She nods, and he reaches out his arms to hoist Piper out of her chair, her hot-pink cast dangling in the air. He carries her up, one arm under her knees and one around her back like he used to do with me at first, when those stairs might as well have been Mount Everest.

I carry Piper’s chair up behind them, and Glenn places her back in it inside my room.

“What in the name of Ken and Barbie?” Piper says before Glenn even shuts the door all the way. Sara’s insanely large doll collection looms in front of us in tall, glass-front cases.

“They belong to my cousin,” I say.

Piper tries to pry open one of the cabinets, but it’s locked tight.

“Why doesn’t your cousin keep them in her room?”

“This is Sara’s room. Was Sara’s room. She died in the fire.”

Piper stops trying to infiltrate the doll display. She picks up a pointe shoe.

“Is all this stuff hers?”

Sara’s old things fill the room: the quilt with bright yellow daisies, the corner shelf with pictures of her dance troupes, the box of pointe shoes.

“A lot of it is.” I grab the shoe and put it back on the shrine. “It’s fine. All my stuff burned up anyway.”

Piper picks at a strip of faded butterfly wallpaper trim that runs through the middle of the wall.

“You should at least repaint or something. Otherwise, you’re just living in a dead girl’s room.”

I shrug. Most of the time, I don’t mind living in a makeshift mausoleum because my own room is gone and this one holds the memories the fire didn’t take. The bed we squeezed into for our monthly cousin sleepovers. The desk where Sara tried in vain to teach me makeup contouring. The butterfly wallpaper where we wrote our initials teeny-tiny beneath a purple wing.

Piper points to a frame with a picture of Sara in a dance skirt, her hands lifted gracefully over her head.

“This her?”

“Yeah.”

“Pretty.”

In the picture, Sara’s long blond hair sweeps over her petite, Cora-esque body. She was the kind of girl who was so pretty you wanted to hate her but was so nice you couldn’t. We were different as Country Barbie and City Barbie (as Glenn used to call us), but we were bound by one thing: our love of performing. As kids, every summer, I’d fumble through dance camp with her; she’d tolerate drama camp for me. I’d always be in the front row at her ballets, and she’d be the first one on her feet on my opening nights.

Piper points to a wall-size poster of Hairspray Cora found at a garage sale.

“Yours or hers?”

“Mine. I guess. I used to be into singing and musicals and all that.”