On the days Serena asks me to walk to school with her, she says my name like it is melting.

            “Valerie,” she pleads, drawing out the sound the way someone might untangle a ribbon, “come with me, just for today.” My answer, the same as every other time, is a refusal. I point to the school bus as it emerges from the other side of the street.

            “I can’t,” I say, “my mom makes me take the bus.” Serena stays next to me until the bus arrives, when I haul myself up the steps and find an empty seat. I often tell her in turn that she should take the bus with me, and that there are never enough people to fill up the whole vehicle, so she can sit next to me. Serena only shakes her head.

            “Goodbye, Valerie” she mouths, watching me through the bus windows. I keep my eyes on her, standing on the cement. I know she must move at some point, but when the bus begins to leave, she remains stationary. Her feet root themselves to the ground and refuse to detach, at least until her figure disappears over the crest of the hill we live on.

            When we meet at school later that day, Serena runs up to me. She sits on a stone next to mine and sets a thin cloth in between us; on this cloth, we place the lunches our mothers have packed for us. They aren’t like the lunches of the other kids – on some days, the boys a few years older than us pass us by and pucker their lips in disgust as they glance at our meals.

            “They don’t know what’s good for anyone,” Serena assures me. We each spoon out half of our lunches, all the dripping egg, stir-fried greens and rice, and place them into the other person’s bowl. I bite off half of the cookie my mother has wrapped in paper towels and hand the other half to Serena.

            We kick our feet against the stones we sit on as we eat. I know Serena doesn’t like the noises of eating, so I fill the air with the sound of my voice. She doesn’t talk as much as I do. She prefers to watch, from a distance, the people scattered around the cement we are sent out to for lunch. A group plays basketball around the squeaky hoops standing guard on either side of the white rectangle painted onto the ground, but Serena isn’t paying attention to them. I follow her line of sight onto a closely huddled trio, eating the same way she and I are.

            “Look,” Serena whispers, as if she is worried they might be able to hear us through the din, “they are angry.”

            “What?” Serena is more observant than I am. It seems she can tell what anyone is thinking if she stares at them hard enough. “Who’s angry?”

            “That one.” Serena discretely points to one of the three, a girl with flaxen hair secured in place by a headband covered in rhinestones. “Look,” Serena continues. “She isn’t eating. Looking away. Holding her own hand.”

            “Why is she angry?” I ask.

Serena shrugs in response. “How am I supposed to know?” The two of us return to our food, and I don’t see the girl again for the rest of the day.

Most days, Serena stands with me as I wait for the school bus going back home. I am half convinced the driver knows her name by now. On a bulletin board near the pickup is a school schedule of the month, which she probes as we wait.

“Here.” Serena points at a square on the schedule labeled TAKE YOUR KID TO WORK DAY. “Where are you going?”

“The pharmacy, probably,” I answer. Somewhere, far above our heads, the wind begins to whistle. “How about you? The movies?” I think of Serena’s father, managing the projector at the back of the theatre a few blocks from school. One of my earliest memories is of Serena and I, sitting in the theatre after hours, her father’s hand on her shoulder. He is conversing with my parents in a language I am just starting to learn the words to, something from a place different from the one I have grown up in. Serena, though, understands. I ask her what our parents are saying. She responds, “It’s nothing, nothing.”

“Not the theatre,” Serena declares, disrupting me from my memories. “My father is a doctor.” I sigh, because we have had this conversation countless times.

“He used to be,” I correct her.

“You don’t understand,” she insists. “I was there, back home. You weren’t. My father is a doctor, and he will be one again, soon enough.” She is right, in a way. Though Serena’s family and mine share a homeland, they left much later than my parents did. Serena lived there, a place I have only heard of from my parents’ stories.

“You were a little kid,” I continue, frustrated. “You probably don’t even remember.”

“No,” Serena asserts. “I don’t forget. I never forget.”

I leave the topic because I’m not the person to convince her otherwise. A large, bright blue car rumbles up to the block, and four girls with identical braids strike through the waiting crowd, hopping into the vehicle. I have seen them before, sitting in a circle, each others’ hair in their hands. My hair isn’t long enough to braid, not the way they do it, and Serena prefers to keep her hair down, so we have never tried to join.

“I should grow my hair out,” I think aloud. Serena doesn’t answer. She is looking at a girl, one with the same braid as the other four; this girl sits far away from the blue car and does not try to get in.

“Serena,” I ask, “do you want to take the bus back today?” She responds without moving.

“No, Valerie. I’ll walk.” The bus appears around the corner of the street, and Serena points. “It’s here.”

A small group of kids begins a slow surge towards the vehicle. I reach for Serena’s hand but can’t quite make it before she drifts away from me.

