Hang out in the living room and run into Max*

Eventually with all the caffeine coursing through your blood you have to get up and move around. Even if it is just puttering around the house, gathering in your newish surroundings. You wander around this deeply unfamiliar familiar space. Furniture has moved, things rearranged; a new hall closet here, the hall mirror swapped spots, a new bouquet of fake flowers in the vase by the front door.

You walk past all the graduation photos lined up in a row: Carrie’s, yours, Lex’s, and then a lone nail jutting out of the wall waiting for Max to join the club. A picture of your grandfather and grandmother, rest their souls, sitting and smiling on the porch of their old house.

Beneath their photo is another one, from a family reunion that is lost to your memory, or that only happened to this version of you and not the old you. You scan across the foreign faces of aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews all gathered together on the porch steps of a rather big house that you probably saw once and then never again for somebody that is familiar. Finally you pick out your Aunt Agatha, your mom’s sister among the crowd. You recognize her, her arm around the shoulders of her ex-husband, Uncle Tom. Three kids, maybe ten or twelve stand in front of them, two girls and a boy that are utterly foreign to you. You smack your lips.

“So you ended up having kids, didja?” You say to no one in particular.

You keep looking, trying to see if you can find your parents, which after a little more searching you do, your dad sporting an awkward mustache and your mom a with a hand around his waist; all three of your siblings and who must be you no more then about ten years old gathered around them. Carrie, hair done up in pigtails, is frowning. Lex, band-aid on her nose with the terminally bored expression of a child made to stand still on her face. Max staring off into space not even looking at the camera. You, looking straight ahead, bored, with your hair in the ugliest bowl cut you’ve ever seen.

“Huh.” you huff and walk on.

You wander into the living room, and find a picture of the family on vacation somewhere on the Gulf Coast, on the beach posing together. Your step hitches midstride and you catch yourself staring.

“Wow their tits are out,” you chuckle to yourself, unbelieving at this vacation photo. Your mom, Carrie, and Lex are all topless, wearing only bikini bottoms with big smiles on their faces as they throw their arms over the shoulders of your dad, you, and Max between them. Their breasts in the wind, some sand stuck to Lex’s cleavage, and not a bikini tan in sight. Max is the odd one out of the girls, wearing a black one piece swimsuit and wearing the same awkward half smile to hide her braces. Your dad and you are even odder ones out, wearing what looks like singlets, your dad’s a truly vintage looking blue and horizontally white striped thing that makes him look like he ought to have kept the mustache and bought himself a straw boater hat, and you wearing a boring black one on what you have to imagine was a pretty hot day.

“Huh?” You hear someone close to you say, nearly jumping out of your skin, and your head snapping around. Max is sitting on the couch with a blanket, her laptop in her lap and an earbud between her fingers held away from her ear, looking at you. “What’s up?” She asks.

“What?” You reply, sounding guilty of all sin in your own head.

“Whatcha looking at?” Max asks, shifting on the couch to sit up a little straighter and see the picture you were looking at. You reflexively stand out of her way.

“Oh,” you blubber, “just a vacation photo. You know.”

“Oh.” Max replies, suddenly disinterested, and shifts her weight again, going back to her laptop. You do your best not to look at the picture again immediately, feeling more than a little ashamed of getting caught gawking. Max sighs, “well don’t let me stop you from reminiscing about being stuck on a crowded beach for a week in the dog days of summer. What an awful place. Honest.”

“Yeah you look like you were really enjoying yourself,” you say glancing back at the photo and Max’s grim smile in it.

“You try being out in the hot sun all day for a week straight and tell me how you’d feel.”

“Honestly, after how cold it’s been the last few months, I could go for some of that,” you reply, looking back at the photo again. Turning your attention to the boobs, you have to admit that Carrie definitely takes the cake when it comes to size. She has a rather large pair of honkers on an otherwise rather slim frame, with big pink areolas and little bullet nipples pointing out in either direction. Moving down from her chest you are surprised with her muscular torso and slight abs, which she didn't used to have in your opinion if that still means anything here, but on further inspection she has a bad case of pencil legs, they are downright coltish all the way down. She definitely is skipping leg day.

“Ugh, gross,” Max groans. “Especially with all those people. God I never complained about going to the river again after that trip. Plus didn’t you and dad fight that whole trip?”

You have zero recollection of any such trip in any memory.

“Eh, if I did I don’t remember it too well,” you lie, “when was this even taken?”

Max gives you an eye.

