Free Devil in the Details by Jennifer Traig

full head taller, with the capacity to tan. Except for bad
manners and laziness, we don’t have a single common feature. My
hair is curly and my teeth, straight; my sister’s, the opposite.
Pore size, problem areas, general disposition – we share none of
these. Vicky lets it all hang out. I tuck it in, straighten it, pin
it back. I am anal-retentive; she is – “ not anal-expulsive,” she finishes. Anal-repulsive, maybe.
    We don’t look alike, don’t even see alike. The first time we
went to the ophthalmologist, he couldn’t get over it. “Do these
children have different fathers?” he inquired. Though I am
nearsighted and Vicky, far-, neither one of us had any trouble
making out the horrified and offended look on our mother’s
face.
    By the time we were in school our differences had multiplied and
magnified. I’d taken to school right away, had loved the stacks of
fresh newsprint to scrawl on, the tiny cartons of room-temperature
milk, the minions to boss around. Vicky’s adjustment was rockier.
It just wasn’t what she expected. First of all, there was no TV.
She had to wear underwear, pants, and shoes, and the dog couldn’t
come with her. Vicky had spent the previous four years of her life
in her bathing suit, asking strangers if they had any gum and
eating breath mints we found in the gutter. She wasn’t prepared for
this new world of rules and math, of cubbies and structured
time.
    She responded with nosebleeds. They came out of nowhere, these
daily torrents of blood. “Have you been rooting around in there?”
my mother demanded, inspecting Vicky’s fingernails for evidence.
But she hadn’t. This was just a spontaneous bodily reaction to
kindergarten. Some kids wet their pants; Vicky hemorrhaged. It was
disturbing, but it wasn’t particularly dangerous, and after a while
we got used to her coming home with blood spattered down her front
and purple crust around her nostrils.
    One morning she got a nosebleed that was worse than usual. I
knew this because I could hear her calling for me through the
partition that divided our classrooms. A few minutes later the
teacher’s aide carried her into my class, cradled in her arms like
a three-foot-tall baby, feet dangling, head back with bloody
tissues wadded to her nose, yellow hair spilling down. “She kept
asking for you,” the aide explained. “We didn’t know what to
do.”
    I didn’t know, either. I was six. I couldn’t fix this. And I was
mortified. This was more embarrassing than the time my mother
dropped a tray of cupcakes facedown in the parking lot and then
picked out the gravel and served them to my classmates anyway. This
was more embarrassing than the time the dog followed us to school,
which hadn’t actually been embarrassing at all, had actually been
kind of exciting and had afforded me a certain popularity for the
rest of the day. “He just loves me so much ,” I told my
classmates when we spotted him through the classroom window,
darting across the empty playground, a brown, panting blur. “He
follows me everywhere. It’s embarrassing, but what can you do?”
    But a leaking sister, this was just bad. I ignored her for a
full minute, hoping the aide would carry her back out before my
classmates noticed what was going on. But she just stood there.
Finally I went over and patted Vicky on the head. That seemed to
satisfy all parties, and they left.
    Shortly after that the nosebleeds stopped. Vicky adjusted, made
lots of friends, got used to the whole routine, and did just fine
for a couple years. Then she found herself in a class taught by a
true moron. It’s not unusual to see someone taking off her shoes to
count to sixteen in an elementary school classroom, but when it’s
the teacher, there’s cause for alarm. This woman’s idea of social
studies was to tell the kids about the previous night’s date. For
history, she recounted Happy Days plot lines. Art was pinto
beans glued to a paper towel. She may have had a