The auntie effect

The punch card has been sitting on your desk for six days, and you have been doing a very good job of not looking at it. It's a plain card, cream-colored, stamped SECOND DRAFT LOYALTY PROGRAM at the top in a font that belongs on a 1970s recipe box. Two of the ten slots are punched. You don't remember either punch happening. You just know that your jeans stopped fitting on Thursday, and that Prudence Achebe smiled at you across the counter like a woman watching bread rise.

You catch your reflection in the window now, and you make yourself hold it. Your hips have opinions. Your belly, which was always a suggestion, is now a soft, warm statement that presses against the waistband and settles there like it pays rent. You're twenty-one. You look, at least from the chest down, like somebody's favorite aunt at a barbecue who insists you take seconds. It should horrify you. The strange part is how much of you wants to turn sideways and look again.

Brit bangs through the door behind you with a pizza box and freezes. 'Okay,' she says slowly, setting it down. 'Either your laundry's shrinking, or we're having a conversation.' The card sits on the desk between you, two holes and eight to go.