From Distant Shores
May 2024From outside the window, the world of Athens, Florida trembled green and tugged at Novalie’s eyes, demanding attention. So much so, that when Aneilia’s mechanical pencil was tossed onto her desk, Novalie nearly fell completely over the edge of her seat. Novalie swiftly deconstructed the mechanical pencil and pulled out a tiny scrolled-up piece of paper with a note in impossibly minuscule writing.
My parents are ok with dinner. 6 pm Friday. 118 April Lane.
Novalie had been asking to hang out at Aneilia’s house for forever. She turned back to face Aneilia but found her busy observing the group of girls in the back of the classroom, all surrounding Liv Burman, who hated Aneilia and made everyone hate her too. Liv was the reason why Novalie started eating cafeteria food and stopped bringing packed lunches.
Aneilia didn’t seem to understand that people could hate her. She treated Liv the same as she treated everyone, bombarding them with questions.
“Why don’t eighth graders have recess?” asked Aneilia. “We have a fifteen-minute outdoor break but they stopped calling it recess.”
“Because we’re not kindergarteners anymore,” said Liv.
“I do notice that kids start sticking to stricter social hierarchies, and into these gendered… herds,” offered Aneilia. “What are your thoughts on this?”
Novalie was both envious of and repulsed by her shamelessness. The girls around Liv giggled quietly as they eagerly waited for Liv’s response.
Liv flared her nostrils, flashing the whites of her eyes at her. “Yeah whatever Aneilia, stop making a big fuss and go be a kindergartener with Mariam Webster over there,” she said, referencing Novalie’s nickname. “We’re talking about the end of the year formal, very grown-up business you wouldn’t understand.”
Aneilia shrugged, unbothered. Liv looked over at Novalie and sneered. Novalie felt herself shrink and avert Liv’s gaze, waiting for her to turn back to her posse before mustering a tight smile at Aneilia. She weakly held up the mechanical pencil to confirm their plans for later that week.
“What kind of food do humans like?” Aneilia asked her partners Bill and Sue.
Bill opened their completely empty fridge, grinding his teeth. The three of them stood in their magazine-cover kitchen, not a single utensil or pot in sight.
“Lasagna,” said Sue. She looked down at her arms, then at Bill’s, and then finally at Aneilia. “We look like we can pass for Italians, maybe not Aneilia though.”
Aneilia tucked her blonde hair behind her ears. “I told them to give me brown hair, this is a genetic rarity, to have two dark-haired parents.”
Bill shook his head. “I dunno, humans reek of infidelity, maybe my wife procreated with another man with lighter hair–”
“Shut up,” said Sue. “There is no time mulling over what we cannot change. What we can do is focus on not letting this young human see through our cover.”
Bill clicked his tongue in a way that made a glassy, crinkling sound. “Novalie is of Chinese descent, do you think she would react poorly to pasta?”
Aneilia shook her head. “She mostly eats dining hall food anyways, which is pretty American.”
Bill sighed. “Work is so easy, I drive to the big box, type for eight hours, smile at coworkers, and then come home. How does one talk to a human child?”
Aneilia began to say something but Sue cut her off. “You’re a human child too so you don’t need to adhere to the customs as much. And I’ve seen your reports, you are far too aggressive with your intel gathering.”
Aneilia squinted with annoyance. “Nobody answers questions like Novalie. She does not do the things the rest do with their eyes.”
Bill and Sue smiled, together, they rolled their eyes in slow motion.
“It’s so crude. I’ve noticed that this behavior peaks at age twenty-five and then subsequently drops,” said Sue.
“Huh,” said Bill, “I thought it just got worse over time.”
Aneilia sighed. “It’ll be weird for me to be seen at one of their depots, can the two of you buy the lasagna by Friday? We also need props. Forks and… chopsticks?”
“Yes,” said Bill.
“Respect customs,” agreed Sue. “We will refrain from asking too many questions, act amicably, and hopefully her suspicions will lower.”
“How long has she been investigating the coast now?” asked Bill.
“Unsure,” replied Aneilia. “When we met last semester at Braddock, she had been investigating for a while, and had already printed out photographs of our lights.”
Sue sighed. “I just hope it doesn’t come down to termination.”
Bill shook his head. “Don’t even mention it, casualties are to be as minimal as possible.”
What to wear? Novalie and her mom struggled over which of her dresses to don for the occasion at the end of the week. The two garish garments lay limp and wrinkled on the couch, an iron heating up on the kitchen counter.
