Freshwater(20)

“I hate lying to my mother,” he said.

Ada made a face and put her hand on his arm. “I know,” she replied, and she meant it. She hated dishonesty and she knew what loving a mother felt like. Me, I rolled my eyes at the both of them.

“He can hate what he wants,” I told her. “You know he loves fucking us. It’s not as if he’s going to stop. They never stop.”

“You mean he loves fucking you,” she whispered back, and I made a rough sound. She was right. I was staying behind her face like a good little spirit, sha, like a small beast on a leash. When the boy drove us to church, Ada stood up in the car to stick her head out of the sunroof and feel the wind rocketing against her face.

“Come inside the car,” he scolded.

She looked down at his face and sat back in her seat. “What’s the problem?”

He stared straight ahead, through the windshield, his face set. “My girlfriend won’t do things like that.”

Ada raised her eyebrows and I snorted inside her head, but neither of us said anything. After the service, Ada headed toward the other car to return to the house with the rest of the family—the boy had to run some errands.

“You people, take care of my wife,” he called out to his mother and his sister and his older brother. His voice carried over the green lawn and he was smiling like the sun, and everyone laughed fondly as Ada blushed.

After I had Ada cut off her hair, the boy was disapproving, but he still prayed with Ada when he dropped her off at the airport because he had somehow become her boyfriend. When he prayed, Ada held his hands, closed her eyes, and pretended as if she could feel Yshwa anywhere close to her. She couldn’t, of course, not anymore, but I was helping her get better at lying.

After her visit with Saachi, Ada flew back to Virginia for her final year at the university. On her first day back, she walked through the cafeteria and set her tray down on a table. One of her friends on the track team slid in next to her, flipping a ponytail over her shoulder.

“Hey, Ada. How was your summer?”

Ada shrugged. “It was cool. Went to Georgia, visited my mother, had sex. You know, the usual.”

Her friend shrieked. Everyone knew Ada had never been touched like that before. “Girl, what?! You got laid?”

Ada smiled and they both dissolved into laughter.

Her friend was nodding and proud. “Yo, when I saw you walking across the room, I could tell, you know? I said, ‘Yeah, she’s walking different.’”

I wondered if that was true. Was I showing that much on the outside? Had I entered Ada’s walk, the way she moved her head, her smile? She kept stretching her mouth and laughing with them, but I knew she was just relieved that they were treating her as if she was normal, now that she wasn’t the uptight virgin anymore. But inside, I could smell it: she still felt ashamed, dirty with sin. She hadn’t gone back to her christ, Yshwa. Instead she went to see that other boy she’d been talking to over the summer, that other brother of a friend, the one who was there when she left Soren. Ada thought she might love this new boy. If she could love Soren, then why not this one? But while I was kissing him on the blue mattress of Ada’s dorm room, I drifted her hand down between his legs and recoiled at the thinness of his penis.

“I can’t work with that,” I told Ada, and I ended the crush.

She didn’t argue with me. I had her call Itohan’s younger brother, and she broke up with him.

“I was feeling single already,” he said. He sounded petulant.

“Good,” I told Ada. “It’s better this way.”

“If you say so,” she said, and she let him go.

The next summer, we went back to Georgia, and I set my sights on Itohan’s older brother. Ada never forgave me for what I did to him.


She wasn’t doing a lot of forgiving, to be fair. Not of me, not of herself. Before Soren, Ada had been obsessed with her christ, that Yshwa. She loved him, or to be more accurate, she adored and worshipped him, which is exactly how he likes it. She lived for him. I don’t even know why—he was never there for her, not like me, not even close. He couldn’t even be bothered to materialize when she was just a little girl, when she really, really needed him. How can you leave a child alone like that? But whatever—it’s stupid to think that gods actually care about you. Ada stopped talking to him after I was born, all because of that promise she’d made to be abstinent, which is another thing I don’t understand. Her body meant more to me than it ever did to her. Promising abstinence was like promising not to play with a weapon that she didn’t even like in the first place. After Soren was done with her, Ada walked away from Yshwa and straight into my arms, where she belonged. Yshwa’s teachings included a lot about repentance and forgiveness and being white as the snow of a bleached lamb, the general gist being that you could fuck up and start over, and Ada believed in it until I was born and then she didn’t.

She tried to, since it seemed like a betrayal to lose faith so deeply, to be that lost, but she just couldn’t believe that she would ever be clean again. Now that I was there, with my sleek skin and wet hair, she was probably right. I couldn’t be excised. Life moves in only one direction and things couldn’t go back to what they used to be: bright and untouched, with Ada being ignorant of what our shared body now meant and what it could be used for. All that mattered was this, and I told her—I had to use the body first, before they did.