━

In high school, I try out for the tennis team. I stand with a group of other girls, lacing my runners for the third time. I want them to feel so close to my feet they might never fall off no matter how many steps I take.

“What are you worrying for?” Serena says. “You can beat the rest of the people here without issues.” I glance up from my shoes to make sure no one has noticed, or at least, noticed enough to react.

“Please,” I beg, “talk a little lower.” She isn’t here for tryouts; she only waits to accompany me. A stray leaf, propelled by a gust of air, zips around the court. Serena pouts and crouches down, tracing circles on the ground with her index finger.

When the time for tryouts comes, Serena steps out of the court and watches us through the wire fence. The rest of us move

 into the blaring sunlight, where the coach waits. He is a lanky man, with a long face and small, silver hairs crowding around his chin. He begins to list out orders and wave a racket around, and I follow the other girls in a slow-moving cloud to the other side of the court.

After warming up, we are paired into practice matches. The girl I am playing against is tall and thin, like a store mannequin. I lose to her, and then I lose to the next matchup, a girl with thick eyebrows and a glare that seems to slow the ball as it arcs across the court. By the end of the tryouts, I can’t seem to do anything but look down at my shoelaces, because at least they are still impeccably tied.

I leave the court once tryouts are over and Serena hurries over to me. She takes the bottle of water she had left in my bag, crunching the plastic so that the water explodes out of the bottle into her waiting mouth.

“How did it go?” she asks.

“Weren’t you watching? What do you think?” I retort, sharper than I mean for it to be. In my shame, her question sounds almost mocking.

            Serena wipes her mouth and puts the cap on her bottle. “Not good?”

            “No. I lost every match.”

            “Oh,” Serena says. “Sorry.” She grabs my arm and tugs me forward. “Let’s go.”

            “Where?” I’m not sure why I ask the question. There is only one answer. Serena, too, knows this, and so she doesn’t give a reply, instead pulling me further along. We traverse a few streets and one alley before arriving at the local theatre.

            In the theatre, Serena pulls a keycard out of her pocket and swipes it across a sensor next to a locked door. I remember this keycard well because I was the one that took it from the ground. I had seen an employee drop it from a back pocket. Serena snatched it out of my hand before I could return it, telling me it was important, and that since her father worked at the theatre, she was practically afforded a card as well. I hadn’t argued.

            The door unlocks and Serena and I enter the storeroom. Pieces of junk adorn every part of the room except the centre, where a table and two chairs sit. On the table is a DVD player and a screen, the only thing not covered in dust.

            “What do you want to watch?” Serena brings out a set of DVD sleeves and begins flipping through the plastic pages.

            “I don’t know,” I grumble. Serena sighs and puts down the sleeve.

            “You can’t be so angry about those tryouts,” she tells me. “What’s done is done. What does it matter if you don’t get in, really?”

            “It’s not just that I won’t make it,” I insist. “It was embarrassing.”

            “For girls like you, nothing is too embarrassing.” I look at Serena, questioning. “Girls like you,” she continues. “Pretty girls. When people look at you, they won’t think about tennis.”

            I don’t say anything in return to that, so Serena drops the topic. She extracts a DVD of her own choosing from the sleeve and inserts it into the player. The screen lights up; Serena and I sit next to each other on the floor and watch. Soon enough, I fall asleep.

            I dream of tennis balls and white lines, girls. Girls with ponytails that morph into brown, dirt roads., traveling across lands and under the water. A tornado coming into sight of a city I have never seen. A house with two baby girls, two beautiful daughters.

            By the time I wake up, Serena is gone, the screen turned off. I pack my things and hurry out of the theatre, stopping only once to check the time. I don’t see any of Serena’s things. I am irritated she has left me, not because it is out of character for her, but only since it can’t be safe for either of us to be walking home alone in the middle of the night.

━

The night before graduation, Serena and I take a ferry home from a trip. We will get back a couple hours before midnight. The inside of the ship is illuminated by fluorescent lights dotted along the ceiling, painting the illustrations of sea creatures on the wall in a cold glow.

            Serena grabs my hand. “We should go out,” she declares. “It’ll be nice.”

            “Sure,” I reply. The two of us head outside. The wind rushes through the night sky, pushing our hair to one side. Crests of small waves are illuminated by the glare of the ship lights, forming snaky white lines that are borders on the water, dissipating as fast as they are formed.

            Serena leans over the railing, looking down at the ocean. She can see the reflection of the moon above us, silver and large and brilliant.

            “Do you know how big the ocean really is?” she asks me. “All the maps laid out flat are of the land, the side of the planet where all the ground is. But the whole other side of the world is all water.”

“I know.” I lean on the railing next to her, feeling the air land on my eyelashes for brief moments before leaping out again.

“And it’s deep too.” She pauses. “How many times do you think you could stack yourself on top of each other until you got to the bottom?”