“Xiao Jiu,” her mother said her Chinese name, “Did you think of a present to bring them?”
Novalie paused, wondering for a moment if she should lie.
“I forgot,” she said.
Her mom made a disappointed exhale and walked towards Novalie’s room.
“Wait! I told you not to go in there!” said Novalie, and all of the strength in her legs powered her as she raced to her room and blocked the entranceway. Her mother acquiesced.
Novalie smiled sweetly. “What were you going to grab?”
“Just the basket on your closet’s top shelf. I got some fruit today. We can scrap together an arrangement,” her mother replied.
Novalie moved quickly to find the item her mom wanted, bringing a stool to her closet and rummaging through the ruckus. Lisa Sun was a surgeon in China but after moving to America, her job was to raise Novalie. Though she never seemed to let go of her excruciating precision when it came to judgment and criticism.
From up on her stool, Novalie cast a wary glance at her desk, what she was guarding from her mother. She wasn’t going to expose the investigations to her until she was sure.
One could find a small universe sprawled on the underbelly of the cheap IKEA writing desk: newspaper clippings of alien sightings, Aneilia’s illegible poetry scrawled on math homework, and endless photographs of the Athens beach painstakingly scotch taped to the cheap chipboard. They were almost all pitch black, all taken at night, and each depicted the same thing, the Seabrights: three silver rings of light hovering above the waves.
As Novalie fished out the basket from the back of the top shelf, she remembered the first time Aneilia was in her room. She had caught Aneilia standing before the photo frame her mom bought from TJ Maxx, the one that still had its stock photo: a blonde girl frozen in a field surrounded by sunflowers.
Novalie herself had been startled by how similar her friend looked to the girl in the photo. It wasn’t just because Aneilia was blonde too. Her face was extreme in its symmetricality and had a quality about it that made it both hard to remember and to forget. Extreme genericness.
Novalie had watched as Aneilia noticed the resemblance herself, her eyes shifting from the photograph to Novalie’s makeup mirror, a look of surprise stricken on her face as if she were looking at someone else. At that moment, Aneilia, who was unusually skittish and noticed any minute changes in noise or movement, was completely frozen like the girl in the photograph, unaware of Novalie’s presence. She looked haunted. Her light gray eyes were wide and she had a hollow look about her. And then Novalie saw it: a silver glint in Aneilia’s eyes, a sharp shade of lightning gray that she had not seen anywhere else, except…
The wicker basket was coated in dust and made Novalie sneeze explosively as she lowered it from its shelf. She presented it to her mother.
“Thank you, this is perfect,” was the response she got. Her mother ran a wet rag over the basket and let out a hopeful sigh.
Novalie pedaled into the dark.
“How the fuck are you going that fast?” Aneilia called out from behind. Novalie hated Aneilia’s new obsession with curse words.
“Dunno, guess you’re just too fucking slow,” Novalie yelled back. She had waited at the edge of Aneilia’s driveway, whispering into one of two electric blue walkie-talkies until Aneilia also slipped out her window.
They were riding through Athens, a small beach town that was completely flat and bad at tourism even though that was its only chance at survival.
“Where are we going?” hollered Aneilia.
A year ago, their friendship had begun with bike rides, Novalie as the local and Aneilia as the new kid in town. Novalie quickly exhausted the usual spots: the diner, the one and only strip mall, the Food Lion. Now they just biked for the sake of biking, occasionally stopping at a memorable tree or parking lot to talk and eat candy bars.
“We’re going to the beach,” said Novalie.
“Is it too late at night to go to the beach?”
“That’s kind of the point.”
Aneilia stopped her bike completely.
“What are you doing?” asked Novalie, whipping her head back. She stopped too, nobody was out on the street this late. “There’s something I wanted to show you for a while now but you have to promise not to tell anyone.”
Aneilia shifted uneasily. “Can’t you just tell me now?” she asked.
“Are you scared of the water? We aren’t getting in. It’s just something I can’t explain with words, you wouldn’t believe me anyway,” said Novalie.
“Ok, I will comply,” said Aneilia.
They rode for a while before Aneilia spoke again.
“Why are you showing me this now?”
Novalie didn’t know herself. “I just spend a lot of my time recording this… phenomenon. Like really recording it. But it doesn’t seem real until I tell someone. You know?”
Aneilia shrugged. “Even if you didn’t tell anyone, it doesn’t make it less real.”
But Novalie pretended she didn’t hear. Instead, she let the wind rip at their ears and they rode wordlessly until they reached the beach. They left their bikes and shoes against a metal fence, ditching the still hot concrete as they walked onto the sand, cool and loose underneath their bare feet, burying their trail as they went. It was like they were sinking as they were walking, and it made a heavy cadence to their steps: down and forward, down and forward.
“I saw a flock of avocets yesterday,” said Novalie.
“Avocet?” asked Aneilia.
“It’s a kind of bird. They aren’t supposed to be here in the summer, but they were circling the palm tree by the cafeteria.”
“Where are they supposed to go?”
“North, midwest actually.”
The sand grew hard as they approached the water, their weight beginning to be met with some solidity, some give from the seawater, a slight buoyancy. Their cadence had quickened into fat slaps that propelled them forward. Above them, the night sky swam with constellations, but the moon was just a sliver.
“Do they have a venereal term?” asked Aneilia.
Novalie scrunched her face. “What’s that?”
“It’s like when you say a pride of lions or like, a colony of ants,” said Aneilia.
“No idea, probably not,” said Novalie.
“It’s weird how some do and some don’t,” said Aneilia.
They continued towards the pier, the tide coming in every once in a while to brush at their ankles, destroying the specific permutation of interchanging footprints left behind them. It was never really cold in Athens, but that night they shivered in the cold cast of starlight.
Novalie shrugged. “Well, anyways, I was wondering if the avocets had anything to do with the Seabrights.”
Aneilia’s steps slowed. “What’s that?”
“I’ve been studying the coast for a while now, and I think there is something wrong with this beach,” Novalie continued. “Let me show you, it’s near the pier.”
Novalie’s steps quickened and Aneilia matched her speed.
“How would the birds have anything to do with the lights-” she whined.
“Seabrights.” corrected Novalie.
“Ok, Seabrights. What do the birds have to do with that?”
Novalie appreciated Aneilia for going along with her small insistences.
“It’s getting close to the solstice, which is also when the Seabrights reach their maximum illumination. And last year there was a group of beached whales the week before. Just weird crap like that,” said Novalie.
“Yeah, weird shit,” Aneilia grinned, emphasizing the ‘t’ at the end of the word shit.
Novalie couldn’t help but grin back.
She continued, “When it first happened all kinds of rumors started – Navy practice drills, Russian surveillance, even… aliens.”
Aneilia nodded slowly, her shoulders and neck bobbing up and down too. “What do you think it is?”
Novalie squinted at the horizon swirling with black and navy. “The military base is too far from here… please don’t think I’m crazy, but I think it’s something extraterrestrial.”
Aneilia and Novalie stopped beneath the pier, water at their ankles.
“Anytime now,” she said. “There’ll be these rings of light, the brightest silver, and I swear, and it’s not an airplane or the moon, I see them every time I come here.”
And so the two girls leaned against the wooden pillars, waiting for magic that never came. After half an hour of eager small talk, Aneilia shook her head.
“Novalie, I don’t know if tonight is the night.”
Novalie’s mouth twisted in one direction. “Come on, let’s wait a little longer.”
“I don’t think it’s very nice of you to make up stories like this,” said Aneilia, “even if you were bored.”
“I am not making shit up!” said Novalie. “I can’t believe the first time I try to show anybody they don’t come out. I swear–”
“It’s okay,” said Aneilia.
“Every other time!” Novalie said to herself.
Aneila started to wade back towards the dry beach, the water having grown to their shins since they first got there.
“Why would I be bored?” asked Novalie, calling after her. “Why did you say it like that?”
Aneilia kept walking until she was completely out of the water before turning back. “Whatever. Ignore what I just said. Let’s return to our bikes.”
Novalie followed slowly, her steps being the ones dragging behind Aneilia now. She knew the answer to her own question: Of course she was bored, there was nothing to do in Athens when you only had one friend.
“She tried to show me the pier,” said Aneilia.
Bill and Sue shared a look of concern. They were in a two car garage with one 2008 silver Toyota Corolla, leaving room for them to sit on the floor beside the car. This was where Aneilia slept.
“Was any information compromised?” asked Sue.
“No,” said Aneilia. “But I lied to her for the first time.”
“Now that is a lie,” said Sue. “We are under disguise, our entire presence is dishonest.”
