“Joriah wasn’t able to make the journey,” my mother says, and I exhale a bit of the dread I’ve been hiding. I won’t have to pretend all day then. At least, no more than usual.
She turns away from me. “Company’s here,” she says.
She won’t say Caramenta. She’s ashamed now to have given her daughter a slum name. My stepfather’s name is Daniel. His children are Esther and Michael. My mother was born Mellorie, but those who trick in Ash use x’s in their names as an identifier, so she’d been Lorix since before I was born. Here and now, she’s just Mel.
My stepfather comes in, his smile wide and genuine. He is blond, like his daughter. It’s an advertisement. Real Wileyites have white hair and skin so pale it’s a shade off blue. Daniel’s hair reminds his congregation that his great-grandfather came here willingly as a missionary from the city, not as a refugee or migrant trying to get into it.
He hugs me easily, with less hesitation than it took my mother to look in my eyes. “You made it. What do you think of the tie? Too on the nose?”
Usually, he wears a tunic like all men from the Rurals, but outsiders are coming and he’s attempting to dress like them. His tie is covered in little fish, smiling at one another as they swim in all directions.
“Are you going for holy and approachable, or completely cheesy?”
He fakes thinking about it. “Both?”
“Then it’s perfect.”
“Thought so,” he says, then nods over his shoulder. “Twins are out back.”
I see Esther and Michael outside, having the kind of conversation I’m sure only twins have. Esther looks pleading, Michael resolved. Neither seems to be speaking, and yet both have been understood. Michael’s black hair would have made him the outsider in the family if Mom and I hadn’t shown up. He is nice to me, but not like we’re family, not like I am someone he will ever give a nickname or call late at night. The twins don’t remember their mother, a woman whose face and past matched theirs far better than my mother’s ever will, but I’ve looked her up. In worlds where their mother lives, my mother never meets Dan and never leaves downtown.
Their conversation picks up again, and the wind carries Esther’s raised voice against the window. I turn away, trying to remember the last time I cared about anything enough to scream for it.
I change in my old room, now converted into Esther’s office. When she comes in, I take a container from my bag and toss it over my shoulder at her. She smiles as she catches it, running her thumb along the face cream’s silver top.
“You shouldn’t feed my vanity. It’s my worst trait,” she says, sitting on the cot that will be my bed tonight.
“That you think vanity is your worst trait is a sign of your vanity.”
I put on tights, even though they’re thick, black, and hell to wear in the desert, and Esther’s eyes fixate on my legs. This last trip has pushed the traversing bruises—unique stripes on either side of my limbs and torso—down my thighs and onto both sides of my calves. That alone wouldn’t force me to put on tights, but the garage tattoos on the back of my thighs, a massive eye on each leg, are also exposed.
My mother can never see the tattoos. I’ve had tattoos removed from my arms, chest, the base of my neck, and behind my ears. I’ve saved a little at a time to have the rest removed, but I started on the ones in plain view first. The next one I erase will be the largest: the six letters of someone else’s name scrawled across my back from shoulder blade to shoulder blade.
“Mom still thinks you never got tattoos before you left Ashtown,” she says.
I concentrate on not pausing in my task. “How did that come up?”
“Michael wants a plated tooth. She’s been using you as an example, because you’re worldly, but you didn’t alter your body.”
“He wants a runner’s tooth?”
“Worse,” she says. “He wants onyx, like Nik Nik.”
“No.” I look up from my tights so she’ll know I’m serious. “You can’t let him. If runners see him with an emperor’s tooth they’ll rip it out. It’s an insult. If he has to get one, get silver. Silver’s safe.”
She’s looking at me wide-eyed, seeing too much. It’s the same way she looked at me when she was twelve. She’s probably wondering how a Ruralite girl knows so much about downtown Ash’s runners.
“Is that what you two were fighting about?”
She waits a second, deciding whether she’s going to let me get away with moving the conversation along, then answers. “We weren’t fighting, we were discussing, and no. That was about something else.”
My sister tells me everything, so her pause means this is Michael’s secret.
“I was good at hiding things from her before I left home,” I say, sitting next to her. “That’s why Mom never knew.”
“And from me. I never saw them either until you came back.”
“You were twelve. I could have hidden an eye patch from you then.”
We talk for a little while, though mostly I listen. Eventually she looks out the window and stands. I stand, too, but I don’t have anywhere to go. This is where we separate. The sun is setting, so she will need to pray. Today, the theme will be gratitude, a litany of thanks from a girl raised in a place with nothing. She will don an apron for tonight’s festivities, something her people wear when they interact with the nonreligious, a sign of their willingness to help if asked. And I will wear my dress, a sign that I am not part of the church, just a nonbelieving donor.
But she’s taking the face cream with her, just like she does the lip balm and tooth rinses I bring. She wears products from me that change her appearance, and it almost makes up for the fact that she is too fair to ever look like me. When I see her, absent the sunspots of her peers, her teeth shining white in that ever-benevolent smile, I think, There, there I am. Because that’s what a sister is: a piece of yourself you can finally love, because it’s in someone else.
* * *
SHOES. I’D FORGOTTEN to bring cheap shoes. I’d grabbed the only dressy pair I owned, black with the distinctive gold line running up the back indicating the brand without saying it. Dell got them for me because she knew I’d embarrass myself at company parties in whatever I owned, and by extension embarrass her, but it doesn’t matter that they were a gift. These shoes could buy a month of food for the families out here. When I walk into the new church they click loudly in a crowd of heels too worn down to match the sound. It shames me more than it shames them, but it does shame us both. I make up for it by smiling too much, because my usual aloofness will look like elitism to them.