Ayanna looked again at the grass, the pink spirits, the sky, the bush. Each one of them was teaching her a different understanding of the word blue. She let her heart thrill to it. Their father had once earnestly told them the secret to living well was that “you have to want to like things. Even enjoyment, enjoying things, whatever, is a skill you have to cultivate.” “You’re right.”

They walked farther, saw a hill in the distance, ascended, and a sudden mountain range, silver and spindly, somehow lit from within. Above the mountains were clouds, as pink as the spirits, and Ayanna suspected that if she had binoculars, she would see they were not weather phenomena, but a murmuration of spirits shifting and talking with one another. Her soul swayed to the ecstasy as she surveyed the mountains and their shine, the distant vistas, the feeling of being the first. She longed for a canvas and paint, for months of time to capture it.

“Remember when we were eight,” Olivia said, “and you told me one day you were going to find the Fountain of Youth?”

“We learned about it in school, our teacher kept saying everyone thought it was in Florida. It felt attainable.”

That entire year she spent looking up facts about Florida, alligators, and the Everglades, and brainstorming what she would do if she found the Fountain of Youth. Sometimes, Ayanna thought it would be like a regular drinking fountain, dented and ugly like the ones at school, and waiting for her in a swamp. She would gather a bottle of it and save it to drink at the age she most wanted to stay. Olivia had told her maybe it didn’t work like that, but instead worked to keep you young for longer, to live at your strongest for many, many years. Sometimes, Ayanna thought the fountain would be a creek or a stream, and they would have to test and taste many, and record how their bodies reacted. Maybe it would be a geyser pushing out of different parts of the earth. She had given up on it.

“Here’s your first discovery,” Olivia said.

“Ours,” Ayanna said, and squeezed her sister’s wrist.