“Perhaps she means in a more… direct way,” Bill pondered. He started to pat Aneilia’s lap with the back of his hand, palm up. “You are too sentimental,” and then after a pause: “What did she ask you?”
“Did she ask if you were different?” pressed Sue.
“No, she just asked what I thought about the ships,” said Aneilia. “She called them ‘Seabrights.’ Pretty name.”
Bill nodded. “And how did her question make you think?” he asked.
Novalie shook her head. “Humans lie all the time. But I think she was showing me something special, a secret… I feel…” she clutched her chest.
“I find it worrisome that you are more concerned about her emotional safety than our security,” said Sue.
“I have to agree with Sue here,” said Bill. “For our safety, and hers, you have to keep some distance.”
Aneilia nodded, not saying anything else. Bill and Sue looked at each other again before getting up and going back in the house.
“The dinner is too close to cancel. We will go through with it, but just be wary,” said Sue as she closed the door.
They left Aneilia in the dank garage. She knew they were right. But earlier that night at the pier, she had felt a powerful tug in her new body, one of wanting to share something secret in return, a dangerous need to assert herself frankly. She remedied this unknown feeling welling up inside her by resting her eyes on what she knew best, her collection of bike parts pinned to the walls of the garage with nails. It was placed in such a fashion that it spiraled out from the middle of the wall, tires, gears and broken handlebars glued and roped and nailed together.
She remembered the first time Novalie asked if she wanted to go biking, and she had spent half a week studying bikes, their history and mechanics. She went to the junkyard and compiled all the components of a bike from what she gleaned from The Art of the Two Wheeled Beast by Jean Wilder. She learned that the first wheel was made six thousand years ago but this slim device was only invented in the last two hundred. How rudimentary, she had thought as she observed the pieces, yet wonderful.
But it was only until she got on the bike that Aneilia realized that no amount of studying could prepare her for the experiential aspect of the human bike. Novalie had watched on in horror as Aneilia veered straight into a ditch after ranting about the genius of shifting gears. She violently somersaulted off, slamming into the wet grass, staining her white polo shirt green.
“Aneilia!” she had heard Novalie scream. Novalie ended up tripping off her bike trying to dismount on the side of the road, tumbling alongside her. “Are you okay?”
Aneilia had never felt the body she was in so alive as it did when it was hurting; her knees stung from being scraped by the bike pedal, her abdomen ached from the impact, and her head throbbed. “I think I’m dying,” she had said, completely serious. “Internal bleeding.”
As her head spun, Aneilia had thought Novalie had begun to malfunction too. A choking noise erupted from Novalie and Aneilia peered over to her, curious despite the pain. All of the liquids: the snot, saliva, and tears dripped down from Novalie’s cheeks as she shook from laughter. She was laughing! After a while, she said: “Trust me, you’re gonna be okay.”
“You don’t know that,” said Aneilia. But as she protested she could already feel the pain in her stomach starting to subside.
“Just say you don’t know how to bike,” said Novalie. She was still laughing, but it came out in more gentle tremors. “I can teach you.”
Aneilia wiped off the blades of grass on her shirt. “I thought I did my research.”
“I swear you seemed like you really loved biking,” said Novalie.
“Just wait ’til I actually learn the way of the two wheeled beast.”
Novalie had given Aneilia a curious look then, incredulous and in awe.
That night, Novalie patiently held onto Aneilia’s handlebars to stabilize her bike for her to learn how to pedal. Aneilia felt that unknown feeling for the first time, an expanding cavern in her chest – something boundless like anarchy, which perhaps was just love.
Now alone in the garage, Aneilia appreciated the deconstructed bike pieces pinned to the wall, taken out of their context and holding sentimental value. After Novalie taught her how, biking was indeed one of her favorite activities on the planet, along with prose poetry and bird watching. Aneilia touched the chain and gear hung closest to her, the grease blackening her fingers. It was something she thought humans would consider art.
Novalie saw Liv Burnman’s turquoise toenails above the water as she finished her lap in the pool. Liv was always late, but it didn’t matter because her times stayed the same: fast.
“Hey Novalie,” said Liv out the side of her mouth, crouching down at the edge of the pool and dangling her feet in the water. She usually called her Mariam.
“Hi Liv,” said Novalie. She wanted to get out of the pool and could feel her fingertips pruning, but she felt compelled to continue the conversation without interrupting. She took off her goggles and blinked forcefully, her legs kicking underneath to keep herself afloat as her elbows rested on the plastic grate at the side of the pool.
