Annie found herself playing a game she hadn’t even thought about since she was twelve years old and Robbie McCormick cut his lip on her braces. Her image of some benign affair, where everyone stood around with a wine glass and nibbled canapes, was deteriorating faster than her last blind date-with Stan the Used-Car-Salesman.

She’d had no idea when her sisters had invited her to this thing that it was going to be some nightmarish, pre-teen flashback. Annie felt ridiculous in such a revealing position, sitting cross-legged, trying to tuck her pastel patchwork skirt between her thighs. She noticed a lot of the women had discarded their shoes, but she was wearing soft, knee-high black boots that didn’t lend themselves to a casual slipping-off. The entire room had morphed from mingling adults to a gang of unruly adolescents, hooting and howling and elbowing each other the minute they all sat in a circle on the floor in their suits and skirts.

Her oldest sister, Chloe, spun the empty rum bottle and everyone roared when the narrow end settled on Rebecca, the middle sister. While the men whistled and whooped, both women crawled, giggling, toward the center of the large circle. Their cheeks flushed the same shade of rosy pink as they briefly touched lips.

Annie blushed as well, appalled and astonished at how her body remembered these old games with a dreadful pang and tingle: first kisses and two-minutes-in-the-closet fumblings. There was the time she and her sisters had tried to make their own soap opera just to have an excuse to kiss the boys. Then there was the summer they’d built a fort made of someone’s discarded turquoise carpet and played spin-the-bottle with an empty gin bottle Gary Hillman snitched from his mom’s stash.