The apartment building is a long way from campus, with some sort of clinic on one side, sketchy-looking people camped out on the sidewalk, and a boarded-up building on the other. I can totally see why Nor would rather live here than with her family at home.
I clamp down on my inner snark. Nor reached out. She invited me over. I’m not going to screw this up.
I text to let her know I’ve arrived, since something crusty is growing on the buzzer panel, which looks like it hasn’t been touched in about half a century anyway. The door clicks and I step inside.
It smells like weed and rat poison.
My breath starts coming faster. My palms are sweaty. I’m nervous—to see my sister. My best friend. I take in the slowest breath I can manage considering I feel like I’m about to be shoved into a coliseum to face some underfed, abused beast.
“Up here!” A head appears over the railing a few floors up. “I’m Tonika! Nor’s roommate. Come on up!”
Roommates. I knew they existed, but I’ve been so focused on seeing Nor again that I didn’t think about meeting her roommates.
Tonika pulls me in for a hug the moment I reach the third-floor landing. Then she pulls back and holds me at arm’s length, like our great-aunt Phyllis does when we haven’t seen her in a few years.
“You look so much like Nor!” she says. “She talks about you constantly. Come in! She’s in the shower. She left her phone out for me to buzz you in if you texted.”
We used to think it was funny, how sometimes growing up people didn’t even believe we were sisters. I was always fair, with thin, light brown hair and light brown eyes. When we visited Guatemala, Papi’s family would call me canchita and I was confused because Spanish class taught me that meant blond. I’m not blond.
Nor’s always been darker, morena, especially in the summer, with thick, glossy waves of nearly black hair and eyes to match. The nicknames weren’t good or bad, only facts, so commonplace and neutral to comment on appearance. Mom wasn’t thrilled when they called her gordita, but Papi insisted it was loving. Most of his family members call him cabezón—big head—so all things considered, gordita wasn’t bad.
Maybe because our tíos and tías and primos are all much more moreno than canche, I’ve always felt like Nor belongs with Papi’s family in a way I don’t and never will.
Tonika says we look alike, and we do, in our bone structure, the shape of our noses, our smiles. For someone passing by, though, we look worlds apart.
I follow Tonika into the apartment, which smells more like freshly baked chocolate chips cookies than the patchouli incense I was expecting. To be clear: The apartment is most certainly a shithole. But it’s the shit-hole of poor college students using milk crates as end tables. They’re not cooking meth.
Tonika knocks on the bathroom door as we pass it and hollers, “Your baby sister’s here!”
She leads me into the living room–kitchen area, where chocolate chip cookies cool on the counter. “Help yourself,” she says. “We forgive your sister for turning the oven on in this heat because she is a culinary goddess. Want something to drink? Too hot for coffee, though. Wyatt’s home-brewed kombucha?”
I perch on a wobbly barstool and take a cookie. “Water would be great.”
She laughs. “I don’t blame you. He hasn’t killed us yet, but it’s always a gamble.” She sets a glass of water in front of me. “You’re a writer, yeah?”
I’m confused for a second. Nor doesn’t even know about Marguerite.
“Nor says you’re on the school paper?”
“Oh yeah. I was.” Loud electronic music drifts through the ceiling from the apartment upstairs. There’s a water stain on the ceiling that would give Papi a heart attack. “Who else lives here?”
“Right now? It’s me and Nor and Wyatt. My girl, Lola, went to Puerto Rico for the summer, so Nor’s in her room.”
“Who’s Wyatt?” When Nor said she was moving in with some people from her gender studies class, I’d assumed they were all women. Which was stupid of me, now that I think about it. It seems like lately I’m wrong about everything.
Tonika pulls a photo off the fridge and sets it in front of me. She’s at a concert with a short, round Latinx girl on one side, and a super-tall, gangly white guy on the other. “Lola, and this here’s Wyatt. I think he’s working today.”
The bathroom door opens and Nor comes out in the same faded green sweats she’s had forever, looking almost like my sister. Her hair is all wrapped up in a sort of turban thing on her head. But I catch a glimpse of the Fremont High Eagle.
“Are you wearing my T-shirt on your head?”
She reaches up and touches the makeshift turban. “It cuts down on the frizz,” she says. As she brings her hand down, I catch a glimpse of something on her wrist.
“Is that . . . did you get a tattoo?”
“Oh. Yeah.” She holds it out, shy.
I don’t grab her wrist the way I would have, before. Instead, I step closer and lean in to look. It’s a tiny line drawing of a butterfly. I almost miss the fact that the body is a semicolon.
“She was very brave,” Tonika says. “Except for the part where she was a total baby.”
“Hey!”
Tonika laughs as her phone buzzes. She waves it at us and heads to her room.
Nor sits down with me and grabs a cookie. “What do you think? I’m playing with the recipe.”
“They’re good. Something’s different. Sort of . . . herbal? Wait, these aren’t—”
Nor laughs, finally a familiar thing in a world where Nor has a tattoo and roommates she trusted more than me to go with her. “They are not pot cookies. But good call on the herbal—they’ve got thyme.”
For a second I think she means time. Like time is an ingredient we could bake into things, fold into the batter of our lives to give us the space we need to process and heal, move fluidly back to change things or forward to where the edges won’t feel so sharp.
“They’re really good. Can I take some home for Papi?”
“Sure.” She narrows her eyes at me. “But they better make it home to Papi.”
“I swear.”
“I wanted to talk to you about Mom. Her birthday’s next month.”
“Okay.”
“She turned fifty last year.”
I take another cookie to hide my surprise. I probably should have known that. But I can’t even remember her birthday last year. I can’t remember mine. The trial prep, the postponements, the media, the continuances.
Reading my mind, Nor says to the counter, “We just completely skipped over it. It was right when . . .”
“Right.”
“So I think we should do something special this year. To make up for the one we missed.”
“Like a party?”
“Ew, no. I mean, with our family, sure. But more like a special gift from the two of us.”
Lately I’ve spent all my money on longsword classes and obscure books about medieval warfare, but I can’t tell Nor that. It feels like a secret, for some reason. Maybe I don’t want anyone to think I’m actually training to avenge my sister.
“I was thinking like a scrapbook. We could gather old pictures and try to contact people she went to school with or whatever and get them to write cards. Make it pretty. It wouldn’t have to cost much, but I think it would mean a lot to her.”
“That would be nice.”
“I know the last year has been kind of shitty for all of you and it’s—”
“You better not say it’s your fault.”
She pauses. “You’re right. It’s not. But I don’t want everything to be about me. I was terrible to you that day at the house, packing my stuff.”
“Only that day?”
She gives me a gentle shove. Much gentler than when she literally shoved me off our porch into the hydrangea.
“I’m sorry. Okay? I know it hurt your feelings that I didn’t move home. But being here is good for me. It gives me some space. Obviously being on campus was too toxic. And being at home feels too smothering. It’s not you, it’s Mom and Papi. They mean well, but they handle me like I’m made of spun glass.”
She gets a text and glances at her phone. She laughs and holds it up. Mom, just checking in.
“I have to figure this out on my own. How to move forward. I have to control something. And this . . . being on my own, here, makes me feel like I am.”
I can see that. “Tonika’s really nice.”
“She is! Wyatt is too. You’ll meet him another time. He writes a column for the Daily.”
I stare into my tea, hoping to avoid any conversation about journalism. “So is this where you’re going to live in the fall?”
She sighs. “I wish. But Lola will come back and want her room. So it’s kind of up in the air. I’m trying to take things one day at a time, you know?”