Chapter Text
The pencil broke.
A small sound, a neat betrayal, the kind of sound that should have belonged to plastic snapping or a wishbone cracking but instead belonged to a thin sliver of graphite, a clipped heartbeat, a clean, bright no that cut across a page lined with little tyrannies. The gray smear it left was not gray, not really—if she stared at it, if she let her eyes unfocus, it was metallic, it was soft gunmetal that bled into the paper fibers like rain, it was the shadow of a bruise, it was the trail of a moth. Numbers arranged themselves like ants in military traffic—7 over 8, the tilted jaw of a fraction bar, then 1 over 3, a smaller animal, an impossible division, a punishment disguised as learning. She pressed the heel of her hand into the smear and watched it ghost to the side, a storm cloud caught beneath skin. She thought, Who would divide a ghost by a ghost? Who would ask me to tell them what emptiness equals when you cut it into tinier emptinesses?
The light outside was syrup, California doing its five o’clock trick with a magician’s steadiness, pouring gold where there had been only ordinary afternoon, varnishing the neighbor’s patchy lawn so it looked like a church idea of summer. It was heavy light, a light that made you slower, that moved like honey in her eyes. Jasmine slipped in from two streets over—the perfume of other people’s fences, other people’s desire—and bicycles ticked past like metronomes. It was all so unreasonably promising, a golden hour that promised the world if she would only step out and claim it, and she was inside doing executioner math.
She re-sorted her day, a private arithmetic: if she sat upright and put on the face of obedience for fifteen minutes, she could buy herself the long sprawl of not-trying, of letting her mind drift toward the bigger dramas, the real ones, the ones that lived in her phone like a second heart.
Then the phone buzzed. A small, decisive tremor in the fabric.
SUMI.
How quickly the body betrayed its loyalties. The frustration flaked off her like dried paint; she was new underneath. She folded herself into the pillows, knees up, the old choreography of happiness. She said, “Hey,” the way she always did, bored on purpose, smiling despite it. “Did you see Mr. Henderson today? He looked like a highlighter. A walking, talking, neon-yellow highlighter."
Silence rolled forward—cooler than air, heavier than air. Not the chip-bag pause, not the mother-in-the-doorway pause. Not any of the known silences. This one pressed into her ears until she felt the shape of it.
“Sumi?”
Breath. A wet hiccup. The sound of a mouth trying to be brave and failing.
“Sumi, are you… are you crying?”
The world tilted. Sumi did not cry. Sumi cut through rooms like a bright knife. Sumi lived first. She wore the eyeliner, she knew how boys’ voices changed when they lied, she laughed with her head thrown back, she had a way of making trouble look like a festival. Fourteen, and already a fire. Camila was the water poured carefully around her.
“Cami…”
Her name, but drained. Her name as a prayer someone didn’t believe would be answered. Camila’s whole body narrowed.
“What happened? Did your mom—did she say something about the—”
“No.” The word was flat as a table. “I did something. It’s bad.”
Bad. Such a small word carrying such a heavy box.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m pregnant.”
The room flattened. The air became a wall she walked into. The word was an adult that had wandered into a child’s party and nobody knew where to look. Pregnant. It did not sit on her floral comforter; it did not belong on her poster-sleeved walls; it belonged to other people’s shouting kitchens and low-voiced living rooms on TV.
“What?” Because there was no other word that would come.
“I took a test,” Sumi said, voice already cracking into smaller voices. “Two. Drugstore ones. They both—” And then the breath fell apart and wouldn’t assemble.
“You’re lying,” Camila said, the easy safety of denial dressed in her mouth. “You’re trying to scare me.”
“I’m not lying!” Not a sentence so much as a torn piece of one, sharp at the edges, and she flinched like the cut had landed on her.
“What—who—”
“You remember that party? Couple months ago? The one I wanted you to—”
She remembered. Of course she remembered. Sumi in a small tornado of tops, holding up one then the other, that particular bounce she did when possibility brushed her shoulder. "Come on, Cami, it’ll be fine, college guys are nicer, they have cars, we can just say"— No. Camila had said no, first with a laugh and then with the spine of herself. Not because she had imagined anything like this. No because she knew her parents’ faces in disappointment, knew what it meant to be good, knew how to stay living inside the borders she could name.
“The one with the car,” Sumi said now. “He’s not answering.”
The gold on the neighbor’s lawn had an ugly sheen to it suddenly, as if gold were just a word for a sickness that looked pretty where it killed.
“So what are you going to do?” Camila asked, and it felt like a thief in her throat, a line stolen from a movie where someone older wore it well. “Are you… going to keep it?”
It. The word clattered like a dropped dish.
