Peels
By Nora Wagner
My mom pays my sister to “babysit” me, but all she does is lug me to her beauty treatment appointments. My sister makes ten dollars for quick ones, like skin peels, which make her pink and shiny, like she has just finished showering. Fifteen for manicures, blowouts, spray tans. While I wait to see her new face, I explore her pencil case, filled with nubs of weed, red gel pens, and her spicy campfire scent. Sometimes the changes are invisible, like after the waxing salon.
Last Sunday, my sister wouldn’t eat dinner, angry about being underpaid. “And Cassie keeps trying to talk to the manicurists. She distracts them,” she said. Our mom stared at the cold, thickening sheet of gravy on her plate, her eyes small and unfocused.
I don’t understand the tools used on my sister. “Spoolies” for her eyelashes. Huge metal wands to tame her hair, like TSA screening sticks. Electric blue and magenta tanning beds that she wears goggles to enter. They remind me of our trip to Hawaii last summer, when she last acted like my sister, rubbing sunscreen into my shoulders, her hair a poofy cloud above yellow-green swim goggles.
Rarely, maybe one out of five times, my sister will talk to me as we drive home. “You’re fine as you are right now. But next year, when you start high school. When you like a boy.” Her gaze sweeps over me, as electrifying as it is cursory. In a soft voice, she asks me if she looks pretty. I tell her yes, like the gaunt, bug-eyed actress at the Met Gala, or the stranger who passed us in a gardenia-scented mist. She flushes happily. But what I mean is, you don’t look like my sister.
Today, I tell my sister I’m staying home, I have homework. She blinks twice in my doorway, her eyelash extensions heavy and outrageous, then strides off. I imagine her in the styling chair, swallowed by the salon cape, the foil packets in her hair crinkling with every small motion as her hair is stripped of color. I think of our last night in Hawaii, when she returned long past midnight and climbed into my bed, pulling my body to hers, undressed, shivering, sticky. In the morning, I watched the movements of her body through the shower curtain.
Tonight, my sister doesn’t come down to dinner. My mom repeats her name until it sounds unreal, a noise from a different language, maybe Portuguese, something nasal and impossible for Americans to pronounce. She doesn’t respond. Eventually, we eat without her. My mom’s laugh carries, mixing with the steam that rises from our bowls, when I tell her about what I learned in history class: Ancient Romans using donkey milk and swan fat to erase wrinkles.
I enter my sister’s room after I brush my teeth. The light is on, and her body, covered by a comforter, is small and twitchy. Her acrylics are discarded on the nightstand next to her. I reach for her hand, her bare nails like hermit crabs without their shells.
THE END
Author Bio: Nora Esme Wagner is a rising sophomore at Wellesley College. She lives in San Francisco, California. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in JMWW, Litbreak Magazine, Milk Candy Review, Flash Boulevard, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere. She is an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel.