I will remember us as three girls in a teacup, set in motion by a carny worker who flicked his cigarette into the air with a shower of sparks and pulled the switch. Three girls jerked to a start by the ride machinery, knocking knees and elbows, spilling over the cup, and sent spinning in and out of orbit. Me, my little sister, our girlish mother. Spinning in a world of drunken stars. I will remember how we were pushed against the cup by centrifugal force, how we were pinned in place like butterflies. Our mother, Betsy, staring at some point in space beyond the cup and grinning, her red curls clinging to her head, her breasts flattened under a silk paisley scarf, and her arms stretched along the cup rim in a pantomime of protection. My sister, Lilly, yelling, "Meg, make them stop it," over and over, her eyes stricken, her red hair flying, and her hand gripping my wrist. And me, gripping the wheel at the center of the cup, trying to stop the orbit, and telling Lilly, "Scream. It will make you feel better. Just scream as loud as you can." And Lilly and I screaming with all our might. I will remember making myself not feel anything, as if by deadening myself, I could make Lilly stop feeling. When the ride finally stopped, I saw the half moons of blood from her nails that I hadn't felt because I was screaming. Only then it hurt.

Sometimes when Lilly ran away from home, I was her accomplice. Finally, I was her betrayer. Betsy would lock Lilly's bedroom window by screwing metal rods through the window frame with a key. I knew where she kept the key, and after a while-not in the beginning, but after a while-I began to slip into Lilly's room to unlock her window. I would open it just enough for Lilly to touch her fingers to the edge and feel the air underneath. She would drop into the azalea bush below. In time, it became deformed from her falls and stopped blooming.

If I had been able to predict the traits that would come of us being together like the pea plants in Mendel's garden, how pieces of us would graft on to the other, how some pieces would die and make us different, I would have let Lilly go that last time. I would be able to remember her like this.

The day of the teacup ride, we rode rental bikes up and down the boardwalk at the Jersey shore with Lilly in the lead, streaking through rollerbladers and cutting through families to peer into souvenir shops before ringing the rusty bicycle bell and disappearing into cotton candy clouds and the whir of arcade lights. Betsy and her boyfriend Mike, who had just started living at our house, wobbled on their bikes between Lilly and me. Betsy wore sunglasses with little rhinestones in each corner, that sparkled from even far away, and her mouth shone with Passionate Plum. She had a bathroom shelf at home full of passionate and breathless colors. They were stacked like Jenga sticks and tended to spill into the bathroom sink when I took out my toothbrush. Mike rode slightly ahead of Betsy, with his Vitalis hair and aviator sunglasses shining dully.

I pedaled slowly behind them, liking the boardwalk bumpiness, the muted ocean, and Lilly swooping along the horizon like a kite on a string. Every few minutes, Betsy called out, "Lilly, don't get too far ahead," and Lilly slowed down as if pedaling into a strong wind. Then the string slackened, and off she flew again.

We all caught up with each other at a souvenir shop with a pirate display. Lilly was trying on pirate hats at a sunglasses rack mirror when I found her. Hats with the skull and crossbones. Hats with wispy feathers. Scarves with beads. Bandanas. She settled on a black, tricornered hat with gold braid and marabou feathers, then turned and twirled her invisible mustache. "Shiver me timbers."

"Ahoy, yourself." I squawked at a stuffed parrot clinging to a perch with pipe cleaner claws.

Lilly handed me a lady pirate dress, satiny, with strategic rips and slits, and a front that closed with laces. "Put this on, or walk the deck, bucko."

Betsy and Mike rolled their eyes and wandered away to the shelves of salt water taffy and caramel corn.

I held the dress in front of her. "You mean the plank."

"Whatever, matey." Lilly drew a cutlass from its sheath on the 99 cents rack and poked the tip at my throat. "Put the dress on, wench, or you'll end up in Davy Jones' locker."

I couldn't help thinking of the cover of the romance novel in our mother's beach bag, even if the pirate in front of me was a very short Fabio with no muscles. But Lilly's eyes blazed, and I believed that Lilly was capable of magic and great feats. I pulled the pirate dress over my shorts and t-shirt and tied the laces loosely over my breasts that had appeared that summer. I hooked a finger over the neckline and pushed the jersey down to my cleavage.

