“Solara, stop fucking around. I’m really trying to figure out what’s up with you. I haven’t seen you since you randomly punched out that white kid, you keep Instagramming pictures of you and Antonio, who I know you only hang out with to score booze, and you keep looking out the window like a damn worried dog. Girl, what is going on?”

° ° °

Sol stared at Kai, taciturn. In juvie, the counselors had always blabbered about the importance of “emotional transparency.” Sol could still remember the way Ms. Watts, the head counselor, would slowly and loudly pronounce the latter word. “Trans-PAAARENNNNCYYY,” she’d croon, as if she were teaching toddlers. The counselors had always seemed to neglect the fact that they were teaching in a jail, a place where all emotions were liable to be used against you. Sol didn’t fault them—of course the theories seemed true when jail was your nine-to-five instead of your midnight-to-midnight—but she stopped listening after the first week.

This choice had served her well. Unlike her second cellmate, Patricia Frauland, a stocky blond white girl with a concrete jaw and eyes the size of beads, she’d never gotten extorted. Personal information was currency in juvie, and Sol had been so tight-lipped that she wasn’t even listed at the currency exchange. Patricia, on the other hand, was constantly filing for bankruptcy. Every week, she acquired a new best friend. And every other week, one of those friends acquired a brutal thrashing after leaking a choice secret or two. Sol laughed.

Kai stared at her. “Is there something I should know, or are you just not talking about yourself at all?”

Sol stood up and fanned herself with the bottom of her oversized T-shirt. “Walk with me,” she said. “It’s hot in here.”

Kai rose, trailing Sol into the kitchen, where they leaned against the counters on opposite sides of the room. Sol removed a glass from a cabinet and reached into the refrigerator, grabbing the tea pitcher. “You want some more?” she asked.

“Yeah, this is actually really fucking good.”

“I’ve been trying to tell everyone that it’s never been bad! I just made one bad batch one time, when everybody happened to be over. And y’all niggas just agreed that the shit had always been bad, ole anti-statistical asses.”

Kai cackled, doubling over yet holding her glass out to be replenished.

Sol emptied the pitcher then poured herself a glass of wine using a bottle she’d left on the counter. The bottle was depleted before her glass was even half full.