Human Sister

the sand and stands. The shadow of the boat covers the right side of her lower right pant leg and the right edge of her right shoe.
    It is 29 minutes, 47 seconds past midday.

Sara

    A fter Michael was born, Grandpa told Aunt Lynh that he would no longer accompany me on my summer vacations because Elio and I tired him out. But, in fact, Grandpa had enjoyed our summer trips. His concern was for Michael, who, he told me, was even more fragile than a human baby and was too much for Grandma to take care of alone. Thus, the following summer, the summer of my tenth birthday, was the first of many summers that I arrived alone in Amsterdam to visit Elio and Aunt Lynh. It was also the first summer Elio and I had separate bedrooms.
    He and Aunt Lynh had moved into a larger apartment in the same building that spring. Aunt Lynh tried to explain to me in private that I was getting to be a big girl and should have a separate bedroom for my privacy. I didn’t understand, nor was I pleased, by this privacy business. Fortunately, Elio’s and my bedrooms were connected by a bathroom through which each night, after we’d been kissed and tucked in by Aunt Lynh and the lights had been turned out, I snuck, buck naked, into Elio’s bedroom and bed. There, as during each summer before, he wrapped himself around me, called me the best teddy bear in the world, and kissed me goodnight. He was smaller then than Michael; he fit better, I thought, when he held me; he was softer. And unlike Michael, he was warm, and he had something Michael didn’t: a small pouch containing two testicles below his penis, a penis which often got hard during the night. Michael’s never did. Neither one of them had hair anywhere except on the top of his head.
    It was also during that summer that Aunt Lynh began insisting that Elio call me his sister; so from then on, in front of her, he usually called me “Sis.” But when he and I were alone together, I remained “Sara.” She also wanted me to call him “Brother.” But although I thought of Elio as family, he didn’t seem like a brother. He was my friend. He was summer and freedom. He was my connection with the wider world. He was fun.
    And by three summers later, the summer I turned thirteen, he was so, so beautiful.
    After we met at Schiphol Airport, we talked and laughed, as we had during previous summers. But later that night, he locked the door while using the bathroom, and then, as I began undressing for bed in my bedroom, he came in wearing underpants and told me I should sleep in my own bed.
    Shocked, I just stared at him.
    “I’m not a little boy anymore,” he said with a dismissive wave. Then he turned and walked through our bathroom, shutting the door leading to his bedroom behind him. I heard the lock click.
    “This must be the type of pain Michael feels when I leave him,” I whispered to myself as I stood staring, teary-eyed, at Elio’s closed and locked bedroom door.
    The next morning, I woke early and quietly slipped out of the apartment to call Grandpa. Since Elio and I were supposed to have been sleeping separately during the past three summers, I had to be careful what I said to express my unhappiness with Elio’s behavior, so I simply explained that Elio had locked me out of the bathroom the night before and wouldn’t let me see him naked.
    “Elio is fourteen,” Grandpa replied, “and undoubtedly is exhibiting new primary and secondary male sex characteristics. He may be uncomfortable about his new body around you and desirous of heightened privacy. I’m sure you are curious about his new physiology, but I believe it would be a serious mistake to impose on the privacy he desires. I’ll prepare some materials. When you return home, we’ll have a sex education class.”
    I enjoyed the remainder of my time that summer with Elio, doing the usual things—talking, biking, swimming, visiting his friends—but he continued locking me out of our bathroom whenever he was using it, and the least he wore in my presence were underpants, which appeared astonishingly white against his dark skin.

    Grandpa began his sex-education class by giving me my puberty shot to protect me from all known sexually transmitted diseases. “You and your generation are fortunate,” he said. “Unlike in the days of my youth, sex no longer puts on its short skirts or tight jeans and solicits at the entrance to hospitals and cemeteries.” He laid the first syringe back on the top of his desk and picked