Your mother quieted down after that. Still, she had succeeded. I could not let the topic go.

“What was that about?” I asked you urgently. It had something to do with the drawings they had shown me, replicas of my own. That you knew and I did not infuriated me more than anything my mother could have done.

To my surprise, you answered my question.

“There is a power in the pencils made by the Phoenix Pencil Company,” you said. “And we have the ability to unleash it.”

“What’s the power?” I asked, desperate to understand.

“I can’t tell you.”

“Please tell me. I’ll draw a better picture of you. You’re so pretty, do you know that? That’s why I was mean to you. I was jealous. I won’t do it again.”

“I’m sorry,” you said. “I don’t understand it, and I’m not allowed to tell you anything about it.”

“Why not? Who said that?”

“My mother said if I do, we will get kicked out. And then where would we go?” We frequently walked past the warehouses and movie theaters that had recently been converted to refugee housing, seen more than enough people sleeping on the streets while the foreigners’ mansions loomed in the background. I would not have wished that life on anybody, no matter how much I wanted to know this secret.

But the isolation of not knowing was unbearable at that age.

“I’ll give you a hint,” you said. “But then I really can’t say more.”

You padded over, and I felt your weight on the edge of my mattress. There would come a day when we camped out freely on each other’s beds without a second thought, but that was the first time you came so close. In the dark, you guided my hand to your forearm. I felt the lines—long, thin scars—that traveled to the crook of your elbow. They looped and intertwined. I shivered, my body recognizing it before my mind caught up, a buried memory, one from when my father left and I had held Mother’s arm, wormed my hand beneath her sleeve, and she let me run my fingers over the strange pattern on her arm—and there it was on you, too.

“How?” I whispered.

My grandmother let out a violent cough. You retreated to your bed, the warmth of your arm against my fingertips gone.

I ran my hand over my own smooth arm. It was a cold night. I pulled the blankets closer, my body curling in on itself, wondering what it was that I was missing, how my exclusion could be branded into my skin.