“No, you don’t,” she says. “It’s all the same no matter how you look.”

The lie makes her a friend.

I BEGIN TO BRING SOPHIA TO THE ACRES each day after school. We spend afternoons exchanging secrets, whispering about boys. We nod into each other’s hair.

“Let me see your knot,” she says one day.

I don’t fight. I stand in the center of the living room and lift my dress up slow as an ache. In the afternoon sun, my knot looks even worse, each stretchmark illuminated.

“Well,” she says flatly. “That’s disgusting. Pull your dress down.”

I sit back on the couch, dying inside, until she puts an arm around me, and whispers in my ear.

“I think I saw Jarred staring at you today.”

JARRED IS TALLER THAN THE OTHERS AT school, lanky bodied. His hair is short, uneven, cut over a kitchen sink. A dirty streak of freckles crosses his nose, cheeks.

Under his skin is an anger that casts a shadow around him.

“Why are you always looking at me?” he asks.

I lift my eyes and stare right into his face.

That’s when I realize it: His left eye is lazy, the pupil unfocused, staring off into another world. His right eye pierces into me like a knife.

I TELL SOPHIA WHAT’S IN MY INSIDES.

“It’s awful inside of me,” I say.

“What’s in there?” she asks.

“I have a pit of badness in my stomach,” I say.

Then we sit in the quiet of the confession.

VISION

Under the fluorescent lights, I am gaping wide. My incision is wide and long, from hip to hip, across my flat belly, right where a woman would grow a baby.

With each breath, black blood gurgles out from the slit. My insides are no longer red. Now, my organs are black, no longer soft, now covered in dark sparkling crystals.

I can’t stop looking at my terrible insides, at how wretched I have become there, how beautiful the rot is.

My wound keeps glittering with each breath, a terrible evening of stars shimmering inside of me.

EACH WEEK, MY MOTHER TAKES ME TO visit the bodies of my grandparents. We walk to the edge of The Acres where there is a cemetery squared by a low white fence.

“It keeps the wolves out,” my mother says.

Crooked white crosses spell out their names in script above the dates of birth and death. We place small offerings on low grassy mounds.

“They’ll love this,” my mother whispers.

The offerings: Flowers, small sugar cookies, rosaries, a small cheap statue of an angel. Against the crosses, the gifts look wrong. They will spoil in the rain, melt down to strange, warped blobs of colored sugar and plastic.

“Now, isn’t this nice?”

My mother sits between the graves and caresses the grass.

“I just miss you so much,” she says to the ground, her sob a fist which clenches the heart in my chest.