When We Collided(15)

“Jonah and me are obsessed, too!” Leah says. “We eat cherries every day over the summer, but we know how to spit out the pits, so it’s okay.”

Silas shoots me a look, impressed that someone coaxed Leah that far out of her shell.

After dinner, Vivi announces that she’ll hang around to color more with Leah. I bus the table with help from my brothers, and Naomi disappears upstairs, still annoyed with me. Bekah sits on the couch pretending to read while still watching Vivi like she’s a unicorn in the wild. My hands dunk dishes into warm sink water, but I keep stealing glances into the living room. Vivi is lying on her stomach, coloring alongside Leah on the floor. Their knees are bent, feet swaying up in the air. My eyes follow Vivi’s body from her red toenails, up her legs, tiny shorts. When she laughs at something Leah said, it’s loud and happy and changes the whole shape of her face. The knife in my hands clatters into the metal sink.

“Jonah!” Leah yells. “Come look!”

I glance away so Vivi won’t realize I was already looking. God. I once saw a video online of a dog crashing into a screen door. Over and over. He couldn’t figure it out. This is me and trying to be cool in front of Vivi.

“Come look at my picture!” Leah demands.

Fortunately, I have a master’s degree in Leah’s Art Criticism. I say everything looks beautiful and ask the artist lots of questions about her color choices. She loves her princess coloring books so much that I’m surprised she’s letting Vivi use one.

“Wow! Your mermaid looks just like in the movie,” I tell Leah. Then I steal a glance at Vivi’s coloring page. Her princess has purple hair, thick-rimmed glasses, and a lip ring.

Leah examines Vivi’s drawing, too. “Belle doesn’t have purple hair. Or glasses.”

“This isn’t Belle,” Vivi says. “This is her twin sister, Claudette. She goes to a university where she’s studying marine biology. She has to wear her glasses because she’s farsighted and because she reads a lot of textbooks.”

“But why is her hair purple?”

“Because she goes scuba diving sometimes, so she’s seen how many colors there are underwater.”

“Like fish?”

“Like rainbow fish and coral and underwater plants and all kinds of things. She can’t just go down into that kingdom with mousy-brown hair, you know? She’d be out of place.”

Leah nods as if this is totally sensible. “Cool. What’s it called? Marinabology?”

“Muh-reen bi-ol-o-jee,” Vivi says. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“A teacher.” This is Leah’s stock answer to something a lot of adults ask kids. Also, this might be the only profession she knows other than chef. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

Vivi presses her for more. “Okay, clear your mind. Like, totally blank—are you picturing nothing in your head? Nothing at all. Infinite black space.”

Leah pinches her eyes shut. “Uh-huh.”

“You can be anything, anything in the whole world. Imagine the entire blue-and-green planet with swirly white clouds—the way it looks from space. Out of everything on this enormous Earth, what do you most want to be?”

Leah considers this. “A peacock.”

I almost choke on my laugh. She’s the funniest, most creative kid in the world. “You’d be a peacock?”

She nods, eyebrows pulled down. I know that look. It says, You better not be teasing me. And I’m not. “They’re blue and their feathers are the prettiest.”

Vivi stares at her, totally serious, with her lips pursed in curiosity. “What makes you think you can’t be one?” She says this like she truly doesn’t understand why peacock isn’t a profession.

“I guess . . .” Leah’s little face creases between her eyebrows and beside her mouth. “I guess I don’t know how.”

“Oh.” Vivi shrugs. “I do.”

“You do?”

I try to imagine Vivi turning my sister into a peacock, but the image won’t come. Maybe if I turn my head away, Vivi would shoot sparks at my sister with a wand, turning her into a peacock. It wouldn’t surprise me that much at this point.

“Of course I do. We’ll work on it soon, okay?”

“Okay!” Leah’s excitement leans into a yawn.

“Bedtime, sleepyhead,” I announce. “You too, Bekah.”

“I was going upstairs anyway,” Bekah says, flipping her hair as she gets off the couch. Leah, however, gives me a murderous look, like I’m embarrassing her.

“Jonah,” she howls. “Noooo.”

Vivi slides in easily, climbing to her feet. “Leah, if you don’t go to bed, how will we hang out tomorrow?”

Leah turns. “We’ll hang out tomorrow?”

“Sure. If you want.”

Leah hugs Vivi’s legs, squeezing quickly, and then bounces upstairs.

I shake my head as Leah disappears around the corner. Now it’s just me and Vivi, and I’m not sure what to say. I’d rather flirt by making her really good food. “A peacock. Leah’s a riot sometimes.”

Vivi shrugs. “She was probably a peacock in a past life. Her spirit is still part avian.”

I feel my eyebrows rise. “You believe in reincarnation?”