Page 26 of XOXO, Yours

Then she comes again, clenching around me, and I follow her right over the edge with her name torn out of my chest.

She collapses forward onto me. I wrap both arms around her and hold on while we both remember how to breathe.

For about thirty seconds, she lets me.

Then she rolls off onto her back.

I get rid of the condom in the little trash can by the nightstand and lie back down. Stare at her ceiling. There’s a water stain in the corner shaped a little like Oklahoma.

She doesn’t cuddle. I’m not surprised. It fits with everything else about her.

So I just reach over and hook my pinky finger through hers.

She goes still. I wait for her to pull away.

She doesn’t.

We lie there like that for a while. Her ceiling fan ticks on every third rotation.

There’s one photograph in the whole room. It’s on her nightstand, in a cheap frame from the drugstore, and it’s three girls sitting on a set of concrete porch steps. The tall one has braces and a scowl and a hand on each of the other girls’ shoulders like she’s daring somebody to try something. The littlest one has a crooked ponytail and a missing front tooth. The middle one is laughing so hard her eyes are shut.

“Is that y’all?”

She follows my gaze. “Yeah.”

“You’re the one with the braces.”

“How could you tell?”

“The glare.”

That gets a huff of a laugh out of her. “Cora was eight. Hope was nine and a half and would like you to know about the half. I was thirteen.”

“That the house where y’all met?”

“Our foster mom’s house. Yeah.” She’s quiet for a second. “It was my eleventh placement.”

I turn my head on the pillow to look at her. She’s still looking at the ceiling.

“Eleven,” I repeat.

“I went into care when I was three.” She says it the way you’d tell somebody the weather. “Before you ask, I don’t know why. There’s a file somewhere. I’ve never read it.”

“You don’t want to know?”

“Everybody thinks I should.” Her pinky tightens around mine, just barely. I don’t think she notices. “My therapist. My caseworker, back when I had one. Cora, once, when she was going through her own stuff. But whatever happened, it happened to a three-year-old I don’t remember being. I’ve got enough going on up here without dragging her into it.”

I don’t say anything. I just hold on to her pinky.

“By the time I got to that house,” she goes on, “I’d figured out the trick.”

“What trick?”

“You leave first.”

The fan ticks.

“You can always tell when a placement’s about to go bad,” she says. “The voices in the kitchen get real quiet after you go to bed. They stop buying the cereal you like. So you don’t wait around for it. You break something. You mouth off at dinner. You make it go bad faster. On your own schedule. Then when the caseworker shows up with the trash bag for your stuff, it was your idea.” She shrugs against the pillow. “Saves everybody time.”