Sean checked his watch and stretched his legs. He said goodbye to Anna and settled the phone into its cradle. He walked up the carpeted stairs to the bathroom door. As he raised his hand to knock, he heard a splash and a giggle.

"Michelle?" he said politely. "You finished your bath yet?"

His little sister splashed again. This one had an almost indignant tone to it. "But I have to get this shipment back to England before the pirates sink us!" she replied, as though this were the most normal thing in the world.

"But Michelle, I have to pee. And besides, it's your bedtime."

"I can't sleep unless I save the spices from Scruffy Cobblepotts! The English need these Oriental spices for their dinners!"

"I think the British will survive without their MSG,"� Sean said with a sigh, but he settled down on the floor outside the bathroom door to wait. Michelle's fourth grade class had been reading about the spice trade and all of the economic issues that went with it. Of course, the colorful picture books her class used removed some of the strife from the process, and Sean's 16-year-old mind knew that Michelle's definition of 'economics' listed more towards how much candy she could get for her dollar allowance. Still, Sean knew that when her imagination kicked in, nothing could pull her back until her story was over. Michelle's mind was on Spice Route #5 on the Indian Sea, or something like that, and her brother's bladder would just have to wait.

A fair amount of splashing and half-vocalized battles cries later, the plug popped and Sean heard the water swirl down the drain. By the time the trickle stopped, Michelle had toweled herself off and appeared in the doorway wrapped shoulders to knees in a fluffy green towel. Sean zipped by her and into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him. He sword loudly - too loudly; his sister was only one room away - as he kicked her toy pirate ship. The damp plastic form of Scruffy Cobblepotts skittered across the floor and clinked against the toilet. Sean emptied his bladder with an exaggerated sigh of relief and kicked Scruffy out of the way of his path to the door.

Michelle was sitting on her bed when he poked his head into her room, wrapped in a flannel robe and tossing a basketball into a hoop hung from her closet door. After each shot went in, a tube returned it to her hand. Sean had set it up for her as a part of the birthday present that the hoop had been. If she missed, she had to go get it. She'd learned quickly, and now missed only about one in a hundred.

"Yar," he said by way of greeting.

Michelle raised an eyebrow at him. It was something Sean desperately wanted to be able to do, but had never mastered. The fact that his ten-year-old sister seemed innately capable drove him crazy. "I'm Scruffy Cobblepotts, here to steal your spices."� Sean paused. "Yar," he added.

Michelle sighed. "Scruffy's in the bathroom. You kicked him and said a word mom usually yells at you for saying."

Sean felt stupid for failing to be able to play in his sister's world, but refused to let on. "Yar,"� he insisted, "but Mom and Dad are at dinner, so I'm in charge."

"Whatever. Wanna play?"� She lobbed the ball at him unexpectedly. It bounced off Sean's face and back into her hands. She giggled.

"Sure," Sean said belatedly, and held out his hand for the ball. She laughed again and shot at the basket; it went in and returned to her. Only then did she toss it to Sean. He shot, missed, and grumbled overdramatically as he fetched it. "Yar."�

The game continued in this manner - Michelle making shots easily, Sean missing and retrieving the ball from across the room. After about twelve such shots, one of Sean's tosses rolled agonizingly around the hoop and finally fell through.

"Yar, I'm on the board," Sean said with relief. Being shut out by a girl six years younger than him, even in the privacy of his own home, would have haunted him for months.

"You keep saying 'yar' like I'm still playing pirates in the bathtub," she said caustically.

Something about the way she said it, so scornfully and with her eyebrow quirked, tugged at Sean's heart. He thought of Anna, his friend and confidante, who had called him two hours ago, hysterically crying because she had just found out she was pregnant. Her 17th birthday was in a week. Sean had done his best to calm her down, but ultimately had been helpless. He thought of Mike, whose 21-year-old brother had died a month earlier while hiking after a rainstorm. His foot had slipped on a wet rock and he'd plunged 40 feet down the cliff face. Michelle sat on the bed now, without fear or responsibility or loss, her mind full of pirates and spices and youth and ignorance. Sean knew someday her mind would fill with other, adult things, and that imaginative spark would flicker against so many other things competing for her attention.

"Yeah, I know you're done playing, but you wanna tell me what you and Scruffy Cobblepotts were fighting over?"� He slid down the wall into a sitting position by the door.

Michelle snuggled down into her bed and began weaving the tale of spices and pirates. When their parents came home, Sean's mother chastised him for letting her stay up late, but he didn't really care.