Olivia spent a lot of time thinking about who was or wasn’t popular or assessing where she was in the school social structure. She liked asking Ayanna about what made people popular at her high school, and even though the schools were twenty miles apart, it was clear that each one had its own culture and levels of attractiveness. Olivia wanted exactly what she had, an anodyne mid-tier popularity where there was very little to be lost and, as long as she kept things tight, where very little gossip could leak out about her. She was a defensive midfielder on her high school’s varsity soccer team and was careful in her motions, more interested in containing other people than in making challenges. She straightened her hair and rarely went to parties where people drank and got into situations. Their mom was always telling her how to be the “right kind of Black woman”: God-fearing, hair neat at all times (preferably straightened), no serious boyfriends until college, good grades, light-colored pedicures, deep clean your house every Sunday, no bra straps showing, a mixture of love and pity for Whitney and deep skepticism toward Mariah, ambitious but in a gentle way, and when the day came, be the kind of daughter who called every Saturday.

“That is nerd shit,” Ayanna was prone to saying when Olivia talked out how often she worried about being in the “wrong” situation. “You can’t control how other people see you.”

Their mother had given up on telling Ayanna how to be years ago. Her feral daughter, Opal would sometimes sigh. It was foolish even to try to tell Ayanna anything—she was slippery and grumpy and confident enough even as a high schooler to correct people far older than her when they tried to tell her things about the world. Sometimes, this was fine. Ayanna’s soul was old and artistic, Opal liked to say. Sometimes, it took all of Opal’s willpower to stop herself from dialing up her ex-husband and destroying him on the phone for the ways he had clearly failed as a father.

Ayanna would rather talk about living on Mars than think about what her future wedding would be like. Ayanna was thinking about going to art school and was ignoring offers from Division III colleges to go play soccer on a full ride. Ayanna said that the only pro-life she believed in was a world without genocide. You did this, Antony, Opal thought whenever Ayanna was willing to share her thoughts, and now I don’t know how to make her right.