They wipe pink froth from their faces with the backs of their arms, and sit still for a moment, solemn in the wake of what they’ve just done. They tip the bowl up to their mouths, one after the other, sip-for-sip, until there are only dregs. She stirs the milk and blood until it is the desired shade, the pink of Kiera’s lips: a soft, hopeful color. “Get a spoon,” Kiera says, and from the drawer Ava grabs a large silver one with slotted holes. This year, she’s become obsessed with dualities, at looking at one thing in two ways: Kiera’s eyes, strange and magic her own sadness, both imaginary and pulsating.
This is one of many differences between her and Kiera-in that the truth about the two of them changed depending on which mother was telling it-and Ava often wonders if their differences are only because Kiera is white, or if there’s something more. Trying to name it was like pulling words up from her belly, bucketful after heavy bucketful, all that effort but they never meant what she wanted them to.
It was the type of feeling she herself sometimes got, a heaviness, an airlessness, that was hard to talk about, especially with her mother. At Ava’s house they are tomboys, they are lazy, they are “getting on her mother’s last nerve.” Her mother doesn’t approve of Kiera, but they’ve been friends for two months-late August, when the eighth grade started-ever since Kiera came up to her during gym and told her: I feel like I’m drowning, and even though there was no water in sight, Ava knew what she meant. The girls are at Kiera’s because her parents believe in “freedom of expression,” and they can climb trees and catch frogs and lie on the living room floor with the cushions pulled off the couch, watching cartoons and eating sugary cereal from metal mixing bowls for hours. Strange eyes, Ava’s mother always says with the same pinched grimace usually reserved for pulling plugs of their hair from the bathtub drain. Her mouth is a slim, straight line, but her eyes are wide, green-yellow, unblinking. How she holds her hand steady-as if used to slicing herself open-while sunlight falls into the kitchen window and fills her curls with glow.
“Pink is the color for girls,” Kiera says, so she and Ava cut their palms and let their blood drip into a shallow bowl filled with milk, watching the color spread slowly on the surface, small red flowers blooming.
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