Ayanna never felt lonelier than on the days when she and Olivia were together. Olivia was talking about goals she had scored at school recess, about how she kept reading the same chapter of Farmer Boy over and over, about the boy eating all the delicious food, about how she had a First Communion dress, and it was the pretty one, not the one that Mom liked.

Her sister’s voice sounded like her own, except slower, and she had a nasal Michigan a like their mom. Ayanna nodded along. Yes, the goals sounded great, yes, she would read the chapter too, and it was fine she wasn’t doing a First Communion. She felt like she understood how her dad felt at breakfast sometimes. You just have to let the kid speak. It made Ayanna feel so distant from her sister that Ayanna thought a lot about what she could do to bridge the gap between them. She liked Olivia and loved her. And they were twins. What was the point of being a twin if you felt that far away from your sibling?

She decided to go to church with her mom and Olivia for the first time in a long time. They woke up early on Sunday morning. Ayanna could tell her mom was pleased that she wanted to go to church with them. There would be doughnuts after Mass, and her mom kept talking about the ones with chocolate and pink sprinkles as if it were something Ayanna needed to hear about multiple times so that she wouldn’t back out at the last moment.

“Wear my pink dress,” Olivia said.

That was too far for Ayanna. She put on a pair of black cotton overalls and a frilly white shirt underneath it and white socks with ruffles around the ankles.

“You look very sophisticated,” Opal said, and there wasn’t a hint of patronization in her voice. Her mother’s grip was softer than her father’s when she was braiding. Her scalp had to work less because her mother knew what she was doing, loved the mix of textures on her twins’ heads, the glissando between straight hairs all the way to the 4C hair they had inherited from both grandmothers. She liked to call their heads “the symphony” sometimes.

“Is there anything you want me to remind you about before Mass?”

“Can I sit between you so I remember what to do?” All the standing and kneeling and repeating! Usually her dad would be picking her up around this time. He would take her out to breakfast at the diner, where they always made her a smiling strawberry pancake and gave her milk in a coffee mug so she could match the adults.