Lilly raised the cutlass and shouted, "Strumpet!"

I spun Lilly around and clapped a hand over her mouth. "Shut up," I whispered. "You're going to get us in trouble." I tried to sound mean, but when Lilly started singing a muffled "ho ho ho and a bottle of rum" against my hand, I couldn't help laughing. "You landlubber. You're just jealous because you don't have any yet."

The man perched on a stool behind the counter looked over my laces, rips, and slits. "You gonna buy that, darlin'? Maybe nice for Halloween, eh? Ask your daddy?" He winked. "You rip it, you pay for it."

I knew Betsy didn't have much money, and she probably wouldn't ask Mike. "Just browsing. I'll be careful."

While I unlaced and shimmied out of the dress, Lilly clasped a wide black belt with a big gold buckle around her waist. Then she clipped a gold hoop earring to her left ear and tied on an eye patch. "Avast!"

"Dork." I stuck a mustache with waxed tips under Lilly's sunburned nose. "Actually, you look pretty good, mon capitan."

Lilly looked in the mirror, grinned, and yelled, "Hey, Mom." I called her Mom then, too, but she has been only Betsy for a very long time.

Betsy and Mike approached the clerk, and Mike tossed a box of salt water taffy on the counter. "Mom, this is what I want," and Lilly flung open her arms and tossed her head, displaying all her price-tagged booty.

"Oh, honey, you know we can't get all that." Betsy glanced up at Mike and rubbed his back. "Maybe just the hat for Halloween?" Mike looked at the price tag and cracked his gum. "Or maybe that nice big earring?"

Lilly laced her fingers on the top of her head, squashing the hat down to her eyebrows. "I want it all. I can't be a pirate without all of it."

Mike looked at our mother and pointed to the bikes. "Tell the kid to take all the stuff off and get back on the bike. They have to be back at 11:00. We're leaving." He stuffed his change from the taffy into his pocket, stepped outside onto the board walk, and looped the bag with the salt water taffy over the bike handle. He jerked his head. "Vamoose." Betsy, rhinestones sparkling, shot a "sorry, Charlie" look over her shoulder at Lilly, and wobbled off down the boardwalk behind Mike.

Lilly put the eye patch, the gold hoop earring, and the waxed mustache back in their places. But after a glance at the clerk, who was ringing up another salt water taffy sale, she took a stuffed parrot from its perch, slipped out of the store, and wrapped its pipe cleaner claws around her bike handle. She pushed the marabou-feathered hat down to her eyebrows, tucked the cutlass in her belt, mounted her bike, and pedaled furiously. All I could do was pedal bumpily behind her, keeping the bright colors of the parrot in my sight, hearing the cries of the souvenir shop clerk behind me and the faint ringing of a rusty bike bell up ahead.

This is how I would have remembered Lilly. A loose kite. No strings. And nothing after.

Mike disappeared, just broke himself off of us, and was gone. He didn't go out through any window though. He simply went to work one morning with his brown paper bag lunch and didn't come back. Our father had left by the front door, too, but each time that story was told to me, the details shifted shape, never locking into facts. Their leavings were quiet and blurry and irrefutable. Like pirate ships sailing off into faraway horizons and off the ends of the earth. Without a boyfriend to anchor her, Betsy began to stay out for whole nights at a time. She would leave with a dramatic flourish, saying goodbyes in a Southern belle or English aristocrat accent, then return an hour or so before her alarm rang. She would sit woozily on the edge of her bed, pieces of Aqua Net hair sticking out from her head and Maybelline under her eyes. She would sit there and not talk to Lilly or me. She would not tell us to turn off the light or lock the door. She would not tell us to show her our interim reports from school. She would not tell us to clean up the bread crumbs on the kitchen counter. I didn't mind. I liked the quiet. But Lilly was afraid.

