“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. Ava studies Kiera. 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. Her mouth is a slim, straight line, but her eyes are wide, green-yellow, unblinking. Strange eyes, Ava’s mother always says with the same pinched grimace usually reserved for pulling plugs of their hair from the bathtub drain.

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. 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 though there was no water in sight, Ava knew what she meant. It was the type of feeling she herself sometimes got, a heaviness, an airlessness, that was hard to talk about, especially with her mother. Trying to name it was like pulling up words from her belly, bucketful after bucketful, all that effort but they never quite meant what she wanted them to.

The next day, our grandmother pulled us from our play for Bible study. We groaned and dragged our feet, made our bodies dense, hoping to be immovable, but our grandmother was a capable shepherd. She ushered us into the living room, big hands fanning us forward; we imagined wind at our backs. “Why was Jonah punished?” she asked.

“He disobeyed God,” we answered in the drawling unison of students at school. God sent a storm and the sailors tossed Jonah off their ship to calm the sea and save themselves. 

“Jehovah knows your heart,” she told us, giving us the eye. I thought of Jonah in the belly of the whale, his hands pressed to his lips in prayer, and what he might have said to make God spit him back up. I wouldn’t let them throw me overboard, I thought, and my heart pitter-pattered a defiant beat against my birdcage chest. I had never seen a god, nor smelled one. Never tasted its sunshine flesh. 

“Maybe there is no God,” I told Tweet later in the backyard. The grass had shriveled and died. I threw rocks at a wasp’s nest that hung from the limb of our grandmother’s river birch. They missed and bounced off the papery bark, making new gouges next to scratches where the cats climbed up. “What if He’s just some big joke? To make us behave?” 

I chucked another rock, and Tweet put her hand flat on my back. “Don’t,” she said. I didn’t know if she meant the wasps or God. I looked into her face, her large dark eyes, searching for some answer the grown-ups wouldn’t give. I wanted to ask if—when she pressed her palms together before bed—she prayed for her parents’ salvation or the man they killed. And to what did she pray? Did her God have two faces that looked like hers, and a gun hidden in the waistband of Its jeans? Was hers a God of pawnshop gold and two-dollar scratchers, promising We’ll be back soon, but never coming home? Even then, I wanted to let her speak the answers into my ear like a psalm. But the subject was “grown folk talk,” forbidden even between us, and so I said nothing. I threw again and missed. 

Tweet wound back her arm and let her own stone fly; it found the nest with a soft thwap and knocked it loose. The nest hit the ground and we ran for cover as the wasps flew out, their violent droning filling the air as they searched for somewhere to place the blame. They disappeared into the unmoving sky, leaving silence in their wake. 

“God’s real,” Tweet said, and headed for the house. She left me standing in the yard alone.

He weighed 210 pounds buck-ass naked; 217 in his leather jacket and boots, which he wore that crisp March evening to the bar along with a gold stud pin in his lapel. It was shaped like a spade, a gift from his wife when they were young, once she’d discovered how much he liked expensive-looking things. He wasn’t handsome but his light skin, wavy hair, the polished gleam of his fingernails, and the bills pressed tightly in his wallet almost made him so. As he entered the Albatross he stopped just in the doorway, imagining his body filing the width from frame to frame, giving the occupants time to look and wonder who he was. The jukebox played the Temptations and threw colored light onto his face, and a couple of women at a nearby table glanced up from their pastel martinis, one sucking the cherry from her drink. Satisfied, he walked in. Hilda swept a dishtowel along the bar top, looking bored, smiling out from under her bangs at a trio of men at the counter, a pretty laugh spilling from deep within her chest. He chose a stool in the middle, with an unobstructed view of her. 

“Hey there, Fred. Jim and Coke?” she asked, the start to their ritual. Her low, drawling voice pulled something tight inside his stomach. 

“You know it, kid,” he said. He slid his jacket off and draped it on the back of his chair as she filled a rocks glass with three large cubes of ice, so dense they could sit in a drink a while before melting. In the few months since he’d met her, Fred often imagined tracing one down the contours of Hilda’s spine, recording an exact ratio of body heat and melting points.  

“No lime,” Hilda sang, placing his drink in front of him on a square of white napkin she’d sprinkled with salt. “Start a tab?”

“I’ll pay as I go,” Fred told her, as he always did, and placed a five on the bar. Hilda disappeared the bill into her apron in one discreet, fluid motion. She never brought him change. 

The Albatross hosted a quiet crowd on Tuesday evenings, a mix of suits, day laborers, and truckers with three-day scruff. The bar’s aesthetic lingered somewhere between a dive and a lounge, sporting wood details and burgundy upholstery along with burger specials and streetwise games of pool on red felt in the back. Older gentlemen sat a tables in dim corners sipping rye whiskey, talking with other men about matters only other men would understand; some kept their hands high on the thighs of women who were not their wives⎯girls, really⎯who did not yet keep house and so still had inexact ideas about how the world worked and all of the ways in which they could be disappointed. The girls possessed a malleability, a willingness to be impressed, their cheeks, soft and new, flushing at even the most trivial compliments. These were sweet, bygone qualities the men wished to bottle and harbor for themselves. 

Fred took a swig from his drink and watched the young bartender over the rim of his glass. He liked the healthy way her hips moved under her black uniform skirt; the deep brown of her skin; the way she talked to other men, her oiled hair sweeping forward as she leaned over the bar to take their orders, a grin under every word. He liked that she knew what a two-dollar-a-drink tip was worth, and that his glass was never empty. Hilda smiled every time she made him a new one, as if they shared a secret⎯as if she knew him⎯and sometimes her fingers would linger over his, creating heft and heat. 

“Still good, Fred?” she’d ask from time to time, letting him watch her. Making sure he never lost sight of his importance. He was good. Fred lifted his glass to her, the bite of bourbon still glowing in his throat. “To beautiful friendships,” he said, and when Hilda laughed, even that seemed just for him.