The Space Between Us

Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, Pepilla the Gypsy and Her Daughter, (1910), detail. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Small children, small problems, my mother likes to tell me. Now I also understand: small children, small lies. My 6-year-old lies about the bathroom, whether or not she has to go. I don’t, she’ll promise, dancing back and forth and grabbing at the back of her dress. Or: I tried. She’s young, so I still know her—I know she hasn’t, and I know she does. And here we are, two soft bodies made of matching cells, touching skin, as our minds become repelling magnets—the more I push, the further she goes. I know you are lying, I tell her, but I’m grasping at what isn’t mine, and she keeps falling backwards into herself, to that place where I can barely see her at all.

“Darren is mad sexy,” Diandra tells me, all 16 years of her leaned up against the window of my English classroom after school, thumb swiping along the screen of her phone.

“I’ve been seeing him wait for you outside of class,” I reply, folding my laptop and putting it in my bag. “What’s up with you two?”

“Miss. Honestly, I don’t even know,” she says, running a pink comb through the part of her bobbed hair. “But it’s about to be something.”

“I like him for