“Are you telling me my blocks have been unblocked?”
She hip-bumped me. “Be serious.”
I sighed. “Okay, let’s hear it.”
“I’m not lecturing you.”
“I know,” I said. “I want to hear it.”
“Are you happy?” she blurted.
“Why so blunt, sister love?”
Her face pinched, and before she could say anything else, I answered.
“Yeah, I am.”
She pointed at me. “That.Right there. That’s where the difference is coming from. You haven’t been happy since Janis left.”
“You mean mom.”
“I mean our incubator.”
“Incubator. Sperm donor. How romantic is must have been when they made us.”
She stopped walking and so did I. Nazzareno and Brio stopped walking too, but Minnie kept pulling them. She had both their hands in hers. They let her pull them to a stand with purses, but they were not moving any further.
Luci sighed. “I don’t care about how we were made. I only care about what happens now. And it makes me so happy to see you finally happy. You would have never even admitted you were happy before. It was too much of a risk, even though you took exceptional ones every day and night to get here.”
“I did, didn’t I?” When Luci put it that way, I looked back on my life and realized some of the stupid shit I’d done could have easily gotten me killed.
Edna, Neil, and Andrea always made such a big deal about my birthday, probably because they didn’t expect me to have another one. I’d even gotten a bullshit ribbon at work for the most dead bodies stumbled upon at Vice City. It was like the darkness was drawn to me.
“See!There it is again. You would have never realized how much danger you were in before, or even cared. Now it seems like you do—you care about you. All these changes are happening deeper than skin, Ava. It’s like you’re healing. And that’s making you look different. More beautiful.”
“More beautiful?”
“Bitch.” She plucked me on the forehead, and I took a step back, laughing. “You’ve always been beautiful. You always will be. But now you feel better on the inside, and I’m so thankful for it. I don’t have to worry as much.”
I looked away from her for a second, meeting Nazzareno’s eyes. He was watching us with that curious stare of his, like he wanted all my secrets. “I made you worry a lot.”
“You know you did,” she said.
“I just didn’t care.”
“Didn’t seem like it.”
I wrapped my arms around my sister and pulled her close. She held me back.
“I’m sorry, Luci.”
“For making me worry?”
“For everything,” I whispered.
We pulled back some and looked each other in the eye.
“You did all you could for me after mom left,” I said. “I know it wasn’t easy.”
