“Are you okay?” she signed.

She didn’t use sign language often. Luna didn’t want to talk. Not in sign, and not at all. She could talk. Technically, I mean. Not that I’d ever heard her say anything. But that’s what our parents said—that it wasn’t about her voice. It was about the world.

I got it. I hated the world, too.

We just hated it differently.

I shrugged. “Sure.”

“Friends don’t let friends get upset over small stuff,” she signed.

Whoa. An entire sentence. That was new.

I didn’t understand the point of speaking sign language if she was planning not to speak at all, but I didn’t want to make her feel bad and stuff.

“I don’t care about the bike.” I put the page down and scooted toward our branch, leaving. She followed, sitting beside me. I didn’t even like riding my bike. It was cruel on my nuts and boring to the rest of my body. I only rode it so I could hang out with Luna. Same reason I colored. I loathed coloring.

She cocked her head to the side. A question.

“Mom’s in the hospital again.” I picked out a pinecone and threw it at the sinking sun, over the edge of the mountain our tree was rooted upon. I wondered if the pinecone made it to the ocean, if it was wet and cold now. If it hated me.

Luna put her hand over mine, staring down at our palms. Our hands were the same size, hers brown, mine white as fresh-fallen snow.

“I’m fine.” I sniffed, choosing another pinecone. “It’s fine.”

“I hate that word. Fine,” Luna signed. “It’s not good. It’s not bad. It’s nothing.”

She dropped her head down and took my hand, gave it a squeeze. Her touch was warm and sticky. Kind of gross. A few weeks ago, Vaughn told me he wanted to kiss Cara Hunting. I couldn’t even imagine touching a girl like that.

Luna put my hand on her heart.

I rolled my eyes, embarrassed. “I know. You’re here for me.”

She shook her head and squeezed my hand harder. The intensity of her gaze freaked me out. “Always. Whenever. Forever,” she signed.

I breathed in her words. I wanted to smash my stupid bike on Vaughn’s stupid face, then run away. Then die. I wanted to die in desolate sands, evaporate into dust, let the wind carry me nowhere and everywhere.

I wanted to die instead of Mom. I was pretty useless. But so many people were dependent on Ma.

Dad.

Lev.

Me.

Me.

Luna pointed at the sun in front of us.

“Sunset?” I sighed.

She frowned.

“Beach?”

She shook her head, rolling her eyes.

“The sun will rise again tomorrow,” she signed.

She leaned forward. For a moment, I thought she was going to jump. She took a safety pin from her checkered Vans and pierced the tip of her index finger. Wordlessly, she took my hand and pricked my finger, too. She joined them together, and I stared as the blood meshed.

Her lips broke into a smile. Her teeth were uneven. A little pointy. A lot imperfect.

With our blood, she wrote the words Ride or Die on the back of my hand, ignoring the state of my knuckles.

I thought about the bike she’d retrieved for me and smirked.

She drew me into a hug. I sank into her arms.

I didn’t want to kiss her.

I wanted to zip open my skin and tuck her into me.

Hide her from the world and keep her mine.

 

 

Knight, 12; Luna, 13

 

 

I was named after the moon.

Dad said I’d been a plump, perfect thing. A light born into darkness. A child my mother didn’t want and he hadn’t known what to do with. He’d said that despite—or maybe because of—that, I was the most beautiful and enticing creature he’d ever laid eyes on.

“My heart broke, not because I was sad, but because it swelled so much at the sight of you, I needed more space in it,” he once told me.

He said a lot of things to make me feel loved. He had good reasons, of course.

My mother left us before I turned two.

Over the years, she’d come knocking on the doors of my mind whenever I least expected her—barging through the gates with an army of memories and hidden photos I was never supposed to find. Her laugh—that laugh I could never unhear, no matter how hard I tried—rolled down my skin like tongues of fire.

What made everything worse was the fact that I knew she was alive. She was living somewhere under the same sky, breathing the same air. Perhaps in Brazil, her home country. It really didn’t matter, since wherever she was, she wasn’t with me. And the one time she’d come back for me, she’d really wanted money.

I was five when it happened—around the time Dad had met Edie, my stepmom. Val, my mom, had asked for joint custody and enough child support to fund a small country. When she’d realized I wasn’t going to make her rich, she’d bailed again.

At that point, I had made it a habit to tiptoe to the kitchen at night, where Dad and Edie had all their big talks. They never noticed me. I’d perfected the art of being invisible from the moment Val stopped seeing me.

“I don’t want her anywhere near my kid,” Dad had gritted out.

“Neither do I,” Edie had replied.

My heart had melted into warm goo.

“But if she comes back, we need to consider it.”

“What if she hurts her?”

“What if she mends her?”

Experience had taught me that time was good at two things: healing and killing. I waited for the healing part to come every single day. I sank my knees to the lacy pillows below my windowsill and cracked it open, praying the wind would swish away the memories of her.

I couldn’t hate Valenciana Vasquez, the woman who’d packed up her things in front of my crib while I’d cried, pleaded, screamed for her not to go, and left anyway.

I remembered the scene chillingly well. They say your earliest recollection can’t be before the age of two, but I have a photographic memory, a 155 IQ, and a brain that’s been put through enough tests to know that, for better or worse, I remember everything.

Everything bad.

Everything good.

And the in-between.

So the memory was still crisp in my head. The determination zinging in her tawny, slanted eyes. The cold sweat gathering under my pudgy arms. I’d racked my brain looking for the words, and when I finally found them, I screamed as loud as I possibly could.

“Mommy! Please! No!”

She’d paused at the door, her knuckles white from holding the doorframe tightly, not taking any chances in case something inspired her to turn around and hold me. I remembered how I didn’t dare blink, too scared she’d disappear if I closed my eyes.

Then, for a split second, her motherly instincts won, and she did swivel to face me.

Her face had twisted, her mouth parting, her tongue sweeping over her scarlet lipstick. She’d been about to say something, but in the end, she just shook her head and left. The radio had played a melancholic tune. Val had often listened to the radio to drown out the sound of my crying. My parents hadn’t lived together, but they shared custody. After Val had failed to answer Dad’s many phone calls, he’d found me some hours later in my cot, my diaper so soiled it outweighed my tiny body.