maybe you should ask one of your blockhead fucking boyfriends.”
“Let’s go,” Dee said. We were aware that a small, whispering crowd was forming in the parking lot.
I never explained to Dee what happened that day. Maybe she knew. Maybe she didn’t. We never talked about it. I’d bet a lot of money that by the time we were both in college, she’d completely forgotten about the incident. I never forgot about it, though. And much later, after she disappeared, I would regret my unwillingness to even try to explain the dread I felt while I watched these boys watching her. It wasn’t, I might have told her, about some paternalistic desire to protect her from them or to shield her from their sight. It wasn’t a fear that they would hurt her or that she would be embarrassed. It’s difficult to explain. I suppose the dread came from an understanding that even then I was losing us: this we that had once been solely ours.