Antonia Russo lives in an apartment with two bedrooms, one that is hers and one that is her parents’. Her mamma and papa leave the door to their room open and Antonia sleeps best when she can hear the cresting waves of her papa snoring. Her kitchen has no window and a small round wooden table instead of the square dining table Sofia’s family has. Her mamma scrubs and scrubs the floor and then sighs and says, there is nothing to be done about this. In the living room there are pictures on all the walls, the grayish-brown old-fashioned kind where everyone looks upset. The pictures are of Antonia’s grandparents, before they left theoldcountry. Sometimes her mamma looks at them and kisses the necklace around her neck and shuts her eyes tightly, just for a moment.

Antonia finds that though she is expected to stay inside her own body, she often feels like she is in Sofia’s body, or her mamma’s body, or the body of the princess in a story. It is easy for her to slip away, spread out, and exist in the whole universe instead of within the confines of her own skin.

In the mornings, Antonia lines up her stuffed animals and names them. She makes her bed without being asked.

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Sofia often appears in the doorway of Antonia’s home with unbrushed hair and dirt under her fingernails; she possesses the effortless light of the sun, sure she will rise, confident that she can wake everyone up. Antonia is both attracted and repelled: fascinated in the way a child will circle a dead bird, admire a lone feather, build a shrine to it. She is scrupulous about her own appearance. She wants to drink Sofia, to fill herself with her friend’s addictive magic.

Sofia and Antonia spend all of their time together, because they are young, and they live next door to one another, and their parents encourage their friendship. It is convenient for parents when your child can always be found with someone else’s.

The texture of Sofia’s walk is as familiar to Antonia as the heft and rhythm of her own; her reflection in Sofia’s brown eyes is more grounding than the reflection of a mirror. Sofia, for her part, recognizes Antonia by way of a smell of powder and lilies, left in her room long after her friend has gone home for dinner; by the perfectly stacked tower of blocks on her shelf; in the wave of her favorite doll’s neatly brushed hair.

Sofia and Antonia do not realize that their friendship is undisturbed by other children.