“I'm trying a bunch of colors until I find the one that's just right.”

“So you're like Goldilocks of Love?”

“Exactamundo.”

We continued to paw through the cavernous brown bins lining the self-proclaimed “best thrift shop on Baylor Street,” but Carson's mind seemed to have hopscotched away with the discovery of her...garment. Back on the sidewalk, in the city's humid embrace, I leaned against the steaming bricks and sighed dramatically.

“Okay, kid. Give it up.” Carson drew a pack of Virginia Slims from a corner of her clutch (made from a license plate) and furrowed her brow. Wrinkles were forming on my half-sister—which wasn't so crazy, given that she was twelve years my senior. But perhaps because I'd always felt better kicking it with Carson and her slightly mad bohemian friends, I didn't like to concede the age difference.

In fact, I never liked to concede the age difference.

“Is it a boy?” she puffed, sending an elegant plume of smoke in the direction of the setting sun. “Because you know I'm not great at that kind of advice.”

“It's not a boy.” It's a man, I didn't say. Well, more like I barely prevented myself from saying. As hard as it was to keep secrets from Carson, I'd had to get good at secret-keeping years before—sometime after stepfather number three.

The women in my family were good at few things, and self-preservation above all things was one of them. We were the flee-in-the-night type. We could dodge bill collectors, and all manner of responsibilities. If men we loved were cruel to us, we could forget them. Ditto to the cities.

My mother was also a master at the art of selective memory—not in part because she'd spent half of Carson's childhood failing to kick a heroin addiction. Anya Bennett was what some called a “high functioning addict.” It had taken her co-workers at several State Farms across the Bible Belt years to realize that they were sharing a break room with a dope fiend. This was because my mother was likable, in spite of everything. It was easier to believe that Anya was sleepy, that Anya was depressed, that Anya was in an abusive relationship—than the fact that Anya had brought doom entirely to herself. And to her two kids, of course.

Carson, reading my face, scrunched up her mouth in a decidedly kid-like way.

“Is it Anya?” she asked, her voice already tired. Which was fair. I'd gotten the best of our mother. She'd muscled into sobriety when I was nine, with the help of her since deceased Aunt Shelly. Carson, however, had endured years of absentee and downright abusive parenting. She and Mom only spoke when it was unavoidable.

“Can I rant to you for like three minutes? Pretty please?” Carson stubbed out her cigarette, and tuned her attention to the caftan in its pale plastic bag. She held up three fingers, then nodded once.

“She's started going to one of those creepy storefront churches. You know? The kind off the highway?”

“Ash, religion's a whole part of the steps. Some people get more into it than others. Most of the time, you have to embrace a higher power to get clean.”

“But this isn't like any of the churches Aunt Shelly took us to,” I protested, finally lighting my own cigarette. The sun continued its stumpy drift behind the limited skyscrapers, and for a second there was a cool breeze. “It's like a cult-y situation. She says the Pastor there has 'discovered extra books in the Bible.'”

Carson choked on an inhale.

“Don't laugh!”

“I'm sorry! It's just—even Anya? A cult? Jesus Christ.”

“I'm just worried she's going to come home with like white Nikes or something.”

My sister cocked her head. “You're pretty young for a Heaven's Gate reference, tyke.”

“You know, I'm so tired of people telling me I'm too young.” The words fell out of me in my whiniest voice, which I realized did little for my case. “I've done crazier things than so many older people. I've given our mother a bath during a relapse. I've paid the bills and balanced the checkbook since I was fifteen. I've worked since I was fourteen. I've even been taking college classes, did you know that? English Lit and American History. I'm going to UT a whole year early! This fall!”

Carson's eyes had glazed over again, but this time I didn't care. I was on a roll.

“I've been having sex—safe, consensual, adult sex—since I was thirteen! And I drive, and...”

“Okay, Ash. You know actual adults don't have to prove they're adults.”

“Only because no one ever asks them to,” I pouted. Carson shrugged. We lapsed into the kind of silence that soothes.

Soon, the city would become the color it had been when I regarded it from a roof top, at a crazy frat party in May. Perhaps even sooner, that crazy frat party in May would take on the sepia quality of a distant memory. It would be like I'd never kissed him, Mr. Tall Drink of Water. I still kept swearing to myself that that night had been different. I'd done plenty of crazy things in my life, but was still reluctant to categorize the chance meeting with the perfect stranger as just another one of Ash's “life stories.”

“You are thinking about a boy,” Carson said, grasping my hand and gently tugging me in the direction of the apartment she shared with three other singer-songwriters and one “paranormal psychology” student. “I can tell. Spill the beans, missy.”

“It's nothing. Just some stupid hook-up at a party.”

“That's how Tex and I met,” Carson muttered, wistfully. Then, she pointed a long, bony finger in the direction of the early moon, hanging high in the afternoon sky. “I believe in magic. Don't you?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“It has to do with—if your world was rocked, your world was rocked. Don't downplay. Let it be a magical thing.”

By then, we'd reached my sister's house—an old clapboard painted bright blue, with two bedrooms on each floor. An algae-glazed pool held dominion in the backyard. I peered over the fence at the green water and remembered the delicious feel of those ice cubes gliding down my back. That single dramatic act had done something to my whole body. Whoever he was, he'd woken me up. I laughed darkly, to myself.

“What's his name, lady?” Carson muscled her tan shoulder against the sticky screen door. Even for half-sisters, we didn't look alike. Carson had never known her father, but Anya maintained that he'd been a member of the Choctaw nation. We had no real proof but my sister's dark, thick, straight hair, the texture of a horse's mane—and of course the dollop of extra melanin in her skin. Meanwhile, I could burn from walking around the city with shoulders uncovered for an hour.

“Wait,” she said, turning. Her paint-splattered overalls had already begun to catch early beams of moonlight. “Do you not know his name, Miss Thing?

I slapped my sister on her denim-clad ass, enjoying the peal of giggles this inspired.

“You little S-L-U-T!”

“It's not like that!” I shrieked, as she continued to taunt me. “We made a pact to not exchange names.”

“Why would you do that?”

My tongue suddenly felt dry in my mouth. The reasons why—the whole freaky map of possible reasons why—had actually never occurred to me before. Or perhaps, I'd never allowed them to occur to me.

“Because... he's probably a serial killer, and I'm an idiot.”

“Oh, Ash! Don't be so dramatic! I'm sure that's not it.” Yet Carson didn't sound fully convinced. And when she finally eked the door open, flooding the porch with warm light and the sounds and smells of her groovy roommates existing in their kitchen, she turned to deliver a pitying smile.

“Do you want to stay for dinner? Gonzo's making eggplant...something.” I caught the whiff of something sweet at the same time that I read the subtext in my sister's eyes. I was nobody's pity date. Ramen with Anya for the third night in a row would do fine for me, at least until the day I could finally escape that house.