Kira shrugged. “Survival by art. We never knew she made them; we only found them in that box in the garage last year when her daughter, my grandma, died. My grandma was a baby in the camp; she said her parents never spoke about the war, ever. Their son, Grandma’s older brother, died fighting for America in the war while America imprisoned the rest of his family at Manzanar. They brought his purple heart to Great-Grandma in the camp. Gold Star mother.”

“Jesus.”

“Seriously. Like, Thanks for the fucking award. Does my dead son prove our loyalty now? Spoiler, it did not. Poor little birds. They might have been thrown out. I’m saving the chickadee for a shadowbox. It’s my favorite.”

“Thank God you found them.”

“No kidding.”

“Hey.” I said after a long, quite while. “What does your mom mean, ‘getting you back in art class’? You’re not taking art?”

She tossed some clothes off the bed and flopped down beside me. “First day last year, I go to class and Katiana are in there to easy-A fulfill the grad requirement—they have no actual interest at all in art—and I’ve got my portfolio from my other school because I have a huge fucking ego, and so the teacher is like, These are great; I, a teacher, proclaim you are a talented art student, and Katiana were like, Fuck that girl, she thinks she’s better than us; we are suddenly super interested in being the world’s greatest artists who get attention from teachers, so they started their daily campaign of messing with me, and I didn’t enroll this year because why give them prime access to me for ninety minutes three days a week.”

I got it. When every day is one battle after another, sometimes it’s better to know when to nope out if the alternative is daily misery. “Won’t they be there tonight?” I asked.

“Maybe. But it’ll be crowded, and they’ll be drunk; I can avoid them.”

“You sure?”

“I want to go,” she said. “I’m sick of avoiding things I want to do because of them. They can have art class, fine, but this is a coveted bonfire invitation, and we are going.”

“I bet Sean could get them to stop.”

She turned to look right at me. “No. I mean it. Please.”

“Okay.” I studied the pink canvas, barely begun but already beautiful. “It’s not fair. You should be there, not them.”