You were not allowed to disagree or comment, unless invited. A strict rule was to let the statement sit for at least twenty seconds. Ayanna’s right hand twitched. She opened and shut her mouth. Her tongue felt large and dry, the way it did when she smoked weed at parties, but she was sober, and it was probably because her mom and Olivia liked the air-conditioning set to we-would-rather-freeze-to-death-than-see-a-drop-of-sweat. The twenty seconds went slow.

“Sometimes,” Ayanna said, “I feel guilty that I went with Dad and that you should’ve went with him instead. I like that you and Mom are close, but you’re both afraid of everything. I come here and sometimes I’m jealous of the way you can read each other’s thoughts, know each other so well, and sometimes, I think, Wow, they’re both so afraid of everything. I want to see everything, eat everything, I want to know everything, I want to sleep with different people and—” She paused at the thrill of saying something true and solid about herself and how she felt, then swallowed. “I want to have a big life. It makes me sad that it feels like maybe you could want those things too, but you care so much about what people think. Dad’s not perfect, but he wants me to have a life.”

“I don’t care that much,” Olivia said.

“You broke the rules.”

Olivia sat up. She dramatically fell back to the ground in a way that had to hurt a little bit. Her hair was in a short braid with scraggly ends. She was wearing a matching pajama set with a cherry-and-lemon pattern. Ayanna had a matching set, but it stayed buried at the bottom of a dresser drawer. There was only one time when Ayanna had broken the rules. Last year, Olivia had said, “I believe that you do go to hell when you have an abortion.”

Ayanna asked Olivia what her opinions were on Palestine, on Congo, on the pogroms that happened in India. Why was she so obsessed with something rooted in controlling women’s medical decisions rather than caring about actual living people? Ayanna’s father and grandmothers had worked hard in their church to set a precedent: they didn’t think a medical decision had to become religious. She had talked at her sister about how the average abortion was for people miscarrying, how almost every single one was a medical decision, and Olivia had rolled away from Ayanna, curled into a ball with her forehead pressed against her knees. Ayanna still felt a sting of embarrassment about how she had reacted, kept thinking about the different ways that she could have said this that would have made her sister want to listen to her. But since that incident, Ayanna was precise and measured every time they played Wild Thoughts.

“I don’t think you actually believe it’s possible to bring people back to life,” Olivia said.