One night, I walked into the kitchen to look for a pencil and saw my mother holding on to the wall phone, the cord wrapped around her fist. I heard her whisper, crying a little, "Mike, honey," and sniffling, "but Mike, honey," and "I never meant—" I cringed inside at that itty bitty girl voice.

Lilly came into the kitchen from the living room and looked from Betsy to me, her eyes widening. "Why is she crying? Why are you just standing there? What's wrong?"

I tried to shoo her out of the kitchen. "Just Mike stuff. Go do your homework." But Lilly walked softly up behind Betsy and stroked her back. "It'll be all right."

I don't think Betsy heard Lily. She wailed at the phone and clutched the cord. "No, Mike, you're right. They don't have to be here all the time. They don't have to go with us. We don't need—" Lilly stroked her back once more, and Betsy whirled around, covered the mouthpiece, and spat out, "Stop it, stop it, stop it." Lily flinched. Betsy looked at both of us. "Go. Just go. You can do that one little thing for me." Lilly ran to her room, but I planted my feet in the linoleum and crossed my arms across my chest. "I don't have to go anywhere, and you shouldn't either. You're the mother."

Betsy turned back to the phone. "Mike." She stood still and waited. "Mike." She cradled the phone and whispered, "Mikey." After a few seconds, she held the phone in the air and stared at me. I could hear the dial tone.

When I was eight, Betsy asked me to tell a newly acquired boyfriend, if he asked, that I was four, and I had to wear a seersucker sundress with a big yellow duck appliquéd to the front, which I hated. And yellow anklets with lace trim, which I hated. But Betsy declared in Southern belle, "You are just cute as a button," and that was that. Lilly took a sound nap that afternoon in a locked room, helped by a dose of cold medicine mixed with Kool-Aid. Of course, the boyfriend did ask me my age in that voice adults use with strange children, and I lied.

The beaming young mother act accomplished, Betsy shooed me outside to play while she entertained her visitor that one was Roger, I think. But there was no way I would leave the porch steps in that seersucker dress. I tried dancing on the steps like Shirley Temple, and rolling stones down the steps like a Slinky, but it wasn't fun without Lilly, and after a while, thunder started to boom close by and then closer and closer I haven't heard thunder so loud since and lightning slit the sky. I tried to open the front door, but it was locked. I ran around the house, but the back door was locked, too, and the windows were too high up. I banged on both doors, so hard my hand swelled, but no one answered. Heavy sheets of rain fell. I sat on the top step, in my wet seersucker with the yellow duck slicked to my chest, and my sore hand in my lap, and watched the lightning crash to my left, to my right, and at every point in the sky, trying to anticipate where it would begin and what direction it would take next, and where it would strike and burn. After all, I wasn't hurt, only wet. A little cold. The lightning seemed scientific.

When the front door finally opened, and Roger left, he seemed so sorry to see me there. Something about his kind face bent down toward me and the reproachful look he shot my mother made me blurt, "I'm really eight," and burst into tears.

I got that "now you've done it" look from Betsy then, too.

Later, as I washed the dishes and Lilly dried, Betsy waved to us from the doorway in a satiny dress with a slit to mid thigh and gold hoops dangling from her ears. "See you later, alligators." I pulled the plug to let the dishwater drain, and Lilly tossed the wet towel onto the kitchen counter. Betsy had slammed the door closed but not locked. I turned the deadbolt, then sat on the couch in front of the quiet TV. Lilly flopped beside me and lowered her head onto my chest. She took my hand and lay it on her head, stroking it. I took up the motion, smoothing her fine red hair, so bright and unlike my own.

Lilly said in a small voice, "Let's play that I'm Pippi, and my father is a pirate captain in the South Seas."

"Captain of the sailing ship Hoptoad. You have inherited his super strength and a chest full of gold." Our father was not lost at sea. We knew he was still alive, flying planes in the Air Force. We didn't have a chest full of gold, but we did have a tea set from Japan with two broken cups. "You live in Villa Villekulla, and your mother is an angel who watches you through a hole in the clouds. Your friends are Tommy and Annika, and whenever you want to, you can run away from home on a motorcycle that flies through the air.

