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that, swinging our hands comfortably between us.
    Sometimes people think that Marissa and I are sisters. We’re the same height; facing each other, our foreheads, noses, mouths, and chins match up just so. I know this for a fact.
    Her hair is wild like mine, waves and curls and twists, but she’s mastered the art of taming it. She’s a little more tightly packed than me; her breasts are smaller and tilted upwards; her thighs and butt and back are straight and hard from the years of ballet she did as a kid.
    She would probably still be a dancer if it wasn’t for tearing her ACL. She’s healed from the surgery, and her knee works just fine now and even the scar isn’t too huge, but she developed the unfortunate habit of smoking her dad’s weed while she was recovering, and she just never got back to those dance classes. She still looks like a dancer, in the same way my mom still looks like a model. There’s something about being trained to stand in front of people, the way my mom and Marissa were. It colors everything. Whether they want to be or not, they have been trained to be looked at. They belong front and center.
    (You know the term Achilles’ heel ? Like, “He wanted to be a public speaker, but his stammer was his Achilles’ heel?” Maybe Marissa’s torn ACL is her Achilles’ heel. Sometimes I wonder if I’m my mother’s.)
    I used to hassle Marissa about it, urging her to go back to ballet, but finally she said, “Look, Seph, if it were really important to me, I’d dance. Okay? So shut the fuck up.”
    So I shut the fuck up. But I notice how she rises up on the balls of her feet while she’s peering out at the waves: the triangular line of her calf, her toes turned out, and the straight, smart line of her back.
    I ask, “You gonna go back to Sal’s later?”
    Marissa shrugs.
    “I don’t know why you spend so much time with him.”
    Her mouth hardens a little, and she smiles, but not in a nice way. “I guess we don’t all have art , Seph.”
    I don’t know what to say to this. She seems pissed, but I don’t know what about. Her moods sometimes swing too quickly for me to keep up with. Sometimes I want to sculpt her and all her moods—her face, sure, but touched all over with colors, textures. Patterns and shadows and swirls.
    It could be whatever went down with Sal or it could be something with her dad or maybe she really is pissed that I’ve been spending so much time in my studio. I want to ask, but I don’t think I’m ready for a big, complicated discussion. The weight of her emotions pulls like an undertow, and honestly, I don’t know if I am a strong enough swimmer right now.
    Instead of asking, I squeeze her hand. It is code. When one of us squeezes the other’s hand, it means I love you. It means I am here.
    At first her fingers rest just the same against mine. But then she squeezes back.
    I let out a breath I didn’t mean to hold.
    But she isn’t going to let me off the hook that easy. “You’ve been kind of weird, Seph,” she says. “For a while now. Is there something you want to tell me? About Felix, maybe?”
    There is nothing I wanted to tell Marissa about Felix. I shake my head.
    She tries again. “He didn’t make you … do anything, did he? Anything you didn’t want to do?”
    I remember everything.
    “No,” I say. “Nothing. Nothing I didn’t want.”

Four
    At eight o’clock my mother knocks on the door to my studio. I don’t hear her at first. My earbuds are in, and I am close to getting something right. I’ve got a desk lamp set up, and I’m working in front of it with this stuff that’s basically Play-Doh, but I made it upstairs in the kitchen, out of flour and cream of tartar and red food coloring. And I’m bending and stretching the lump of it in front of the light, fascinated by the shadow it casts on the concrete wall, its silhouetted fingertips elongated—clutching, spreading, grasping—this hunk of innocuous goo made horrible in the shadow it