Summer Sister

I crank the ear mics every night

The summer I'm ten, Rose is disoriented a lot; she often doesn't know what to say, she gets upset when we do things she can't (shower, eat, use the toilet). She mixes me and Kieran up, which Kieran thinks is funny and which sends me into rage-drenched crying jags, which in turn make Rose more disoriented and upset. But she never hides, not this year. She seems to feel it's important that we see her. She makes me keep the goggles on until just before I go to sleep, so I can watch her lie down beside me. I can't sleep in the goggles, but I crank the ear mics every night so I can hear her voice, like a mosquito-whine from the pineapple-painted bedside table.

We don't know how to say goodbye, that summer. Mom says, "We'll see you in a little bit, sweetheart. On the beach again, like this year. It might not seem like a long time to you, but it will be a long time for us. Do you understand?" And Rose says "Yeah, Mom, I know how it works," but even with frame drops and questionable 3-D rendering I can tell she doesn't know what it will be like, when the month runs out and she is no longer instantiated in what's coming to be called the datasphere.

When I ask her, at eleven, what it was like, she won't tell me.