I let out a laugh. “What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know. Nothing.”

I reach my arm above my head and place my hand next to the stars that are just barely coming into view. They are small white dots, like mold in the sky. I put my hand around one and tense my fingers, squeezing it as if it might burst if I try hard enough.

━

One night, in college, Serena knocks on my dorm room. I talk to her less now, but we still see each other every two or three weeks.

            In her hands is a paper that has been crumpled and marked on with pencil crayons. Serena begins to talk frantically, and I examine the paper. It is about people feeling the urge to jump into bodies of water, or sinkholes in the ground. A call, the article names it. To explore something so vast, so unobtainable. To allow complete exposure, as if you were never anywhere else.

            When I tell Serena I am going on a boat in a few months, she becomes sure that I am going to throw myself overboard. She shows me article after article of people looking down, seeing the ocean, thrusting themselves into the waves. I tell her I am going to be fine, and that it is late at night and I need to sleep.

            “No, Valerie,” Serena insists. “You don’t get it.”

            “I don’t want to jump off boats, I promise. And I’m sure you don’t want to either. This is a random phenomenon, not something that happens to everyone.”

            Serena lowers her hands, but not her eyes. Random, she mumbles.

It is the way she says it that brings out something within me. Something that can only be found between two people who have known each other for years, known things about the other nobody else does. Though I doubt a stranger would suspect that about Serena and I now, the time spent together in our childhood still lingers. Maybe that is why I am so sharp with my words, something I come to regret as soon as they leave my tongue.

“Spit it out,” I say. Serena seems surprised for only a moment before she speaks.

“Sometimes, when I look out at the water, I want to jump in. Just to see if I can swim across the ocean, or sink trying.”

            I know what Serena is really talking about. She has wanted to go home for nearly two decades now, to a place where her father is a doctor and she is still a child. I want to tell her that it is in the past, but I know she will refuse to accept it. Instead, I put my hands on her shoulders. Behind her is a family photo I have pinned to the wall. In middle school, people often mistook us for sisters, but with my family behind her it seems like it would be obvious to anyone that the two of us could never be related.

            “Well, I won’t throw myself into the Pacific,” I tell her. “I’ve never wanted to.”

            Serena looks at the ground. “You don’t know that.”

            “You can go back home, Serena,” I tell her. “But no one will be waiting for you there.”

             Serena looks at the floor. Seeing her, downcast eyes, crumpled papers, it hits me only now that she and I are not as similar as I may want to believe. That someone’s birth is etched into them like a tattoo, a black line that shows on pretty girls, girls with braided hair, girls who trade lunches.

            After that night, Serena stops coming to my dorm room. It is the type of cease that is hard to notice at first, the type that I don’t think about until I am eating my lunch at a table with a single chair and wonder when things stopped being the way they used to be.

━

When I am on the ferry, I get the call that Serena has gone missing. Didn’t come back home last night, the person on the other end says. I turn off my phone and step outside, with the ocean rushing below. I look over the railing of the ferry and wonder how strange it is that, despite the news, I am still moving farther away from Serena. I wonder if we are all moving, all the time, through space, so maybe it doesn’t matter which way I or Serena go. Maybe it doesn’t matter if we are moving at all.

            After the trip, I hurry back home. I drive through our old neighbourhood, past the high school and kindergarten. It all looks the same; if I was sitting in the backseat I would have trouble distinguishing whether I was a child again or not. I think, in a way, that I understand what Serena means about never forgetting things. It seems so easy to remember everything from my childhood now, with all the buildings and houses right in front of me. Even if I wanted to forget, I couldn’t.

            I find the theatre, with the same carpet pattern on the floors. The shapes of the pattern look like gems in the ground, and I can hear Serena asking me if I have ever thought they would expand and create a crevasse in the Earth. She says, “Do you think it would be faster to go through the centre of the planet or swim, to get to the other end?”

            I can’t get to the room Serena and I used to go to without a keycard, so instead I enter the theatre with the broken screen I know they never use. I huddle up in one corner and go to sleep for the night. I don’t have trouble sleeping, maybe because I am certain Serena isn’t missing. She is gone, but not disappeared. I only wonder how fast she is moving.

            The next morning, I wait next to the double doors for the first employee to enter the movie theatre. He appears in the early morning – Serena’s father. He has the same dark, black hair as his daughter, even as it wisps and fades on his aging scalp. His eyes too, are the same, sharp and quick.

            I mean to ask him if he has heard anything about Serena, but before the words escape my lips I think of our parents, speaking in the language used to birth me. I think of Serena, all the times she tried to teach me.

            “It’s what you should’ve been speaking all along,” she says. I chew up the letters until they become something in a language Serena would be delighted at. They fizzle in my mouth like popping candy, and then I let them go.