“Coach said we are doing the medley relay with Riley and Anne,” said Liv.
Novalie nodded. “Cool.”
“You’re pretty fast,” said Liv. “How do you do it?”
“What do you mean?” said Novalie. “You’re our best swimmer.”
“Ha, thanks,” said Liv. And then after a pause: “But I mean with school.”
“What?”
“How do you also get good grades?”
“Yeah, well,” Novalie thought about the comfort assignments gave her, a fat red A at the top of an exam, “My mom wants me to be a good student.”
“Oh, I’m sure she does,” said Liv. “You know, Mr. Langley tells me if I don’t get him my essay by Friday he won’t let me pass his class.”
Novalie finally knew where the conversation was going. “Do you want me to take a look at your essay?” she asked.
Liv averted Novalie’s gaze. “Yeah sure, that would be really great actually.”
Novalie pulled herself up and out of the water. As they sat side by side, Novalie’s arm brushed against Liv’s. Liv scooted away immediately but Novalie didn’t notice.
“Yeah, also I’m having a party at my house before the formal. Riley and Anne are coming too,” she said. “You are free to join us.”
Novalie swished her legs in the water, trying to contain her excitement. “I’ll ask my mom,” she said. She immediately regretted her lame response. “Could Aneilia come too?”
Liv made a face as if she had just tasted something awful. “Aneilia? Oh yeah you guys sit at lunch together. I don’t know, she’s a little…” Liv made the face again.
Novalie nodded slowly. “Right, yeah that’s fine.”
Liv shrugged. “You guys are different. Aneilia, the way she asks questions, it’s kind of … alarming, right?”
Novalie nodded again.
“Like, you know how things are, and I like that. Maybe even quiet or mysterious. At first I thought Aneilia was cool, but she’s just kinda annoying. She doesn’t seem to really get it…” Liv couldn’t find the right words to finish her thought.
Novalie felt herself standing up to go. Liv’s assertion of her tacit acceptance made her want to hurl.
“I think my mom will probably be here soon to pick me up,” she said as she walked towards the locker room.
“Yeah, just don’t forget my essay,” hollered Liv.
“Yup, I’ll get it to you by Thursday, that way you can revise it so–” said Novalie, but her response was swallowed by a splash; Liv had already dived head first into the pool.
Novalie and her mother ended up deciding on the blue sundress that pinched at Novalie’s armpits and a neat bun that her mother laboriously wrestled her hair up into. But meeting Aneilia’s parents, Novalie now knew it was pointless to have spent that much time putting herself together. The Otts were not like the other white families in town.
Aneilia Ott’s parents had unnaturally narrow shoulders and normal-sized heads. Their small torso-to-leg ratio made it seem that they were floating above the dinner table, bobbleheads with giant knives in their left hands and chopsticks in their right. They communicated with each other with sideways glances and small chin twitches that made Novalie feel like she was watching an intricate dance between two rodents relaying important information – an encroaching coyote, a hawk circling, a human trying to smoke them out. She watched them eat their lasagna like little field mice and tried to hide her judgment. When Aneilia returned to the table, Novalie let out a long, secret exhale and unclasped the strand of hair she had been fiddling with.
“Here,” said Aneilia, placing four glowering oranges onto the table, all from the fruit basket Novalie brought as a present.
Novalie grabbed the one farthest away from her.
“Why did you pick that one?” asked Aneilia. Aneilia’s voice was always louder when she was asking a question.
“Don’t be so abrasive Nellie, people pick things for arbitrary reasons all the time,” said Aneilia’s mom. Her voice was always the same volume, right above a whisper. “It’s quite ru–”
“Why did you pick that one?” persisted Aneilia.
Novalie was always taken aback by her curiosity but she liked it when Aneilia asked questions like this. Eighth grade had been better because as it happened she had Aneilia to explain it to. “Because it’s the least smooth, look at its rough skin, that means it’ll be easy to peel, which means there has been enough time for the fruit to sweeten.”
“So if an orange is hard to peel, is it safe to assume that it will be more acidic?” asked Aneilia, emphasizing the word acidic.
“Not necessarily, but it’s a safe guess. Just means there is more water content, if it’s hard to peel and sweet, that means it’s juicier too.”
Aneilia smiled. “Everything is related to water.”
