Sleeper Car With Her Stepsister

The overnight train rattled out of the station just after nine, carrying Yara and her stepsister Yvonne toward their parents’ anniversary party three hundred miles up the coast. Yara had fought the booking every way she could. She’d offered to take a later train, a coach seat, even a bus. Nothing worked. The sleeper cars were sold out except for one remaining cabin, and their mother had insisted the girls travel together “like a real family.” So here they were: twenty-two and twenty-four, college senior and recent grad, forced into a space barely wider than a closet.

Yvonne shoved her suitcase onto the upper rack and turned, her long dark hair still damp from the station bathroom. The cabin smelled of recycled air and the faint lemon cleaner they used on the vinyl benches. Two narrow bunks stacked one above the other, a fold-down sink, a sliding door that locked with a cheap metal latch. Their parents were two cars forward in a larger suite. Close enough to knock if something went wrong. Far enough that no one would hear a careful conversation.

“Upper or lower?” Yvonne asked. She wore a thin gray tank top and soft black shorts that rode high on her thighs. The overhead light threw shadows into the hollow of her collarbones. Yara had always noticed those details and always pretended she didn’t.

“Lower,” Yara said. “I get motion sick if I’m up high.” It was only half a lie. The real reason sat lower in her stomach—something restless and guilty that had lived between them since the summer Yvonne came home from her first year of college and suddenly looked like a woman instead of a rival.

Yvonne climbed the little ladder with easy grace, the shorts riding higher. Yara looked away, heat climbing her neck, and sat on the edge of the lower bunk to unlace her sneakers. The train lurched; the cabin lights dimmed to a warm amber night setting. Somewhere down the corridor a couple laughed. The wheels clacked in a steady, intimate rhythm.

“You still hate trains,” Yvonne said from above, voice muffled by the thin mattress.

“I hate sharing six square feet with you,” Yara answered, but there was no real bite in it. They had always talked like this—competitive, teasing, a half-step past sisterly. When their parents married six years ago, the girls had been old enough to resent the forced closeness and young enough to turn resentment into a kind of sport. Who got better grades. Who looked hotter in a bikini. Who could hold a stare longest without blinking. Lately the sport had changed temperature. Yara felt it every time Yvonne’s gaze lingered on her mouth, every time their shoulders brushed in a kitchen doorway and neither of them moved away fast enough.

Yvonne’s bare feet dangled over the edge of the upper bunk, toenails painted a dark wine color. “Remember last Christmas? You stole my black dress and stretched it out.”

“It fit me better.”

“It looked slutty on you.”

“You stared the whole night.”

Silence. Then a low laugh from above. “Maybe I did.”