“I don’t know!” A sound broke open—half sob, half laugh, a laugh that was a cry wearing makeup. “How am I supposed to know? I’m fourteen. I can’t—”
It came apart there, the voice and the day.
“Cami,” the ragged whisper. “Don’t tell. Not your mom. Not anyone. Promise.”
The ribbon of the word promise wound around Camila’s throat—soft silk that tightened when she breathed. “I promise,” she said, and the promise had teeth.
The line died. The room did not. The room continued like a machine, the fan a soft circular insistence, the golden light driving its stake deeper into the afternoon. The pencil lay in two pieces. The gray smear had dried into the paper like a scar that had always been there.
Silence moved in as if it had been waiting in the hallway the whole time.
She sat very still and let the pictures come, because they would come whether she allowed them or not: Sumi at eight, she at six, the creek a wild invitation, "let’s run away and become creek girls", the mud sucking at their ankles, Camila laughing and then not laughing when the mud took Sumi up to the shin and would not let go; Sumi at ten, she at eight, her eyes daring the world, "We’re going to see the scary one, they can’t stop us", the usher frowning, Camila already crying before anyone had actually told them to leave, Sumi trying to bribe with gummy bears as if candy belonged to currency; Sumi at twelve, in front of a mirror, perfectly serious about eyeliner, teaching Camila her hand like it was a language: "Short strokes, breathe between them, open your mouth a little, it makes your eyes wider." Sumi was the gas pedal jammed to the floor; Camila was the brake that learned how to sing yes as a way to keep the car on the road.
Their mothers said it had always been written like this: Elena and Ji-young, the prototype and the echo, the original girls whose friendship drew the lines the daughters walked.
Ji-young had the laughter of a house with many rooms, a noise that made other noises brave. East L.A. in her bones like a song with a chorus everyone knows. Her mother, Elena, had the quiet of a library aisle where a single book can change a life, the sharp gaze that measured and cut and mended. They met at UCLA in a freshman seminar on novels that had a lot of walking and not much happening; Elena said it was the class that taught her to love women who talk about women; Ji-young said it taught her to talk without apologizing for an accent learned from movies with foggy windows and big hair.
Elena: I saw her and thought, there’s the girl who will get me into good trouble.
Ji-young: I saw her and thought, there is the person who will laugh me out of the smallness I was taught to wear.
The story had been told so many times it had turned to myth: they swam in the fountain because they were told not to, Ji-young with her careful English asking the guard if rules were meant for everything and the guard, bored and young, saying sometimes rules look the other way, and Elena pulling her in, and the water dark as greed, cold as angels, and they came up sputtering, sainted by a small rebellion.
Ji-young married Mr. Park when the visa ran like a candle—practical and fast, a courthouse where the clerk said her name like it had too many syllables, a white dress that was not white at all but the soft shade of an old page. "A good man," she said, as if that were a sentence one could live in. Elena met Camila’s father later, in a grocery store aisle where he was arguing with a cantaloupe. "Pick the heavy one," she told him, and he did, and sometimes life wanted to be that simple.
Sumi came first, a baby who learned the door before she learned the lullaby, a storm with cheeks. Ji-young called it “existential chaos,” which made everyone laugh because who gives a baby an existence so large she can ruin it? When Sumi was a year and already inventing reasons to climb into danger and then out of it, Elena learned she was pregnant and put a palm on her belly as if she could press calm into it from above.
SumiandCamila. A single name they wore like a shared sweater. When Camila was three she could pronounce it; when she was five she slept only if Sumi had not upset the balance by sleeping elsewhere; when she was seven her abuela said the brain was a room with too much furniture and Elena was secretly proud and quietly worried and agreed to let her skip a grade. For a little while the distance between them was only a stair you could climb in the dark. They were nearly equal then, nearly the same size in the photograph, nearly two girls who could live in the same moment. But Sumi had a way of inventing firstness. First to the razor of adolescence, first to carry a secret like it was medicine and poison.
Camila breathed. She put the phone down as if it could explode. The room didn’t change to honor what had changed in her.
“Camila! Dinner!”
Her mother’s voice was the exact sound that meant safe. It came up the stairwell wearing the apron of every ordinary evening. It made her skin crawl now with its innocence.
“Coming!”
She looked in the mirror and saw a girl who had not been told the thing she had been told. Brown hair, messy ponytail, the graphite smear on her cheek like a birthmark of bad decisions she had not even made. She washed her face until the water slapped sense into her skin. Act normal, the chant, act normal and do not tell and do not tell and do not—
Downstairs the house breathed. Carne asada hissed at the skillet and gave up its smoke like good gossip. Cilantro and lime flirted with the air. Her father hummed a song older than any of them and flipped tortillas by hand like a man who had learned from a father who learned from a father who learned from a grandmother who never wrote it down. Her mother, at the table, made a small volcano of salsa in a bowl and smiled a smile she had worn since before Camila was born.