“Maybe two years ago? I know it was in July because Lex had just turned 18 and told just about anybody who would listen so―” She shrugs. Looking at Lex’s breasts in the picture, you see that they are much smaller in comparison to your sister’s and mother’s. Where you’d guess that Carrie and mom were the size of a pair of market ready cantaloupe or maybe larger still, Lex’s look more like the size of a pair of lemons, her nipples coming to a point not unlike the rind of a lemon. Her body is athletic, the skin of her legs taught overtop muscle. Compared to Carrie she looks much better proportioned, if even pear shaped and a little bottom heavy.

“Yeah, nothing’s coming to me,” you sigh.

“Well do you at least remember the other fight then?” she asks.

“Survey says no,” you state. Looking back at the picture, your mother’s chest looks to be what Carrie’s is bound to become, still large by any but the most inflated definition, but with a definite sag of age, stretch marks, and criss-crossed with blue veins while the areolas and nipples are noticeably bigger and darker from pregnancy. She's a little heavier set then her eldest daughter, but certainly a lot softer looking too and far more well rounded.

“Don’t tell Lex that,” she snorts.

“Why?”

“Well,” Max says, pausing so she can shuffle around on the couch again, “as I remember it, there were these two girls who weren’t leaving you alone and couldn’t take a hint. They started putting the moves on you until Lex got between them and you and got punched right in the mouth for her troubles.”

“Yikes.”

“She ended up decking one of them, you got thrown clear in the mayhem, and she was wrestling the other girl into the sand when Carrie and a lifeguard broke it up real fast,” she states, eyes returning to her screen.

“She did?”

Max sits up again, kicking her blanket down her legs, looking out into the kitchen to make sure the coast is clear.

“Yeah Carrie scares me now, I could maybe survive her when we still in high school, but now she’d clean your clock without breaking a sweat,” she pauses, “oh and Lex was fine, got a nosebleed full of sand, some scrapes and bruises, but I think she was back in the water before the end of the day.”

“Crazy.”

“Girls will be girls,” she sighs, “shocked that she didn't get any sharks coming after her in those waters. Aren’t you glad you have sisters like that to protect you?”

“Sure,” you chuckle.

“You could express that appreciation for your sister with a small recommended donation of $50 to my checking account,” she replies, “I take cash or credit.”

“Really?” you snort, “you’re trying to monetize Lex defending me now, did you even help her out?”

“I provided moral support.”

“Sure, but was it worth $50?”

“Hear me out,” she orders, “you made use of Lex’s muscles that time, I’m sure that my brains have helped you out many times before too.”

“What does that make Carrie?”

“The attack dog,” she snaps, “you noticed her voice kinda sounds deeper, more gravelly then usual?”

“Yeah?”

“I think that she’s been smoking more, but it makes her voice sound like a dog’s growl to me.”

“Pssh,” then you add, “wait a minute.” You lean back so you can see into the hallway and the nail sticking out of the wall.

“Hmm?”

“Don’t you still have school to go to?” You ask.

“I only need five classes to graduate this year.” she replies, shrugging. “And between the choice of not having a first period or a sixth period, I chose the former. Easily. Going in first thing in the morning sucks.”

“Yet you got up early anyways?” you ask, finding yourself distracted yet again. There on the couch sits Max in a most unladylike position with her blanket pooled over her feet, her legs splayed wide open to the world, and her shorts riding all the way up her crotch.

“Oh it's not that I want to sleep in,” she laughs, “I just don’t want to be in school this early in the morning.” The fabric of her short shorts is not hiding just enough of the business going on between her legs to tell you that your sister is definitely trimming down there.

“So what are you doing?” You ask, still absentmindedly staring at Max’s crotch, eyeing the subtle cameltoe she has going on. She scoots, giving the fabric some breath and it again hides anything interesting to your sight, breaking the spell, and snapping your eyes back to her face.

“Oh you know, just playing video games, hanging out.” She says, staring intently at her screen.

“Cool.” You say, “we should play together sometime.”

“Sure,” she replies.

“Just let me know when you want to,” and spotting your moment to retreat you add, “see you around.”

“Roger rodger.” Max replies flashing you a thumbs up without breaking eye contact with her screen as you turn to hastily retreat from the living room. Despite a little embarrassment that you feel burning in your cheeks, the whole encounter has left you with even more questions than answers. You look at every picture frame you pass, scouring for any other difference, any explanation of why such a raunchy photo would be hanging in the living room.