Her eyes get huge.
“Oh.”
She takes the jersey off the hanger, and she holds it up to her chest in front of the mirror on the back of my door. It’s a cheap mirror, the kind they sell at Walmart for ten dollars, and she looks at herself in it for a second.
“Okay. What should I do?”
She shuffles over to my dresser. She grabs my hat off the top of the dresser without asking and puts it on her head. Then she grabs the original t-shirt I had pulled out for her, which is in my hand, and she holds that up in her other hand.
“Should I be you?” She looks in the mirror. “Or should I be hockey player you?”
She switches the shirts.
Then her eyes find mine in the mirror.
“Which one?”
I realize I haven’t said a single word.
I swallow.
“Whichever you want,” I manage. “I have my gear over there.”
She turns to look at where I am looking. I catch a glimpse — half a second — of her bare back over her shoulder, the line of her spine in the dim of my bedroom. I look away as quickly as possible.
It’s not like you haven’t seen me naked before.
Jesus Christ. She actually said those words to me. I focus on the drywall.
She takes the angel wings off her shoulders and holds them up by one strap. “Here.”
I don’t reach for them.
She sighs and walks behind me. She slides the elastic of the wings up over my arms and onto my shoulders. “You can be an angel. Uh, take a step forward. Don’t turn around.”
I do exactly as she says.
I stare at the wall of my bedroom in a way I have never stared at the wall of my bedroom before. I hear the soft sound of fabric dropping to the floor behind me. I hear the rustle of her stepping into something.
She walks around me in my jersey. She’s in nothing but my jersey and her white leg things. And the jersey is so big on her that it falls to her mid-thigh. I forget how breathing works for one full second.
She turns in a slow circle for me to see.
“What do you think, number eight?”
I swallow.
She is the smallest she has ever looked. The jersey eats her. The hat is sliding off the back of her head. She is grinning at me with her whole face.
I have not, in any of the years I have been carrying her around in my chest, been prepared for the feeling of seeing my own last name on her body.
It doesn’t matter that I know exactly what she looks like naked before. We were kids then. I have no idea what she’s likenow. The mystery of what is underneath that jersey is somehow worse.
She walks to my gear bag in the corner. She crouches and digs. She pulls out my gloves and puts them on. She pulls out my helmet and puts that on too.
She turns around with a giant black helmet on her head and gloves on her hands and a jersey to her thighs, and she starts dancing — bouncing on the balls of her feet, knees moving, shoulders going — because a new song has come on downstairs and her body has registered it before her brain has.
She looks in the mirror.
