“What do you want, Oneechan?!” she snapped.
I stood there, the door open and forgotten behind me. I didn’t have the faintest clue how to start this conversation. Crap. Courage was all very well, but I needed a game plan to go with it! Awkwardness creeped in with the same steady pace as the ticking of a timebomb. Um. Uh. Ack.
“Uh…you tell me,” I said.
My half-naked sister gave me a death glare. Ruh-roh. I could see it now: Pervert barges in on a changing eighth grader with no purpose but ogling her! I would’ve asked her if she really had such little faith in me, but, well, I knew the answer to that one…
Oh well, what the hell. I spread my arms wide and said, “J-just look at you! You’ll catch your death of cold running around in that getup. Look how late it is! March your butt to the bathroom and get clean, missy!”
“Uh, that’s literally what I was in the middle of doing, but go off.”
“Ah. Well. Then uh. Um. See here!” And then, as I panicked, a truly horrible sentence came flying out of my mouth. “Let’s bathe together!”
I unclasped my bra hooks and pulled my bra off. How, oh how, did I end up here?
“What were you even thinking?” my sister whined as she shimmied out of her sports bra. “There’s no room in here.”
“Y-you’re not wrong.”
The changing area in our bathroom was undeniably a cramped fit for two people. Made you wonder how we managed to wash our faces at the same time every morning, jostling each other for space as we went.
And while you’re wondering, here’s another thing to consider: why the hell didn’t my sister say no? She went “What the heck?” like I was making some kind of lame, creepy joke but then followed that up with a casual, “Yeah, sure.” I would never understand how extroverts like her thought. Or maybe that wasn’t to blame. You know how she did all those sports? Maybe she was used to showering with her teammates. Yeah, that could be it. Wait. Did that mean she bathed with all her senpais and kouhai-chans after every practice? Showing off her naked bod? Seeing their naked bods?! Dang, Little Sis, I thought. You’re on that freak shit.
“Uh, Oneechan?” said the freaky little sis in question.
“Huh? R-right, I’m moving! Sorry! Getting undressed as we speak.”
“What’s your problem? I was just gonna say, we’re out of shampoo. Go grab the refill bottle.”
“Oh. Okay. Will do.”
I tiptoed over to the cabinet and got out the big bottle we refilled our shampoo from.
Ladies and gentlemen, we were in hot water. My sister had a bigger (bathing adjacent to a) body count than me, and it was making me wilt like a dying flower. Even though I was two years older!
Off went the undies.
How else was I supposed to feel in front of my sis, if not embarrassed? All up to me?! Get a load of that BS. I could count the number of times I’d bathed with another girl on one hand…albeit just barely!
Ugh. I had so totally made the wrong choice here.
I hunched my shoulders and tiptoed into the bathroom, feeling like I was reading an adventure VN with nothing but bad ends. “D-don’t mind me,” I said as I opened the door and got blasted with the sight of my naked sister standing in the shower.
She faced away from me, her back glistening with soap. Her butt was toned like nobody’s business. It was all those sports, I’m telling you. This girl had a baaaw-dy. She was lithe from head to toe like a fawn you’d see at the zoo. She was perfectly trim (unlike yours truly, even though we ostensibly came from the same DNA) and delightfully petite.
“How the heck do you not gain weight with an appetite like yours?” I asked her.
My sister turned her head over her shoulder to look at me. “What do you mean? I just work out, duh.”
Then her eyes widened. “Holy shit. Your boobs are ginormous.”
“Hello?! You see them all the time.”
“Yeah, but not naked. There’s more oomph when I see ’em up close and personal.”
“What is this, front row tickets to a walrus show?” I groused.
While my sister refilled the shampoo, I scrubbed myself down. Here was where the real problem began: fitting in the bathtub in our all-too humble home. I didn’t know how on earth we were going to get both of us in there, but my little sister just climbed right on in with me. Actually, “climbed” isn’t the word. More like “splooshed.”
“Watch it,” I said as the bathwater sloshed my way.
My sister laughed, unconcerned. She had her hair tied up, you see.
“Move your legs,” she said. “They’re in my way.”
“Your legs are in my way,” I snapped back. “What’d you go and get so big for anyway?”
“Are you trying to use your big boobs to bully me out of the tub?”
“No!”
Miraculously, we managed to slot ourselves into place and settle down facing each other, our backs up against the sides of the tub. Our legs were all over each other’s, but it wasn’t awkward. I mean, it was just my sister. I wished I could be, like, 130 cm, but it was chill otherwise.
All I needed to do was wash my hair and then peace out, but that wasn’t the point of this bathing thing. So I started to feel nervous in a whole different way. How to go about starting this conversation? I figured leading with small talk might be my best shot.
“Oh hey,” I said. “Your bandages are gone.”
“Hm? Oh yeah. I guess.”
My sister’s hands looked fine now. She showed me them, front and back. They were still smaller than mine somehow. Had to have been those darn sports of hers.
“When did your boobs start getting big?” she asked me.
“Huh? I dunno. I don’t remember. I feel like they were already pretty chonky by the time I was your age.”
“Dang.”
I leered. “What’s that? Haruna-chan, are you jealous? Don’t you wish you were me? Hm? Hmm?”
“Not at all,” she said. “I literally could not care less.”
“Ugh! The betrayal.”
“Honestly, if I had giant tits like you, they’d just get in my way when I play badminton.”
Darn that girl! At this rate, all her boob fat would turn into muscle!
“You know,” I said, “we’ve both gotten pretty big. Like, we’ve grown up, I mean.”
My sister smirked before relenting and acknowledging with a nod that I was right.
“When was the last time we bathed together?” I asked. “Elementary school?”
“What, you don’t remember? It was when you had that big screw-up.”
“Which one?” So much for my powers of recollection. I didn’t remember that at all. Ugh, she was going to think I was slow in the head! I stared holes into my sis and willed myself with all my might to remember—and that’s when it hit me.
“Oh yeah…when I spilled the milk everywhere,” I said.
“Yup. You tried to cut the end of the carton off, but you were gripping it so hard the milk shot out everywhere.”
“Ah, right. And we both ended up so drenched Mom and Dad shoved us into the bath together.”
I was in upper elementary school at the time, back when my sister and I attended the same school. Perhaps that was the genesis of our fated roles as shrewd little sister and bungler big sister.
“Sorry,” I said. “That was all my fault.”
“Don’t mention it. I’m used to you screwing things up and catching me in the crossfire.”
“Now see here, you little turd—”
Here came the insults again.
As I looked at my sister, I remembered how she used to be back when we were little. Even though I was the older one, I was always getting her into some trouble or another. I didn’t know how other families worked, but I thought we got along relatively well. Maybe. Or maybe that was just because my sister was such a stand-up individual. See, she was even nice enough to go along with my weird bathing idea. When I was in my own truancy phase, she’d snub me or give me the evil eye, but at least she still treated me decently. I would never have become the person I was now without her help. But I’d never been there for her like an older sister should.