• I put the dress on. It was something that my mother would call ‘cute’ and fawn over if she saw it in the window of a store. Which is exactly what had happened. So she bought it and brought it home. Then she told me that she had to go grocery shopping. Daddy was taking a nap and my sister was at her ballet lesson. So I was alone in the house with the pink dress on the couch. I told my mother that I would put it in the purple sequined gift bag. I had a way with tissue paper.

    I picked it up and jerked the tags off, tugging at those stupid plastic string things with my teeth. I managed to not pull any snags or rip threads. The fabric of the garment was soft in my fingers. I stared at it. And then I held it up against my chest, lifting my head. My mother would hold dresses against my sister with her lips pursed. She’d make that weird kissy noise with her mouth and then she’d nod. “Yes, it’s darling,” she’d say.

    I blinked at my reflection and bit my tongue after I stuck it out, tilting my head. I liked it. I think the feel of the cloth was what did it. And the pink wasn’t like normal pink. All the pinks that I had seen were ugly and made my eyes hurt. But this one was soft like the color the sky was on Saturday mornings when I woke up to watch Batman. And I wondered.

    So I put the dress on. My shorts and t-shirt crumpled on top of my light-up tennis shoes. I looked at myself and sighed. My hair was all wrong. I tripped and tiptoed to my sister’s room. My shaking fingers found the blue plastic drawer of her jewelry box and I pulled it open. I found a white headband and those daisy hairpins that she wore all the time.

    It took me seven times to get it right. I stood in the bathroom and tried over and over again until it looked okay. I laughed. And my face in the mirror sort of looked like my sister’s when Mother told her she looked cute. I wondered if she’d call me that too if she saw me.

    “Marcus? Are you up?” I saw that cute face turned terrified and I kicked the door of the bathroom shut. I tore the jewelry out of my hair and pulled the dress off. My breathing was hard and my chest felt wrong. I kept absolutely still. I heard Daddy’s heavy footsteps leave the hallway. His bedroom door closed again.

    I fell to the floor and gathered up the dress and the hair stuff, keeping my head low. I snuck out of the bathroom and went back to my room, putting my normal clothes back on. After I folded, it I put the dress in the gift bag just like I said I would. I wrote ‘Happy Birthday Danielle’ on the gift tag and then put it in the kitchen with the rest of her birthday presents.

    I sighed and went back to her bedroom to put back what I had taken. She’d yell at me later; she always knew when I was in her room. But after I started borrowing pink dresses from her years later, she would stop. Daddy would yell at me instead.