Is painted a happy-face yellow. The polished wood floors are lined with a thin coat of dust and there is one big window looking out eastward onto the front yard. My bed is already set up but everything else is in boxes. My new room sits at the very end of a long hallway. My new room is twice as big as the room Eve and I shared in Baltimore. It even has a double closet lined with mirrors. I sit on my bed and look at my reflection. I feel so small. I hear Eve unpacking her things. Playing music softly from her phone. Her room is right across from mine and the exact same size except it faces the backyard.
“Eve!” I yell.
“What?” She says peeking out from her door.
“Want to have a sleepover in my room tonight?”
“Not really.”
“Please?”
“Keda. We just got here ok? We need to get used to being in our own rooms. I’m too old for sleepovers.”
“Fine.” But my face is hot. I don’t get what’s changed. In Baltimore we used to wait until Mama tucked us in and then I would climb into Eve’s bed and we’d whisper about our days. And when it would thunderstorm Eve would let me bury my face in her hair.
“Don’t be scared.” She’d say. “It’s just the sky putting on a show for us!” And she’d let me stay until the storm passed.
But then Eve started 9th grade. She got a cell phone and instead of gossiping with me she stays up under her covers chatting with her friends or watching musical theater videos. She never looks up from that stupid thing!
Who needs her anyway? I get up from my bed and close my door. I stand in the middle of MY NEW ROOM. I hear Papa begin to practice in the sunroom. The low notes of his cello vibrating through the walls of the house like the dull throb of a stubbed toe. I open my window and smell bonfire smoke from a nearby property. And then I see it. The mountains are covered in the messy light of the setting sun. And they really are a deep watermelon pink.