Each of the Otts picked up an orange and started peeling them. They ate a slice of their orange and then silently exchanged slices, doing this multiple times and murmuring about the peel-to-sweetness ratios, ranking them precisely.
“I think it’s a good heuristic, Novalie. But these two have indistinguishable sweetness while the peels are the same,” said Aneilia’s dad, holding up two halves of oranges. He turned to Novalie. “Thank you. You are instrumental.”
Novalie smiled and nodded, her initial fears of meeting Aneilia’s family, even though she was the one begging to visit the big house at the end of the culdesac, were quelled, swallowed by a bigger relief of acceptance.
Puberty had clutched Novalie at the age of thirteen and that night she woke up to the feeling of her breasts swelling in the Floridian heat. In her semi-dark room, she stared at the gradient rings of water damage on her ceiling left by the negligent upstairs neighbors and imagined it as a topography map of an unknown land.
She listened unwillingly to her mother in the next room on the phone with her dad; it was morning in Shanghai. Some of the words she could pick out: fang wu bao xian, home insurance; zui jin xin wen, the recent news; xiao jiu lai yue jing le, Little Jiu got her first period. Her dad started the arguing, his voice harsh and made harsher from the distortion of the phone, something about tampons being bad for girls, and her mom retorting that she was on the swim team so it was a necessary evil.
Novalie began hallucinating the chlorine from the pool, the air around her coalescing into a viscous mixture she was now floating in. She loved to swim. The sport was all motion and senses – moving through water, she could feel the proportions of her power with each stroke. Her coach called her stone face but Novalie thought her face betrayed her all the time. But nobody noticed; they only saw her when she won something, when she was finally at the podium. Aneilia did though. She would be the one to wait for her in the locker room, wrap a towel around her shoulders and ask her about her favorite distance to swim.
Novalie wiped the sweat collected in the divet between her nose and her cheek. With her blanket on the floor, there was nothing more she could do except take her shirt off. She did, but a pang of shame made her put it back on.
The streetlight outside their apartment buzzed synchronously with the katydids, and she confused their rhythm for her own heartbeat. Something about dinner at Aneilia’s home had made her want to throw away all of her Seabright photographs. Images of oranges floated to the surface, the creamy insides of the peel, Aneilia’s parents’ mousy chatter, their wide eyes, their shared extreme curiosity.
Nobody in Athens would have been able to figure it out, except Novalie, who was not repulsed enough, who was perhaps more similar than different.
Novalie’s breath quickened, until she became suspicious of it. But there were benefits to living in the half-basement apartment – it was good for escape.
“Can I show you something?” asked Aneilia.
“Oh yeah?”
Somewhere in Athens, Florida, eighth graders were partying with Liv Burnam before their disco-jubilee. But not Novalie or Aneilia.
They were biking again.
Strangely, Novalie knew that Aneilia was still deciding if she should show her anything at all. So she stayed extra quiet. When they got to a big willow tree, they stopped and laid their bikes in the tall grass. A faint smile grew on Aneilia’s face.
“It’s something I wrote.”
Novalie just nodded, afraid to change Aneilia’s mind.
Aneilia pulled out a journal, its cover a collage of disc shaped objects: buttons, bottlecaps, and nickels. It reminded Novalie of the bottom of her desk.
Her eyes were still and honest. Normally the color of water, they were shining now. Strands of hair framed her face, trembling slightly. She paused again before starting to read, her voice faint.
“The sky negotiated with the water, and I landed silently on the foam. I was given new layers to wear, bound to me in a flash of light. I breathed in the salt, pollen, and fish. I said each of these words out loud to myself, feeling my mouth warp and react to the air, casting feeble vibrations out into this vast, foreign kingdom. My tongue ached and I craved to know the names of things. My eyes stumbled at the ferocity of light and I shivered at the new system of colors laid out before me. I knew what all of them were called but did not know which one was which. I was spinning, nauseous. But when my bones and muscles heaved and braced to steady me, I was pleased. I looked down and said to myself: these are my hands, my nails. I touched this body I have now, the skin softer than I expected, the organ meant to resist the world around it elastic and pliable. They were here with me too, both taller. I was the one given the chance to start completely new, here. We stepped in towards the beach, noisy waves at our knees, their crashes welcoming.”
Aneilia looked up at her friend, who couldn’t help but smile at Aneilia, a secret buried exquisitely between them.
“Thanks,” she whispered into the night.