from their homeroom, but Kiera’s mother said she didn’t have to go.
“Chelsea’s square. Why do you think her mom had to invite practically the whole eighth grade? But if you’re going, I’ll go,” Kiera said, sounding benevolent. “We’re sisters, remember?” That slice of blood, sunlight in the window. That wistful, pretty pink. How Ava almost hadn’t felt the sting as the blade cut her palm.
The hotel is one of the nicest J-ville has to offer, though the girls are old enough to know that’s not saying much. Ava’s older cousin used to work here part-time cleaning rooms—dumping trash, replacing tiny bottles of shampoo, kneeling in other people’s bed habits while he changed the sheets. He said people were nasty no matter the star rating, and he didn’t stay for long.
The pool sparkles wickedly, manufactured blue, its depths guarded by fat, reddened sunbathers who seem to the girls like sly gorgons only pretending to sleep, ready to tear them from their skin. Little kids splash in the shallow end, shrill and unselfconscious, and Ava thinks that everyone at the party—even Kiera—must envy them. Thirteen was too old to play that way, and too young to know what else to do. The other girls dawdle in the only shade, slurping fruit punch from clear plastic cups. Ava and Kiera slouch together on a single pool chair, the sun burning at their backs. They tilt their heads close and conspire with one another. (What If we run away?) They ignore everyone else.
Only six other girls come to the party, most of them scraggly things with early zits and bad hair who are just happy to be invited, except for Marisol, who is both prettier and nicer than everyone else and wants to run for freshman class president next year. Kiera traces an emphatic box in the air with her fingers. Square.
At Mrs. Zucker’s behest, Kiera and Ava cram in at a stone table in the pool’s courtyard, watching Chelsea’s father march the sheet cake toward them, the number thirteen burning, how silly he looks singing through his smile. All their swimsuit straps are slipping from their shoulders, sweat beading at their hairlines, chlorine marking the humid spring air in a way Ava likes. They belt out “Happy Birthday” to Chelsea, who even with her wispy hair and chicken legs looks nice in this moment, glowing with her own importance.
Kiera and Ava don’t really sing, so Ava has time to notice Marisol in her two-piece suit, how curvy she looks already, how her stomach has lost its childish paunch and flattened out. She keeps her hair long, shining darkly down her back. She’s a woman already, surely, Ava thinks, imagining where else Marisol has hair.
“What a baby,” Kiera whispers as Chelsea blows out her candles, referring to the late birthday. Everyone else has already turned the first teen, most on their way to the next. Kiera will be fourteen at the end of the summer, and Ava a couple of weeks after that.
“Zygote,” Ava whispers back, feeling grateful for even this small advantage over someone else.
Marisol turns to glare at them—making Ava feel like a plucked bird—and claps hard for the birthday girl. “Great job, Chels!” she cheers.
“We don’t need this,” Kiera says, returning Marisol’s look, though she doesn’t seem to notice. The other girls cluster around Chelsea as her mother begins handing out the gifts, cooing about the smart wrapping paper, complimenting the girls on their good taste—so mature.
Kiera grabs Ava’s hand and they stomp up to Mr. Zucker, who’s cutting cake with a plastic knife, botching the straight lines so that some pieces are trapezoidal.
“Mr. Z,” Kiera groans, clutching her stomach and bending double. “I don’t feel so good. I think I need to lie down.”
Chelsea’s father blinks at them, and Ava sees him seeing them: two girls carting around perpetual grimaces the entire time they’ve been here—their sulkiness, their almost-adult gravity. They make him uneasy. “You don’t want cake?” he asks, as if sugar and cream are the necessary medicine for any illness. An antidote to the dysphoria of growing older.
Kiera can sense his weakness like blood in water. She leans in close as if letting him in on a secret. “Mr. Z . . . it’s just, you know, girl stuff,” she says. The magic words.
Mr. Zucker digs into his pocket for the room key, thrusting it into Ava’s hand along with two paper plates of buttercream cake. “Yeah, go on up. I’ll send Mary in a bit to, uh, check on you.”
“Thanks, Mr. Zucker,” Ava says, letting him see her smile for the first time. She can tell it doesn’t soothe him, and a part of her is glad. “I’ll take good care of her.”
They don’t go up to the room; Ava knows another place they can be alone.
“My cousin showed me once when I came with him to get his paycheck,” she tells Kiera. “There’s a code to the door, but he told me they never change it.”
“What’s he do now?”
“Grows pot in Colorado. Everyone’s mad as hell, but he says he’s making way more money.”
They ride the elevator up to the tenth floor, and Ava leads Kiera to an unmarked door that takes them to the roof. They can see their whole downtown, bisected and tidy, rolling out around them in unremarkable beige and gray buildings barely taller than the hotel; in the distance, the blue bridge spans the St. Johns and the handful of slender, glassy towers flash from the other side. Ava feels disgusted by this place, her home, but also exhilarated, as if viewing a world she can fit in her palm, where she is king, owns the light, and no mother can dictate what she needs.
The girls eat their cake with their fingers and dangle their legs from the roof, watching the tops of people’s heads as they enter and exit the hotel lugging suitcases and their five or six kids, listening to the indistinct bustle of other people’s lives. Ava can’t tell if any of them are happy from way up here, if anything really gets better with age.
“How would it be to get ground up in a meat grinder?” Ava asks.
Kiera mimes flipping sausage in a pan. “Can you imagine? Someone frying you up for breakfast?”
“Yum,” Ava says.
“How’d it be to get executed? Anne Boleyn-style? Off with your head!”
The girls go back and forth, losing track of the time, and for a few moments, it really is a world where only she and Kiera exist. A perfect place.
“We should get back,” Ava says, standing up, “before they call the police.”
“Gross,” Kiera drawls, rising, too. She seems perplexed, looking out over the sparse rooftops like she’s seen something but can’t figure out what it is. She floats her paper plate off the roof and Ava does the same, watching as they waft slowly, beautifully, to the ground. Ava turns to go back.
From behind her, Kiera says, “How would it be to fall from a roof?” The image flashes in Ava’s mind—rush of air, bones breaking, the red and lumpy splat. Grisly. She spins around to say this word to Kiera, but sees only the sky stretching blue—a real God’s blue—overtop the ugly buildings.
Down below, someone starts screaming.
Ava feels her body being pulled toward the ledge. Kiera’s name is stuck in her throat, her lungs shrinking, blood rushing to her head like the fluttering of wings. Her feet move without her consent as two contrary wants rise up inside her: the want to run, and also to see everything.
Ava leans
