Freshwater(13)

We kept her neutral. It was strange; it had been strange even when we were home (back across the ocean, where we belonged). There was one day when Lisa had come out from her boyfriend’s room and told the Ada about the splash of white that colored his trousers from the inside, and our body just arranged her face the way it was supposed to look, as if she understood the secrets of hot teenage fumblings or the appeal of shiny condoms. She knew, logically, but we kept her neutral. It was not meant for her, the heat rising, the tricks of the body, the compulsions of flesh. She turned eighteen and nothing happened. We kept her. They watched her move in her innocence, a golden chained thing, dancing on dim dance floors and bright stages, winding circles with her waist as if she’d done so on a body before. She tried to hide it, flirting and kissing as if she had fire inside rather than us. All those boys, all that empty following it all. We kept her, we held her, she was ours.

There was a Serbian boy with clear brown eyes who was different, who mattered to the Ada very much. His name was Luka and he was on the tennis team. He lived in the house down the hill and had dark hair, even on the gap of his chest that showed through his shirts and on his forearms and calves. Luka knew the Ada enough to see when the blood rose to a blush through her brown skin and he had been a safe place, a port, a boy who called the Ada magic and wanted more than the friendship she offered. He stopped when she chose someone else, later, afterward, when she had no safe places outside her anymore.

The Ada used to go to Luka’s house down the hill, where their friends drank to prepare for the night out, rolling joints and snorting quick lines of coke. The house was full of volleyball players, tall Europeans who were sweet, affectionate, open.

“Come to Iceland,” Axel said, his blond hair falling over his beautiful cheekbones, bending down to forgive his height. “Come and see the northern lights, they’re wonderful.”

A year later, he would climb up a fire escape, rumpled and handsome in a linen suit, to kiss her, and she would be sad because he was so carelessly lovely but everything was too late. But then, back then, he was bright and drunk and high, and he and his best friend, the Slovakian, Denis, played Pac-Man with mad concentration. Together with Luka, they were that house that drew everyone in, the center. She liked them, she liked being around them, because when she came over, they already knew she didn’t drink or smoke, and so they played music she liked instead, with horns blasting, and we would dance inside her like those days when we used to dance with Saachi before she birthed our cage. We danced through her body, our body, the one that had been built so carefully for us, now winding through the rooms, her hands swirling in the air, the music repeating as the boys played it for as long as she wanted, the only fix they could offer, the only one she’d take.

We were distinct in her head by then: we had been Smoke and Shadow since the naming, since the second birth, little nagging parts that the Ada tried to ignore, that she sometimes argued with but didn’t tell anyone about. She just went down the hill, danced until her long hair smelled of smoke or until everyone left for Gilligan’s, where she’d been going before she was legal because the club took college IDs as if they were real, as if everyone started college at eighteen. It was at the house down the hill that she met the boy who would sing the Emilia song a few months afterward. His name was Soren. He was one of the volleyball players, Danish according to his passport, Eritrean according to his blood, a skinny boy with pools for eyes and dark spilling smooth on his skin. We noticed him. He noticed the Ada because she didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, only danced, and there was something in her, something he wanted to put his fingers on. He walked beside her as they all left the house in a rowdy crowd.

“Do you smoke?” he asked, to be sure.

She thought he meant cigarettes. So did we. “No,” she answered.

He’d meant weed, but he liked her answer. They danced together in the smoke of Gilligan’s that night, slowly. The club was named after a TV show that she’d never seen, very plastic and Hawaiian, with fake parrots and violently colorful drinks. The first time the Ada went there, she’d stared in shock at the way people ground against each other, ass to crotch, lost in smoke; she’d stared at the dangerous fall of jeans lower than hips, at the bad behavior of it all. They always played “Sandstorm” and, later, at the end of the night, “New York, New York” as a kind of dramatic finale. By her last semester, the Ada would be up on that stage, arms around a line of strange white girls, kicking her legs up to Frank Sinatra’s hymn to Manhattan and dreaming of the day she’d live there.

But that night, beer was slippery under their feet as Soren touched his lips to the angles of her hand and the curve of her neck. He had the fullest eyes she had ever seen, so she let him come back to her dorm room with her. The Ada lived alone then, as a resident assistant, so she could smash mirrors and make carpets of fine glass in peace and quiet. She could feed us with cuts without having to explain or having people think something was wrong with her. That night, she brought him into her room and they kissed and fell asleep. Soren returned every day after that.

He cried a lot, that boy, with those doe-dark eyes of his. The Ada pretended not to hear, but we listened intently as he huddled against the white brick wall and sobbed into the night, dreams driving him away from sleep. In the day, he couldn’t stand to be apart from her for too long. He held her constantly (we liked that). One day, when they were getting breakfast in the cafeteria, the Ada filled her plate with six hard-boiled eggs and brought them to the table.