The curtains rippled in the sigh of the wind blowing in and out of the
window. In the small bedroom at the end of the hall, they lay side by
side, with a bare separation of skin, touching by the heat of their
bodies on this first sleepover of summer. Two girls reconnecting, with
gossip, laughter, light brushes of fingers through hair, regaining
familiarity again after nine months of separation, during which they’d
outgrown their baby names, grown into their first bras, gotten their
first periods, and consented to the bondage of braces.

Two girls, once Marl and Christy, now Mariel and Christina, breathed
into an awkward silence. Something between them had changed. They could
not name it, only feel it fluttering between them.

“Lonesome,” Christina finally spoke into the silence.

“I’m right here,” Mariel reached out and touched her carefully.

“Not me,” Christina turned her head and was riveted by Mariel’s eyes.
Had they always been so blue, even in the darkness illumined only by
the hall light fingering its way beneath the door. “The wind. It sounds
lonesome.”

They turned their heads away, staring at the ceiling, small breasts rising and falling beneath the sheet.

“Yes, it does.” Mariel agreed. “Were you?”

“Was I what?”

“Lonesome,” Mariel said.

“When you weren’t here?”

“Yes.”

A sigh in the dark. “Oh yes!”

“Good. Because I missed you,” Mariel sighed in return. “I almost ran away from school this year.”

“That bad?” Christina rolled over on her side, concern etched on her face.

An unreadable emotion, a glint of tears, brightened Mariel’s eyes. How
could she explain what she didn’t understand herself? The tears that
didn’t stop once they broke hugs at the airport and she was on the
plane and slid down hot cheeks all the way to her destination. The
tears that fell again once she settled into her single room in the
girl’s dormitory at Our Lady of Peace. An aching loneliness that felt
like a deep well, something she’d never experienced in previous years,
when summer faded and it was time to separate, her to boarding school,
Christina back to public school in LaGrange, a small town built on the
red Carolina clay where strangers were still viewed with suspicion.

The days dragged and the nights seemed endless. The boys who seemed so
cute last year were a major nuisance this year, and it seemed like she
was forever fending them off, instead of tilting her head and smiling
coyly as they vied for her attention. She filled her notebooks with
Christina’s name in every kind of lettering she could mimic or invent.