She hardly ever laughed, unless it was a helpless giggle to please the eyes of a teacher or the kind where you know she's really dying inside and you wanted to know why she'd ever feel that way. And then one day, you understood. You two shared a bedroom--small, it was, but then again where you lived it always small, the best thing about it was how comfy it was, how pushed in and bunched. You liked closeness, but she didn't. She liked solid, pieces of things that were hard and smooth, that made texture feel like a literary element of wood. Yeah, she liked those. You remember watching her, just waking up in the middle of your sleep and you saw her elbow, bare elbow sticking out from one sliver of a white blanket and you've never seen skin like that in the night.
You wanted to paint it and see if it stayed that color, if it stayed the same. But you just hung your legs over the bed, grabbed your pillow and breathed into it, freckles disappearing in the darkness with only red hair trickling the cold in the side of your stomach. Your hair had grown long now, and you could feel your lips, the way it was so small, hers was heart-shaped.
You knew because you watched her drink a sip of her lemonade the day she arrived, and when she opened her mouth it was like she already had the taste in her tongue before she drunk it in. You watched her come out of the small pond near the back of the crossed-house, wearing the damp dress that clung to her legs, and you wondered if she'd like to play when she was a child, if she ever sunk herself in the mud when it rained and felt the grass beneath her palms just to see if the green-black spikes were sharp enough. You sat next to her at dinner one day, and touched her ankle so lightly that you swear you could hear her breath sharply on the end of your nose, but when you turned back she was laughing again, laughing that dying laugh.