Lilly giggled against my chest.

"And I am Tommy and Annika's mother. I know that you wouldn't hurt them, and I know that you don't need a real mother."

I could feel Lilly waiting.

"So I let you live alone in Villa Villekulla with your monkey and your horse. I let you have adventures. I let you do what you want."

Lilly sank into me, limp and calm.

The first night Lilly ran away, I was trying to do my biology homework at the dining room table. I was reading about Mendel in his monastery, experimenting with garden peas, learning to predict which would be tall or short, which would have wrinkled or round seeds, or inflated or constricted pods. The drawing in the textbook showed Mendel touching the plants with a look of concentration on his face. I stared at the diagram of flower and seed traits in the textbook and tried to shut out the sounds of Lilly and Betsy fighting in the kitchen, but I couldn't.

They were fighting over possession of the phone. Each clung to the receiver, tugging it as close as possible to the body, until they seemed to interwine like pea vines.

Betsy shouted, "You can't spend hours on the phone."

"I don't, and you're a liar."

"You're too young to be serious with a boy."

"You don't know anything about love. You scare people."

Betsy yanked the phone up and hit Lilly in the chin. When Betsy froze, one hand fluttering in the air near Lilly's face, Lilly wrestled the phone away. It slipped from her hands, and shot from the outstretched cord, knocking a white china bowl with green leaves to the floor. The bowl broke and sent pieces spinning like the teacup ride on the boardwalk.

Lilly ran to her room and slammed the door. Our mother bent over with the dustpan and brush and swept up the pieces with their vines and tendrils torn apart.

I turned back to the picture of Mendel and the diagrams of cross-pollinated peas. I read that one factor may mask or prevent expression of the other, and I wondered if I were the dominant or recessive child, like a grandparent I didn't get to know, and what kind of pea-child I would have someday. Hypotheses broke apart in my head. From the kitchen, I heard the china bowl pieces fall from the dustpan into the trashcan, breaking into even smaller pieces. I heard our mother stagger into the table, collapse into a chair, and try to cry a little. I wondered if we would cross-pollinate to the point of complete stupidity and despair.

Later that night, I heard Lilly drop into the azalea bush below her window. Both our windows were open to let in the cool night air. I stuck my head out my window as far as I could and yelled, "Lilly." But Lilly was gone. I went to Betsy's room and turned on her nightstand lamp. She scrunched her face at the light and croaked "what?" but she didn't scare me. I shook her. She rolled, naked, until she sat on the edge of her bed with a sheet corner pulled across her lap. I pulled a terrycloth robe from the pile of satiny lingerie in her closet. "Lilly went out her window." She jabbed her arms into the robe and stamped into the bathroom.

Together we circled the block in our bathrobes, occasionally calling Lilly in stage whispers, then walking three or so more blocks to Overbrook, where the boy, four years older than Lilly, lived with his father. We stopped in front of the house. It was squat, with broken steps and a sideswiped LeSabre out front, and moonlight only made it look lonesome. I looked for furtive movement at the windows. Betsy cried "Lilly" once, sharply. We didn't know the boy's name or his father's name. Lights went on in the neighbors' windows but not at the boy's house. Faces peered out. Then the lights went out again.

We tightened our bathrobe sashes and walked back to our street. At home, I lifted the phone from the receiver and handed it to Betsy, so that she could call the police. When an officer finally came, I was in bed. I fell asleep listening to Betsy give a description and the address of the boy on Overbrook. She said she tried her best, but Lilly was a hard girl to raise, and boys just took advantage. I think she cried a little.

Lilly was good at not being found. She got found when she wanted to. Usually, when she stank and she was hungry. She ran away so many times, and for so long, that the police didn't want to come anymore. A policeman told our mother to lock Lilly's bedroom window at night and to stay close at all times, so that she couldn't leave by any other exit. They thought they had given us the yellow copy of the report form each time, but they weren't really sure anymore. Anyway, they had all the identifying information on file, and a recent picture. I didn't want a police car to park in front of our house. I began to want those long stretches when Lilly wasn't there and Betsy could run away from time to time and I could be Pippi, alone in Villa Villekulla. I didn't want to be Tommy and Annika's mother, or Pippi's mother in heaven, or anyone's mother.