“Finally,” Elena said. “How’s the homework?”
“Stupid,” Camila said, because any other word might open the door she was holding shut with her body.
“Just ‘stupid’?” her mother teased, eyes bright. “Not ‘impossible’ or ‘Ms. Ruiz is a tyrant’?”
“Stupid,” she repeated, and the word was a flat plate on which nothing could be served.
Her father brought tortillas to the table, steam twining upward like script. “I have the cure,” he said. “Tacos. The smartest food. Eat two and your math grade rises by a letter, scientifically proven in this kitchen.”
“How’s Sumi?” Elena asked then, and the fork slid from Camila’s fingers as if it had been waiting to escape. The ring it made against the plate sounded like a small bell at a wrong funeral.
“Fine,” Camila said. She found the fork again, stared at the tines like they were a tool she had never seen. “Busy. Studying.”
“A menace,” Elena sighed, smiling into a memory. “Your Tía Ji-young was a menace too.”
“Oh no,” her father said, grinning. “The UCLA Chronicles.”
“Listen.” Elena’s eyes softened, time rippling in them. “We were rebels. She looked so innocent the guards thought she was lost even when she was leading us somewhere we should not go. We swam in the fountain because why not be saints of small crimes? She would have done anything for me. I would have done anything for her. That’s how it is, mija. You protect your sister. No matter what.”
Sister. Protect. The words fit too perfectly over the word promise, like a shirt for the same body. Camila’s stomach pulled into itself, a small animal looking for a hole.
“Mila?” her father asked. He was closer somehow, a hand hovering near her shoulder without touching it. “You okay? You look pale.”
“I’m fine,” she said, and smiled, and heard the tiny ice in it. “Just tired. The math.”
She ate. She moved food to her mouth and then moved it again. She couldn’t taste. The radio whispered an old song that might have been a memory. The kitchen light, a friendly yellow, made halos on the counter. The table had a scratch in it from a year ago when Sumi had been telling a story with her hands and knocked a glass and laughed and said "I owe you a table!" and Elena had said "You owe me a life of laughing like that." and Ji-young had smiled without showing teeth, pride held like a coin in a closed fist.
The rooms in Sumi’s house were different. They wore their order like a braid pulled tight. The smell there was soy and sesame and a clean citrus that Camila couldn’t name. Mr. Park moved like a rule you could not break; he had a voice like the line you draw and then spend the rest of your life not crossing. Ji-young’s voice could fold itself; it could be soft tissue or sharp paper. She had a way of saying Sumi-ah that folded tenderness over warning, a small blanket over the edge of a cliff. Camila loved the quiet there because it meant any noise she made was chosen carefully. She loved the loud at her own house because it meant she could be buried alive in it and nobody would notice she wasn’t breathing right away.
Sumi had learned to be louder than her house. Camila had learned to be quieter than her own. Between them they made something like a weather system.
“Tell Sumi to tell Ji-young I said hi,” Elena said now, pushing the salsa closer. “We haven’t had coffee in too long. She’ll say she’s too busy to sit, then talk for two hours once she does.”
“She’s good at pretending she doesn’t have time for what she wants,” Camila’s father said. “And then making time appear.”
“She’s good at making permission,” Elena said, smiling into a private file of memories. “We all need a Ji-young. We all need someone who looks at a rule and asks if it was written by someone happy.”
Camila heard the past talking to the present in a language she almost understood. She thought of Sumi’s please and her come on and the way it felt to say no to her—the rubber band quality of it, how it stretched and sang and then snapped back harder than you expected. She thought of the creek again, Sumi’s sneaker abandoned in the mud like a small grave, Camila leaning so far over to haul her up that for a second there was no up, only the wet pull and a surprising blue dragonfly darting near her face like a tiny helicopter with a bad plan.
After dinner she stood at the sink and ran water over her plate and watched the grease make its little rainbows. Her mother came behind her, bumped her hip with a musical intention.
“You’re quiet,” Elena said. “My quiet child.”
“I’m thinking,” Camila said.
“Dangerous,” her mother teased.
“Not as dangerous as your fountain,” Camila said, and Elena laughed and kissed the back of her head, that quick blessing.
Upstairs the room had kept its shape. Of course it had. Rooms were stubborn. She closed the door and leaned her forehead against its painted wood and felt, ridiculous and real, the way the world presses when it wants you smaller. The phone lay on the bed where she had left it, dark. She touched it with one finger the way you test cake for doneness. She did not turn it on.
The fractions still waited. The numbers were bones now, clean and collected. She clicked a new pencil out of its plastic—all pretend, the lead a tiny trick—and tried to be the person she had been thirty minutes ago. The line steadied under her hand and for a second she felt the relief of an ordinary problem, answerable, answer-shaped.
