His expression was so serious that I instantly caved.

“Okay, sure,” I said. “What is it?”

He held up a pair of Mom’s tweezers. “I need you to fix my unibrow.”

I pushed him away. “Yuck! No way! I am not responsible for anything hygiene-related.”

“Please!” he begged.

“Do it yourself!”

“I tried. I can’t. I don’t know how!”

“They have salons for that kind of thing, don’t they?”

“It’s too late for that. I have to pick her up in less than an hour. Come on, Lex. I look like Bert from Sesame Street. You have to help me.”

Then he turned on the puppy-dog eyes. I ended up heating the little pot of wax I use to do my own eyebrows—I’d look like Bert, too, if I left it up to nature, and while I might not be super concerned about my appearance most of the time, there was an incident in 9th grade when Jamie Bigelow called me a hairy cavewoman, and thereafter I started to pluck and shave and generally torture myself in the name of femininity.

Ty sat on the bathroom counter while I spread the wax carefully between his eyes. I pressed the cloth down and smoothed it in the direction of the hair growth. Ty gripped the edge of the counter, hard, and took a deep breath.

“I trust you,” I remember he said. “Don’t make me look like a freak.”

“You already look like a freak,” I said, but he knew I was joking. “Okay, I’m going to count to three. . . .”

But I didn’t count. I just ripped off the strip.

Ty fell backward off the counter, howling, clutching at his face.

“Ow!” he screamed. “You crazy bitch!”

I was shocked. Ty didn’t swear. Neither of us did. When we were kids, Mom was always giving us a hard time for the way we instinctively dressed down swear words: heck, crap, dang, a-hole, butt, freaking, and so on. If it means the same thing, Mom used to scold, why say it at all? I guess that lecture affected us, because Ty and I couldn’t seem to swear with the proper conviction. Coming from us, bad words sounded stilted and unnatural.

So, wow. Crazy bitch. I’d never been called a bitch before. I found I didn’t like it.

“A-hole!” I shot back in a kind of knee-jerk reaction. “Imbecilic butthead!”

“Sadistic harpy shrew!”

“Blubbering manchild!” I retorted.

“Gleeful hair snatcher!”

“Dick!” I yelled awkwardly.

Then we were laughing. Hard. We laughed and laughed, the clutch-your-sides type of laughing where you end up almost crying. We laughed until it hurt. Then we both sighed, and Ty rubbed his face, and we went back to the mirror to inspect my work.

Which didn’t look good.

Because the hair was gone—that much was true—but now there was a hot pink stripe of angry skin between Ty’s eyebrows. It looked like he’d been attacked by a neon highlighter.

“Uh-oh,” I snickered.

“Lex . . . ,” he said, “what did you do to me?”

I told him it would be better tomorrow.

He gave me a look.

Then he told me how he really liked this girl he was taking to the dance—Ashley, he said her name was—and he wanted to impress her, and I had just basically ruined his life.

“Hold on, don’t get your undies in a wad.” I got out a cotton ball to apply the soothing oil that comes with the wax.

The soothing oil, unfortunately, did not live up to its name. We waited 10 minutes post-oil, and his face still looked like someone had branded him between the eyes with a hot iron.

We tried icing it. We tried lotion. We tried hemorrhoid cream, which was one of my more ingenious ideas, but at the end of all that his face was, if anything, pinker.

“Lex,” he said. “I think I have to strangle you now.”

He was only half kidding.

“There’s only one thing left to do,” I said gravely.

I held up my bottle of foundation.

He didn’t fight it. He stood still while I painted on a layer of Clinique Stay-Matte Oil-Free foundation carefully between his brows. It was a shade too light for his skin, but better than the pink. I also had to cover a large portion of his forehead, so it would blend in.

“Well, now I feel totally emasculated,” he said when I was finished.

“Shut up or I’ll get out the lipstick,” I teased, and then he ran away, downstairs to apply his cologne and finish getting ready. A few minutes later Mom came home from work, and before we left she made Ty and me stand together by the front door for a picture.

“Look at my two beautiful children,” I remember she said. Ty slung his arm around me, and I leaned my head into his shoulder, and we smiled. The camera flashed. Mom turned away to dig something out of her purse, and Ty suddenly kissed my cheek, the gross, slobbery razz sort of kiss, which made me pull away and punch him in the shoulder.

“Get out of here, brat,” I said, wiping at my cheek.

Mom handed him her car keys.

“Midnight,” she said.

“Aye, aye, Captain,” he answered.

She squinted up into his face. “Are you wearing . . . makeup?”

He shrugged like he had no idea what she was talking about.

“Well, you look nice,” she said after a minute.

He did. His suit fit him perfectly, and he was dashing in it. Of course I didn’t say that, because I was his sister and that would have been weird. But he looked, I thought then, like he was finally comfortable in his own skin. Relaxed. Ready to be himself.