Two for Flinching

We aren’t supposed to play the game this way, the risk of a fist
across the jaw enough to leave our mother screaming. My sister
ties me down, her punch like our father’s framing hammer driving
nails into the planks that built these rooms around us. We play
when someone hits you, you flinch and you get two more for
shrinking from the pain. Pussy, they call, and my sister is the
loudest. I learn to stare into her eyes mirroring mine as she hits
me. I leave the game feeling like I’ve proven myself or something
about bravery, about how much I can take. Bruises bloom on my
skin, ripe, like Anna Marcos, her best friend, three years from
me, the most popular girl in the ninth grade, she falls into playing
like an accident, a question mark always on her tongue. I am
thirteen, and small, and bruised already from fists I do not want
to hold against me, but suddenly I want to touch, like fireworks
sparking under my hands, sudden nameless need, and Anna does
not pay attention. Her first across the jaw so hard that it flashes
electric in my spine. Then she kisses me, hard enough that I forget.

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