She patted me on the head. There are times when I suspect that the reason our family has this chronic problem with conceptions of time is that my sister and I were, in fact, born in a temporal flux of some sort; she was meant to be the older sister, just as I was meant to be the younger sister, and in our typical Hirata fashion we managed to schedule it all wrong. “That’s nice. Go get your nails done while I wait for so-and-so to get back.”