She had thought it was funny how her mom said the word. Pressure. It could have been the thick accent that released the second syllable in a puffed exhale.

Presh-ha.

But she didn’t think so.

To be honest, she thought all forms of the word were funny, no matter who said it. Sometimes she’d mutter it into her cupped hands as she wove through the congested Metro station so she could hear it sink into the soft skin of her palms. Then she’d breathe in sharply as if to recapture the sound.

She’d turn around every minute or so to make sure Paige was still following a few feet behind her.

She knew people thought she was strange. Maybe weird. More than eccentric, to be sure. They never understood why she took Paige everywhere. People knew her as the girl with the buttoned-up tweed coat, the native East Coast resident who wandered Times Square and the Metro stations and the ferry boats to and from the Statue of Liberty.

People who knew her didn’t love her.

Mom was a beauty, and Dad was a business tycoon. Couldn’t remember which went to Yale and which went to Columbia. One of them had family money, the other had drive. Nobody really cared which, though, and no one asked, because their penthouse on Fifth Avenue spoke for itself.

In their early thirties, Mom was under duress from Dad to have a son – a boy to run the family business. Dad wasn’t going to live forever. Mom got pregnant.

But it was a girl.

Oh well, Mom said. Two girls should equal one son.

The baby kicked a lot. Mom would throw off the goose-feather comforter and exclaim in a fit of exhaustion that the baby might as well be a boy. During labor, the feeding tube got wrapped around the baby’s neck.

But the baby lived. Best doctors around knew how to deal with

presh-ha.

So the girl in the tight tweed coat came to be.

She grew up with her sister Paige. They went to private schools whose tuitions looked more like a college’s endowment. They wore fur coats from stores that brought you sparkling water and never put price tags on the clothing.

But the girls were to run the family business one day. Remember, two girls equal one son.

She failed a few tests, and Paige failed a few more. She kissed some boys, and Paige let her silk negligee slip in front of a few more. She sipped champagne, and Paige sipped a few too many.

Paige’s body was never found. She had lost her at a party, lost her in a group of honey tongues and darting eyes and quick tempers and greedy, lustful hearts that engulfed her, squeezing her into the center of an intoxicated herd of bodies that left the club and never returned.

No one knew if she was dead, but it was easier to assume so.

One girl does not equal one son.

No one ever really loved the girl in the tight tweed coat. Her parents even less, now. What were they supposed to do with half a son?

They blamed her, too, for Paige’s disappearance. But that was okay, since she blamed herself. Maybe not blamed, exactly. That was just an easy excuse to tell herself. It was more about the

presh-ha,

in that there was too much of it.

But it’s an interesting thing, pressure. There are so many kinds, the girl thought one day, a few days after her sister’s disappearance, a few days before her disinheritance, sitting on the concrete wall outside the bagel shop.

She found she had a passion, a sort of need for physical pressure.

Hugs, squeezes, kisses, tight coats, crowded areas. Balloons.

She’d come upon a man in a small green cap selling balloons one day. There were six. They swayed with the maze of people moving around them. She liked the way the balloons looked, admired the way they harnessed the pressure inside them to make them rise above everything else.

She bought one, and wrote “Paige” on the stretched latex in dark, bold letters.

She strolled through crowded streets with Paige behind her to help carry the burdens of her life.