Peter was feverishly mouthing the words to one of his Tom Thumb tongue-twisting lines he’d been continually botching at practice when Erica’s car finally squealed to a halt.

                Puzzled, the boy craned his neck to get a peek out the vehicle window above, past the bounds of his specialized car seat. Even if he was preoccupied with the directional tidbits and notes given to him by Mrs. Parks at play practice, he knew the way home from the school very well by now. It was too soon.

                “Uh, Erica?” he said, raising his voice high enough to be heard over the blare of her punk rock radio channel. Maybe she’d stopped for another milkshake like a couple weeks back? If the previous outing was anything to go by, though, he’d already decided he would stay in the car.

                Without speaking , Erica exited her driver’s side door and soon was looming above Peter in his safety box. Her face, as was so often the case, was rigid and unreadable, her lips pursed and eyes narrowed.

                “C’mon,” she said, snapping off his multiple buckles with a pinch of her fingers. She cupped her palm into the base of the container, allowing her brother to load up. “We’ve got stuff to do.”

                Peter propped himself up in his sister’s hand. He gazed out into the green distance far beyond where Erica had parked on the gravel ground. It looked like he’d guessed right. They’d diverted somewhere along the longest stretch of road between neighborhoods, instead turning down a lane that led to one of the district’s larger reservoirs. Down a hill past a protective wire fence, the blue-gray surface of the water was continually churned by artificial jets beneath the lapping meniscus. The whole misting expanse of it stretched past the boy’s sight, even when he squinted and leaned as far forward in his sister’s palm as her fingers would allow him. Froth sifted down against the grassy banks by the clump.

                “Uhh, it’s a nice place, Erica,” he said with lingering uncertainty. He looked up at her face, greeted with the same stoicism as before, and returned his attention to the striking landscape with a shrug. “Not that I don’t appreciate some nature, obviously. It’s really cool out here, don’t’ get me wrong. It’s just that, y’know, but you never seemed the type to-”

                “Do you have to talk, like, every minute?” Erica cut in, gently, but with enough barbed snark to be effective. Shutting the car door, she wandered off the makeshift parking space and into the greenery, the blades of grass rising halfway up her denim-clad calves. Her hand arched higher and nearer to her shoulder, giving Peter a better view of the open space.

                “Sorry,” he hummed at length. He padded his hands overtop his sister’s oversized fingertips, testing the grooves in her warm digits against his own decidedly much smaller skin patterns.

                All the while, Erica descended the loping decline in the earth, planting her sneakers with delicate self-assuredness into the dirt. Her fingers formed a higher barrier around her brother, who gladly sunk into his sibling’s palm and waited patiently for her purpose, ensuring not to fidget too much, as per her usual preference.

                At last, when it seemed the ground was just starting to level off again before it dipped down into the water just a stone’s throw yonder, the seventeen-year-old gently cupped her five-inch charge against her shoulder, allowing him the added support of a few strands of hair as she lowered down to her haunches and took a staggered seat on the grassy slope.

                “Well, this is nice. Are we having a picnic lunch?” Peter couldn’t help himself. It was just too strange to find himself in a situation where his sister not only was willingly increasing their one-on-one time after an entire school day of ferrying him between classes, but doing it in such peaceful surroundings, without a single solitary stranger to eye him like a handheld pet. Really, he couldn’t have asked for better circumstances with his long-estranged elder sister.

                Truth be told, it was nice having somewhere to relax after the decidedly harrowing encounter in his art class. After all, today was the wrong day to be looking harried. He was expected at Lisa’s house in just over an hour and a half, to have dinner with her and her parents, and presumably hear her toot out a few notes on her clarinet. It was his third date with this dream of a girl he’d managed to befriend and maybe something else, despite the natural flow of the universe, and he was determined to look as calm as he could. The manufactured babble of the water spouts over the reservoir were a big help, if he was honest with himself. Still, that made it all the clearer that Erica deserved a good ribbing.

                “I’m not kidding, sis, you picked the perfect spot. It’s so romantic.” Carrying on like this was inevitable, even with Erica’s earlier call for reduced chatter. It was too perfect of a target for jokes. “So… don’t keep me waiting… where’s my ring? You gonna propose to me, or what?”

                In a flash, the goodwill and humor was clamped from Peter’s body, along with most of his air.

                Erica’s opposite hand, resting by her side moments before, swooped in from above and pinned Peter into the palm in which he was sitting. No sooner had she compressed him between skin and skin, then her fingers were massaging his limbs roughly into a spread-eagle position, where her chest could be more effectively pumped down. It took no more than a few seconds to have Peter helpless, flat and mildly panicked as a human pancake between his older sister’s powerful hands.

                What was she doing? He wheezed, kicking his feet and swinging his arms for all he was worth in every direction. Occasionally he felt his shoe clip against Erica’s broad thumb, but it did nothing. No change was wrought. She had him mashed between her palms, as if she was kneading dough. It was all pressure, all around his body. In the thrashing fray, through gritted teeth Peter chanced a look up at Erica’s face above.

                No emotion, nothing. She was just staring out across the water like she had a moment before.

                “Stop!” he finally found reason to pant. “Erica, stop!”

                He realized it had taken him a moment to even summon the words, because he’d never before had to request that Erica release him. Never, in his entire life, had his sister, for all her groaned rants and indifferent tendencies, done something to him that made him feel imperiled. Even Jessica, back in her younger and more reckless days, had earned an outburst or two from him as she gave him an over-zealous squeeze in her clammy fist and tried to convince him to pretty-pretty-please-with-a-cherry-on-top put on some doll clothes?

                But not Erica. Never, until now.

                “ERICA!” he squeaked fruitlessly from beneath the weight of her hand. Still, no change, not even a twitch in her face above. The only motion in the enormous teen’s body was that of her expertly fastened palms, continually rotating and heaving down against Peter’s ribcage. He was beginning to feel queasy, and not just from fear in the face of this unprecedented event. Erica’s wrists were bobbing now, almost in time to the song she’d been playing in the car, with a pounding pulse that fired Peter’s heartbeat into overdrive. Before long, he wasn’t even positive if he was hanging upside down or not between his sister’s hands.

                And God, she was strong. Her flesh became like leather, her muscle like iron. He’d never thought to consider it before. But she was, even if she had relatively thin arms for someone of her age. With a body as fragile as his, in her hands, she was an amazon. An un-doer. Her tanned skin flushed a deeper shade as she laid down more pressure on the sandwich formed by her palms and her hapless, sputtering brother. He could just make out a vein popping in her neck.

                “Erica, let me GO!” he growled, emboldened like he hadn’t been before. Wrapping his hands roughly around the curve of his sister’s wrist, he set his lips down against her skin and chewed. It was hard to get a grip at first, but with some effort he managed to square his jaws and sink his teeth a few micrometers down into the meat of his sister’s hand.

                Almost immediately the battle for air was drawn to a close. Erica’s upper hand flinched and parted, leaving the boy panting in her grasp. Once again, her fingers formed the familiar safety barrier around him, ironic as it was. Peter laid on his back, quivering from shock and adrenaline, but more-so the second one than when his sister first entrapped him between her hands.

                “Not bad,” Erica said at last. Her voice was cool and collected. She drew her palm up closer to her face, studying her brother and the definite red mark he’d made in her hand. “You took longer than I hoped, but not bad.”

                He coughed, his dry throat stinging for water, until at last he could form the words.

                “What the hell?” Peter croaked. He stared, unblinking and disbelieving into Erica’s unaffected countenance. “What WAS THAT?”

                “I told you.”

                “Told me what?”
                “Told you we were going to practice.”

                It was coming back now. The initial blind rage was receding now, replaced instead with a more logical rage directed at her methods. She had, indeed, promised him that she would teach him to be prepared for the next time he was in unwanted hands and unable to get immediate normal-sized-human support. Somehow, though, he’d imagined there would be a little more basic martial arts training and a little less oxygen deprivation.

                “Look, I know you’re probably pissed… and that’s fine… I don’t really give a crap either way. But you do have to know how to do this, whether you like it or not,” Erica explained in the same eerie rationale, though now the stillness of her form and voice at least wasn’t chilling Peter’s spine in quite the same way. “Because you know Mom and Jessica aren’t going to teach you.”

                “That… that really hurt,” he mumbled bitterly. It was all he could manage.

                “Oh, did it?” she simpered. Her lips pursed. “Good.”

                Peter shuddered and bowed his head. Mean as her response was, he did wish he’d sounded just a touch less like a wimp.

                “Cuz you know what?” she continued, her voice slithering to a hushed crawl. “If something ever happens to you? And me or Mom or Jessica or your super-cool girlfriend isn’t there to do something about it? This is what it might be like. This is what you’re gonna have to be able to do.”

                Peter gnawed his lower lip.

                “Look, I don’t care if you actually tell me what your deal was today, but don’t treat me like I’m stupid. And whoever it is, for them, you’re… really easy to take advantage of. Like, really easy. Nobody likes saying it to you, and you don’t like admitting it, but you are,” she said, taking a deep and bracing breath that to Peter’s ears actually bordered on emotional. A lump was gulped down in her still-veined throat. “But you’re also not a god-damned damsel in distress, either. I know you’re not.”

                “How do you know?”

                “Cuz you’re my brother, you stupid little twerp, and nobody in my family lets people push them around.”

                The boy slumped against his sister’s fingers. His nerve was rebuilding, stitch by stitch.

                “Plus… and I also don’t care if what I just did makes you not wanna talk to me for… like, ever, but I will seriously eat off my own leg before I let Mom make me responsible for you getting grabbed up someday when no one was around. You got it?” she grumbled with that reassuring hint of resilient affection.  “I know you’ve got your cute meet-the-parents dinner in a while, so if you’re -”

                “It’s Mandy,” the boy sighed. “The girl we saw in the band hallway the first day.”

                “What about her?”

                “I think there might be… something wrong with her. Like, her brain. The way she acts around me, I, um...” he continued. “…I don’t really know.”

                “Try.”

                “She dunked me in water because I told her I’d help her paint. She keeps just… showing up, like… when Lisa and I were at the theater. And then… today… um, in art again, she…” he said. It felt like releasing a balloon inside his lungs. “…she drew a… a picture of me, without… without…”

                Unable to get himself to utter the necessary modifier, Peter pinched at his shirt. By the look of revulsion in his sister’s eyes and wrinkled lip, he imagined she got the picture.

                “And that’s it,” he said. “She makes me nervous and… kind of scared sometimes, and now I’m asking you… I’m asking you for help. Again.”

                Erica watched her emotionally bare sibling drop back against her fingers. A breeze lifted her bangs up, wisping them in air for just a split second above her eyes. Her lips tightened.

                “Are you going to tell Mom?” Peter asked.

                “Do you want me to?”

                “No.”

                “What if something happens?”

                “That’s why I’m asking you to help me,” he said. “To make sure it doesn’t.”

                The girl nodded, still just as anonymous as when they’d parked the car. Her thumbs swayed, her gaze redirecting out into the reservoir again.

                “I’m not your body guard. I can’t be there every minute of every day,” she said at last.

                “I’ve got… friends. People I trust at school. For when you’re not there. And… and the teachers are all-”

                “Okay, okay. I get it. We’ll keep it on the DL. For now.”

                “T-Thank you,” Peter mumbled, running his hand along his sister’s finger. She didn’t shove it away.

                “Just don’t give me another one of your “I want to feel normal” speeches, okay? You’ve had enough drama queening today,” she said, uncommon concern broaching her callous syllables. “We should probably go back to the house before Mom calls the FBI to find our dead bodies in a ditch.”

                “No,” Peter barked, more loudly than before. It was hard to say, but he could’ve sworn he heard his tiny voice carry across the watery gulf and along the banks.

                “What?”

                The freshman smiled, staggering awkwardly to his feet and lifting both fists in the air in a boxing stance.

                “Put up your dukes, you big ‘ol palooka, and help me,” he said, baring his teeth and unabashedly grinning at the sister who only a couple minutes before had clasped him to her palms and simulated squeezing the life out.

                Erica rolled her eyes at his display, leaning her had back, but Peter would’ve bet most of his miniature furniture that he saw a sly smirk cross her lips just before his world was tossed into reverse again as she answered his challenge.

                Again the long fingers slapped down on his back, mashing his face and neck into the heel of her hand. This time she didn’t even allow him the agency of a front-facing attack stance, limited as it already was. Instead she pinned him by his arms into the creased center of her palm. He was in no position to bite this time at the heavier padding of the heel, and even less position to kick, as she had his ankles shackled between the fleshy pillars of her middle and index fingers.

                As he felt the air draining from his lungs, the vertigo settling comfortably back into his swirling vision, Peter choked through the pain inflicted by his sister’s all-encompassing palms. Senses bedraggled, the boy purified his thoughts into a single point of clarity, just enough to understand the tumbling geometry of his hand-prison, and wrapped his hands around a particularly soft patch of skin in the crevice between Erica’s fingers. Nails extended, he clenched, twisting with all his might in opposite directions until that square decimeter of flesh was contorted to its raw breaking point.

                Peter actually heard the sore expulsion of breath this time from his sister as she released him from her grip, letting him tumble between her legs into the tall grass below. He landed softly in the mottled soil. Battered but victorious, the young man stumbled to his feet, staring defiantly at his sibling’s leering face above.

                “Better,” Erica said as she looked down at him in the shadow between her thighs, an undeniable hint of pride in her voice. “Twerp.”