Locking the window worked for a while. The security of it, the cocooning of her room, seemed to soothe Lilly at first. She slept in resignation. But a kite in the wind won't stay still long. She began to scream at night, little screams at first, then for long stretches of a time. I slept so little, all the pea traits and ratios jumbled in my head, and the one thing counted on, that I was smart, got lost.

I became her accomplice.

I slipped into Betsy's room, got the key from where Betsy hid it above her window sill, and slipped into Lilly's room. I unscrewed the locks, pulled the long metal rods out of the holes, and pocketed them with the key.

Later, after Betsy was asleep, Lilly opened the door, sat down beside me, and rested her head on my shoulder. I shrugged her off. "You're a dork if you're running away to be with a stupid boy."

Lilly reached behind her back and pulled things out I couldn't see in the dark. "I used to run to people. Now I just run away."

I said, "Be like me," and Lilly said, "I can't."

Lilly lifted her arms and lowered the marabou-feathered pirate hat over my head. "This is for you." She raised a small knife with her other hand and placed the tip close to my throat. "You have to let me go."

I said, "The window isn't locked," and I was numb. "It's your plank, matey."

"My ship, you mean." Lilly closed the knife, and I let her go.

I let her go again and again, each time returning the long metal rods to their holes and the key to the window sill.

Only once, I forgot. I remembered as I tried to do my homework and Betsy sorted through the dirty laundry, shaking the tissues and coins out of pockets before putting pants into the washing machine. I heard the heavy ping of the window lock key on the laundry room floor, and I waited, concentrating on a black and white grid in my textbook. Betsy thrust it between my face and the book. "How could you do it?"

She yanked my chin up. "Answer me." She pointed the key at me, and I grabbed her hand with the key. "You let your sister go." Betsy lifted her other hand to slap me, and I grabbed that hand, too. We stared at each other, and I tried to make my eyes blaze like Lilly's, to make believe Betsy would bend at the point of a cutlass.

"You wouldn't make her stop screaming."

Her eyes opened wide. "You let your sister go because she screams?"

"No," and the words felt hollow before they even left my mouth. "Because I couldn't stand her pain."

Our hands holding the key shook between us.

"You let her go because you couldn't stand your own little itty bitty bit of pain."

I looked into the face so like Lilly's, beautiful and fierce, so unlike my own. I held onto her hands, unable to say a word in my defense.

I dropped my hands first and slipped away from table. "I'm sorry." The recessive pea-child.

The last time Lilly ran away, her window was locked. Our mother was out, and I had wedged her bedroom door closed and sat with my back to it. I would not be her accomplice that night. At first, it was quiet, but then I heard the escalating sounds. The bed springs. Quick footsteps. The squeak of a chair. Desk drawers slamming. A banging on the window frame. A few seconds of quiet. I imagined Lilly straining at the window, then looking up to see the rods securely screwed into the window frame. Then Lilly's mouth at the door. "You were supposed to let me go." A second of quiet, then kicking the door hard enough rattle my bones. One more moment of quiet. Then glass shattering. A cracking of wood and a shower of glass like a fire ax had split the house. The falling of Lilly's body into the bushes with red flowers. No soft footsteps across the lawn.

I went into Lilly's room, opened her window, and saw her curled on the ground. I ran out and around the side of the house and knelt down beside her in the grass. The small knife that Lilly had once held to my throat was buried down low in her belly. Blood spurted from the wound, and blood crisscrossed her arms and legs. Her face was white as china in the dark. I took her hand, and she whispered, "You should have let me go."

I said, "I'll go call for help," but Lilly held on. "Don't leave me now. It hurts."

"Scream so it won't hurt, Lilly. I'll scream with you."

We screamed as much as pain would let us. We screamed to blunt the pain. We screamed to make someone stop it. I screamed for Lilly, when she couldn't scream for herself anymore, until my screams became the sirens that would save me.