But her mind opened its galleries whether she bought tickets or not.
There: Elena and Ji-young at the fountain, wet hair like dark ropes, teeth flashing, two girls baptized by minor rebellion, a photograph she had seen so often it had become an icon in their family.
There: Sumi at nine, bringing home a stray cat she had named Thunder because he was afraid of storms; Ji-young saying no and Sumi making a bed for him on the patio anyway, and the cat staying because he recognized his own trouble.
There: the first time Sumi said "I hate you!" to her mother at the top of the stairs and Mr. Park looked like a man who had been shot in a place nobody could see and Ji-young said, very softly, "You may hate me, but you may not speak to me like that." and Sumi cried all the way down to the end of the block and back and then stood in the doorway and said "I didn’t mean it." and Ji-young said "You did, but it changes nothing about love."
Camila felt the promise inside her like a hot stone. She did not know how to hold it without burning. Don’t tell. The words were a wall and a bridge at once. If she told, she broke something. If she didn’t, she carried something too big. She was the peacekeeper; that was her job in the weather system. She kept; she kept; she kept.
She put the worksheet in a careful pile. She put the broken pencil in the trash and immediately felt guilty and took it out again, as if she had thrown away the evidence of a smaller, easier grief.
The sun had stepped down a rung on its invisible ladder. The gold went thin, then red as a scraped knee. The smell of jasmine tried to be gentler about everything.
Her phone shivered once on the blanket. She had not realized she was watching it until it did. For a second the world sharpened, cruelly clear.
Sumi: You there?
Camila held the phone the way she had once held a baby bird that had fallen from an unsuccessful nest—too tightly and not tightly enough. She typed and erased and typed and erased and then sent:
Camila: I’m here.
Dots blossomed and disappeared, a language of almosts. Then:
Sumi: I’m scared.
There was a long breath where Camila thought about lying—don’t be—and then she typed what she could wear without choking.
Camila: I know. I’m here.
She looked up then and caught her own reflection in the dark window, the room behind her superimposed on the night outside—a girl floating where the neighbor’s lawn had been golden an hour ago, a girl whose face carried a fresh shadow. She imagined walking to Sumi’s house; she imagined knocking; she imagined Ji-young answering with her tidy mouth and tidy eyes and Camila saying "I brought notes for the exam." and slipping upstairs and sitting on the carpet and breathing together until it was possible to speak. She imagined being the person who called a doctor or a clinic or a number she didn’t know existed. She imagined not doing any of that because the promise was a leash and she was a good dog and Sumi had said don’t tell.
She heard Elena in the hallway, talking to her father in the soft married voice that meant nothing would be translated for children. She heard Thunder in her mind and wondered if he was still alive. She heard water where there was no water. She put the phone down and lay back on the bed and the ceiling swam a little as ceilings do when you are a certain kind of tired.
She closed her eyes, and the world did not go dark. It went gold again, then gray, then the lavender of a bruise.
In the almost-sleep that was not sleep, she dreamed not of babies or blood or clinics but of the fountain, of two girls in a night that felt like a theater, sneaking into the cold and surfacing, gasping, laughing; she dreamed of Ji-young’s careful hand smoothing Elena’s hair and saying beautiful, and she dreamed of her own hand on Sumi’s, the way their palms had learned to match as if made by the same mold. She dreamed a sentence she could not finish: I will— and then woke to the unfinishedness.
The window had gone dark properly. The house ticked as houses tick. Somewhere a distant car announced itself and then forgot to exist. She sat up and opened her notebook to a blank page, not the worksheet, a clean new page, and wrote her name in the top corner and then wrote it again, Camila, because it looked strange the first time. Then she wrote:
Keep her safe.
She put a period after it and then a second period, as if doubling the punctuation could double the promise.
Her phone lit again—another message that did not solve anything, a fragment of Sumi she folded gently and put away in the drawer of her chest. She texted back what she could, which was almost nothing, which was I’m not going anywhere.
The night took its time. She let it.
Outside, someone laughed; outside, the jasmine refused to be tragic; outside, the world did not know the drama inside her ribcage and refused to be enlisted.
Inside, she stayed very still and practiced holding what had been handed to her without dropping it, the old choreography, the one she had learned beside Sumi from the beginning: Sumi runs; Camila steadies. Sumi sets the room on fire; Camila carries the water. Sumi learns first how to fall; Camila learns first how to keep.
When sleep finally came, it came like a parent who pretends to be strict and is in fact merciful. It put a cool hand on her forehead and said enough for now.
Morning would ask its questions in another language. For tonight, silence sat beside her like a person, not heavy anymore, not cruel. Just there, breathing with her, keeping count.