We’re All Bananas

After my mother’s skin cancer diagnosis, I was bullied by my older sister Sally into scheduling a “skin test,” which is what they call it when you strip in a cold room and show a stranger every part of your body. Honestly, it seemed like overkill. I didn’t need to shell out a copay. I read the pamphlet I was given as a teenager and know to look for asymmetry, border, color, diameter, evolving. It gave me the knowledge to understand a random spot appearing on my arm like I was a banana rotting on the counter. We ignored those bananas like we ignored sunscreen. All those summer afternoons rambling together and tanning in bikinis on the deck without it. We were so smart and so dumb squirting out the sunscreen behind the hot pink azalea bush so our mother didn’t know we were skipping, laughing wickedly like we were nailing the heist of the century. Sally, the oldest and therefore in charge, let us get away with it then, but not now. The paper gown sticks to my ass as I tie the belt around my waist. The doctor flashes a light on my freckles and moles, quickly moving from one to the next. Her speed tells me I’m fine, that this was an unnecessary crossing of my boundaries. A total waste of time and money. Later, when I find a text from Sally saying that they found skin cancer on our baby sister—the fucking co-ed—, it takes everything in me not to race back to the dermatologist and get a second, closer check. To search the places only I know. To find a way that everything can be alright again, the way it was before we knew to be afraid of our bodies.