Milk Blood Heat
I. Monsters
“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 through 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—ever since late August, when the eighth grade started, and 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 meant what she wanted them to.
This is one of many differences between her and Kiera—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. Something beneath the skin. 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.
“Get a spoon,” Kiera says, and from the drawer Ava grabs a large one with slots. She stirs the milk and blood until it is the desired shade, the pink of Kiera’s lips, a soft, hopeful color. They tip the bowl up to their mouths, one after the other, sip-for-sip, until there are only dregs. 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.
“Blood sisters,” Ava murmurs, feeling somehow stretched in time—another sensation she can’t explain. She imagines she can feel Kiera’s blood absorbing into her system, passing through the mucous membrane of her small intestine, assimilating until there is no difference between her blood and her friend’s.
“Blood sisters,” Kiera agrees, and leaves the bowl, spoon, and knife in the sink for her mother to wash.
This is the hour of reckoning, or at least this is what they shout as they flock toward the retention pond behind Kiera’s house, kicking up grass and startling the neighborhood dogs into song. They drop small stones into the water. Watch the tadpoles scatter and count the ripples.
“Run, little guys,” Kiera says, her voice small and high like an actress in a bad horror film. Ava stomps and snarls in the shallows; she’s still wearing her low-tops, her socks full of pond, water squishing between her toes. She is Frankenstein’s monster. She is a vampire queen. She is newly thirteen, hollowed out and filled back up with venom and dust-cloud dreams. She throws her head back and howls and howls at the sun, pretending it’s a strange, burning moon, and that there is no other world than this one where she and Kiera are.
Kiera thunks down onto the bank, sitting with her legs pulled up and her arms draped across the tops of her knees, watching Ava. Her hands dangle from her small wrists like claws. She laughs as Ava poses for her, thrusts her hips out at impossible angles and squinches her eyes tight. Kiera pretends to snap photos with her hands, diving onto her stomach to make sure she gets the shot.
“You’re a sexy monster!” she screams, swooping to the edge of the pond for a close-up, splashing water so that the droplets hang in the air for barely a moment, rainbow-colored. “Say it! Be it!”
“I’m a sexy monster!” Ava repeats, and bares her teeth. Kiera yanks her arms and they fall onto the grass, a giggling heap of girl. They catch their breath and wait. For their hearts to stop thudding, for the warmth to drain from their cheeks. They wait for the howling they don’t voice to quiet. It never does. Instead it evens out, a thin purr that lives inside their ribcages and the webbing of their fingers.
Ava knows she really is a monster, or at least she feels like one: unnatural and unfamiliar in her body. Before thirteen, she hadn’t realized empty was a thing you could carry. But who put it there? Sometimes she wonders if she will ever be rid of it, and other times she never wants to give it back. It is a thing she owns.
Kiera sits up and brushes the wet tops of Ava’s sneakers.
“Your mom’s gonna kill you.”
The girls continue on without their shoes, fleeing into the shade of the small wood behind the pond, bare feet pressing down into cool, loose dirt. They don’t cry out when the sharp points of broken twigs or acorn tops drive into the soft flesh of their insteps. They grit their teeth and keep moving. They swallow pain.
In a clearing where the sun breaks through, they find a dead cardinal, red and perfect, lying on its back with its legs curled in the air like small, delicate rooks. “Don’t touch it,” Kiera says, leaning in so close the tip of a bent feather almost brushes her nose. “Bird flu.” But they both get close like that, hunkering down, drinking death in.
Ava wants to trace her finger along the soft black feathers surrounding the beak. She is jealous of its open, hollow eye, the utter stillness of its body. Even its rank, sweet smell. She lies down beside it, her head at its head, and stares up into the jagged patch of sky. She imagines she’s at peace. Kiera lies down too, and they stay like that until the sun sinks behind the pines, casting the world in cool gold and nightshade green.
When Ava’s mother picks her up that night, her eyes immediately scan her daughter—looking for unplaited hair, for marks, for evidence of her wild ways. She pauses at Ava’s shoes. When she speaks, her voice is saccharine, all her words crisp, enunciated carefully as if speaking a language she knows but wishes she didn’t have to. It’s the voice she uses for her answering machine, for meeting strangers in professional situations. The one she switches on for talking to her daughter’s friend’s white mother. “Thanks for watching her,” she says, smiling, but her eyes are unlit coals. Kiera’s mother is a fluttering, airy sensation at the doorway, something fleeting and cool against Ava’s cheek. “Oh, we love having Ava,” she says, and her cotton-candy voice seems like the real thing, so earnest it could melt.
“Why are your sneakers so dirty?” Ava’s mother demands as soon as the door is shut and they are walking to the car. “Why every time I come get you from this girl’s house, you’re always a mess? Both her parents live here and they can’t watch y’all?” And Ava says nothing because words never mean what she wants them to.
II. Games
There are other differences between them: that Ava is the prettier friend but much browner, so she is often overlooked; that Kiera bleeds first, getting her period in the midnight hours, waking up to sharp pains in her stomach and dark, clotted blood smeared on her thighs—that this makes Kiera a woman now, and Ava still merely a girl; that when Kiera tells her mother she is sad, her mother tells her to explore her feelings, and when Ava does this, her mother just looks tired and tells her, Child, go play.
So she plays. She plays at being drowned in the bathtub, holding her breath with her eyes open underwater. She plays at being hanged from a limb of the white-spotted sycamore beside her house, holding tight to the branches, her body limp and swinging, until she tires and drops. She plays the game of What If: What If I step out in front of this car, right now? What If I don’t wake up tomorrow? She doesn’t mean any of it, she doesn’t think.
Kiera likes these games, too, but she talks about death like she has nine lives. As if when it happens, she’ll be asked, Continue? while flickering numbers on a screen count down, prompting her to restart. The girls like to bounce questions between them as they label different kinds of rocks for Earth Science and play house with Kiera’s dolls.
“How would it be to drown in a pool?”
“How would it be for a man to slice you up and hide you under his mattress?”
“How would it be to be buried?”
“Alive?”
“No, once you’re dead already.”
Ava imagines this last scenario most often, poring over it with the reverence other girls would their first Prom. Her final resting place: the white-lined casket, roses in baby pink. The velvet Sunday dress her mother would slide her body into, and the socks she hates with the wide lace ruffles like a clown’s flamboyant collar. In truth, it isn’t so much death that calls to Ava, but the curiosity of how her absence would affect the world. (What If my mother doesn’t weep?) Would Ava’s mother imagine her beneath the earth, grave worms crawling across her scalp, her still-soft skin and small new breasts, over time, turning to rot?
Ava and Kiera string the Barbies up with rough twine by the neck, dangle them from the DreamHouse roof. They watch the pointed toes twirl.
III. Poolside
Neither of the girls want to be at Chelsea Zucker’s thirteenth birthday party, near the end of the school year, but Ava’s mother got the invitation from Chelsea’s mother and told her she was going.
“You need other friends,” she’d said, standing in front of her daughter with one hip cocked, seeming to suck up all the air and light in Ava’s room. Ava felt cowed around her mother’s bigness, and also bigger because of it. She wanted to kiss her mother’s warm, brown face. To slap it until her hands ached.
“I don’t need new friends,” Ava grumbled, knowing there was no fight; she’d lost already.
“Baby,” her mother said, laughing a little, cupping her chin. “You don’t know what you need.”
Ava told Kiera about having to go to the party, a pool-thing at the Embassy Suites downtown. Chelsea’s parents had paid for a two-room suite for the sleepover afterward, and they’d promised Ava’s mother they’d be just next door. Kiera had also been invited, along with a handful of girls 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. ...
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