from up here. We were still so low that you could identify specific animals—camels, donkeys, a dog running ecstatically from the road towards a farmhouse and a boy’s waiting arms.
We’d never had pets, growing up; in the Caribbean, Mom and Dad always said, animals were dirty and belonged outside with the rest of the dirt, and they were either food or pests. You’d never have one living inside your actual house. A few rich men had pet dogs or cats, but Dad in particular dismissed that: “They bathed them constantly, cleaned house constantly. Who’s got time for that?” We begged, but nothing doing. Then after Dad left we moved again and again, and there just didn’t seem to be room for one more living creature anywhere. The kids would have done a shit job looking after a pet anyway, even a guinea pig or a fish. They just lavished love on whatever animals they met or saw, and spent a lot of time with their friends’ dogs.
The thing about Johnny, I thought, was that she had never been loved enough, never accepted enough love. She had bailed on her parents so young, only seen her dad a handful of times since the divorce; she treated her mother as an acquaintance, scheduling lunches with her weeks in advance; Rutger was more a robot than an employee; she had no other friends. Even Ben’s adoration only went one way. Always it had just been her and me, me and her—a claustrophobic togetherness that, if she hadn’t been away so much, would have driven us both insane. Or maybe it had and we hadn’t noticed, so stifled under the creeping sense of wrongness that a friendship that had begun in blood and bullets should have lasted so long and been so steady and unshakeable on such a foundation. A near-death experience was no basis for a friendship.
And yet she was the only one who ever let me in, the only one who didn’t leave me alone and outside of herself, the only one who didn’t think it was okay to leave me outside. Because that had been my whole life: on one side of the glass, staring in. She was the only one who said, again and again, Come be on my side of the glass. Come be with me. No matter what I did.
We’d even sworn a blood oath once, when we were about seven. I was sure I still had the paper somewhere at home, the red-black J on it cracked but unfaded. I remembered how she had insisted we sterilize the knife we had used, remembered the faint pop as it parted the skin; I thought it would happen in silence. Did she still have the blood ‘N’ somewhere in that wedding-cake fortress of a house? We had been so brave, so swaggering, so young. I couldn’t even use the stove or do long division, and I had cut into the palm of my hand at her suggestion.
We glanced furtively at each other at the same time, and laughed. Her nose was red, but her eyes were dry.
“Oh, you’re kidding me,” I said. “Were you crying?”
“No!”
“Pants on fire,” I said. “Listen, I’m sorry I... did some stuff back there. You’re right, I wasn’t thinking. I just wanted to get your money back. Because it’s really yours, not theirs.”
“I guess it makes more sense if you look at it that way,” she said. “I just kind of saw it as... this stupid, risky, dangerous thing that might slow us down. And I thought any new barrier, anything, when there’s so much already in our way…”
“I mean, it’s just the whole world.”
“Yes.”
“So I guess it’s okay that you were mad.”
“No, it’s still not okay,” she insisted. “I shouldn’t have yelled. I’m sorry.”
“Look at us, all grown up as shit, apologizing like grownups.”
“As grown up as shit.” She sighed and leaned her head back on her bag, sending up a puff of dust. “We didn’t use to fight this much when we were kids.”
“We’re still kids. And anyway, what was there to fight about?”
“You know what I mean.”
“What are we looking for in Carthage? Your duplicates or whatever,” I said, settling back into the bag. The sunlight coming in the windows was hot, but the floor was freezing, and I couldn’t get comfortable. My stomach still felt like a kettle at full boil.
“Oh man, hope is the word,” she said, grabbing a new handful of papers from her bag and lurching closer to