late on the deadline . . . been a bit overwhelmed

perhaps due entirely to my technological ineptitude, I've yet to figure out the google group . . .

They moved to Albuquerque from Ann Arbor in summer of ’95, at the onset of Dave’s sophomore year of high school. It was also the summer preceding pretty-haired Susannah’s entry into Vassar, the summer that Amy turned six, the summer after their mother had married Jack.

Dave noticed first the way the water didn’t hit his skin; the way that this sun sucked every drip of moisture out of him. It pulled even the snot from his nose and by the third day there he woke up with a nosebleed that stained his blue sheets brown and red. He pulled the sheets from his bed, gathered them in his arms, and walked across the hall to Susannah’s and Amy’s bedroom. He rapped twice on the door and heard Susannah moan, then pull herself out of her bed. She answered wearing a tanktop and shorts, her face flushed with the unbearable night heat.

“Gimme Amy’s sheets. I gotta run my own load,” Dave said.
Susannah, infamous for her inability to wake in the morning, walked to Amy’s twin bed and pulled her out. The smaller girl stirred, but her breathing slowed and her limbs relaxed as soon as she and Susannah were safely in Susannah’s bed, curled into each other. Dave put his own sheets on the floor, pulled off Amy’s, and carried both sets down to the basement.

Both girls were tied in their dark blonde hair, their curls looser in New Mexico’s aridity. Amy wore hers long and graceless, a tangled imitation of her older sister. Their hair was where their similarities ended: Susannah had the sharp and angled features of her father; Amy the full cheeks and green eyes of her father.