Punishment with Kisses Read Free Page B

doghouse, so it was a win-win situation all around for her.
    I didn’t want to give her that kind of satisfaction now, so instead I grabbed the pair of odd binocular-like sunglasses that were an expensive good-bye gift from Mark, who somehow thought bird watching might bring me solace in his post-graduation absence. I’d never watched a bird in my life, and I didn’t intend to start, but I had realized that the spectacles appeared to others as simply a pair of peculiar looking sunglasses. No one would notice me people watching from my room, though with these telescoping super-strength lenses I could practically see every pore, every hair on each person’s body.
    I could stoically relax on my balcony, sit in my reclining redwood patio lounge holding my novel, and peer over the pages at Ash and what I was beginning to suspect was a constant parade of lovers. I felt simultaneously intrigued and repelled by the sight of so many of them fawning over my sister like she was an adorable but doomed SPCA puppy begging for a home. What did Ash offer that turned normally independent people into simpering fools? If I paid close attention, would I catch a glimpse of her secret ingredient? Was it something intrinsic to her soul or could I apply it like a glossy lipstick? Could it magically transform me externally, the way Tea’s words did in my mind?
    Ash had always enchanted other people. When we were young girls being trotted out at Father’s cocktail parties for show and tell, the partygoers would always gather around sweet, pig-tailed Ash. At one of Father’s office holiday parties, when Ash was maybe eight or nine, she got on stage while the band was on a break and announced that she had a special treat for the audience. She was dressed in a little red velvet pantsuit with white fur trim that my mother must have helped her pick out. I was still too terrified to speak to people unless forced, and so I stood there, slack jawed, as enamored of my sister as the rest of the audience. She was everything I wanted to be, back then and still now. Beautiful, smart, charming, and truly unafraid of anything. At the party, I kept hiding below the buffet table, stuffing my face and wondering how soon I could get out of there while Ash was charming the pants off of Father’s colleagues.
    Soon all eyes were on Ash as a band member handed her a microphone and she started belting out a perfect rendition of “Santa Baby.” We’d been singing Christmas carols in front of the mirror in our underwear for weeks, karaoke style, so we both knew every single word. But watching Ash up there, I realized that she brought something to the song I never could. We weren’t even teenagers yet, but there was something faintly womanly about Ash, like a twenty-year-old trapped in a nine-year-old’s body. All eyes were on her as she winked and smiled and sang in a Betty Boop tone. When she finished, the crowd applauded and gushed and Father beamed with pride.
    For years afterward, I would think of that party, of how Ash could walk into any situation and charm people. She would sometimes take me under her wing, telling me how to make an entrance like she did, but just as often she’d mock me or push me aside when others were around. Always, we seemed to be competing for Father’s affection, and always, Ash won.
    Even in our family, I seemed to be on the outside of Ash’s world, looking on as everyone fluttered around her, flitting about and marveling.
    So that summer I pretended to be a birdwatcher looking for that endangered species. I pretended I was an anthropologist observing a foreign culture, longing to learn the sacred rituals of a society I could never truly enter.

Chapter Two

    Hours of spying slipped into days, and I soon decided I was getting far more from observing Ash than I would ever garner from my novels and their make-believe worlds. I started bringing a notepad out to the balcony with me, jotting down random things I noticed, hoping somehow