LITMIR.BIZ

      Milk Blood Heat

      I. Monsters

      “Pink is the color for girls,” Kiera says, so she and Ava cut their palms and let their blood drip into a shallow bowl filled with milk, watching the color spread slowly on the surface, small red flowers blooming. Ava studies Kiera. How she holds her hand steady—as if used to slicing herself open—while sunlight falls through the kitchen window and fills her curls with glow. Her mouth is a slim, straight line, but her eyes are wide, green-yellow, unblinking. Strange eyes, Ava’s mother always says with the same pinched grimace usually reserved for pulling plugs of their hair from the bathtub drain.

      The girls are at Kiera’s because her parents believe in “freedom of expression,” and they can climb trees and catch frogs and lie on the living room floor with the cushions pulled off the couch, watching cartoons and eating sugary cereal from metal mixing bowls for hours. At Ava’s house they are tomboys, they are lazy, they are getting on her mother’s last nerve. Her mother doesn’t approve of Kiera, but they’ve been friends for two months—ever since late August, when the eighth grade started, and Kiera came up to her during gym and told her: I feel like I’m drowning, and though there was no water in sight, Ava knew what she meant. It was the type of feeling she herself sometimes got, a heaviness, an airlessness, that was hard to talk about, especially with her mother. Trying to name it was like pulling up words from her belly, bucketful after bucketful, all that effort but they never meant what she wanted them to.

      This is one of many differences between her and Kiera—that the truth about the two of them changed depending on which mother was telling it—and Ava often wonders if their differences are only because Kiera is white, or if there’s something more. Something beneath the skin. This year she’s become obsessed with dualities, at looking at one thing in two ways: Kiera’s eyes, strange and magic; her own sadness, both imaginary and pulsating.

      “Get a spoon,” Kiera says, and from the drawer Ava grabs a large one with slots. She stirs the milk and blood until it is the desired shade, the pink of Kiera’s lips, a soft, hopeful color. They tip the bowl up to their mouths, one after the other, sip-for-sip, until there are only dregs. They wipe pink froth from their faces with the backs of their arms and sit still for a moment, solemn in the wake of what they’ve just done.

      “Blood sisters,” Ava murmurs, feeling somehow stretched in time—another sensation she can’t explain. She imagines she can feel Kiera’s blood absorbing into her system, passing through the mucous membrane of her small intestine, assimilating until there is no difference between her blood and her friend’s.

      “Blood sisters,” Kiera agrees, and leaves the bowl, spoon, and knife in the sink for her mother to wash.

      This is the hour of reckoning, or at least this is what they shout as they flock toward the retention pond behind Kiera’s house, kicking up grass and startling the neighborhood dogs into song. They drop small stones into the water. Watch the tadpoles scatter and count the ripples.

      “Run, little guys,” Kiera says, her voice small and high like an actress in a bad horror film. Ava stomps and snarls in the shallows; she’s still wearing her low-tops, her socks full of pond, water squishing between her toes. She is Frankenstein’s monster. She is a vampire queen. She is newly thirteen, hollowed out and filled back up with venom and dust-cloud dreams. She throws her head back and howls and howls at the sun, pretending it’s a strange, burning moon, and that there is no other world than this one where she and Kiera are.

Скачать книгу