Stars Rise

III. Frost and Fog

For most of Malyssa and Daia's childhood, they had lived with less. Other kids at their school had new shoes every time a new school year rolled around. Gleaming dance shoes for the first day that would appear again on photo day, and then never again, and street-style sneakers kept clean and polished for every other day of the year. Not these girls.

Living with an aunt who'd had four children and already sent two flying out of the nest, the twins who came to stay with her always had plenty of hand-me-downs around. Aries's old Reeboks, Elenor's knits and jackets, Tierra's old jeans — because that's how the fits worked out — and the same boy's roadbike that had passed from Tyson, the oldest, to Aries when she needed to get to her part-time job, to Elenor when her school placement was five miles away, to Tierra when she was getting into trouble and a bicycle gang would be safer than the crew Mama caught her hanging around with on the corner.

By the time Malyssa and Daia moved in, Elenor and Tierra were the two still living at home, and Elenor had gotten into City College of San Francisco, a twenty-five minute bus ride to an incredible top of the hill campus in Ingleside, and Tierra had a place at an alternative school a blessed miracle two streets over from home. And so, one hand me down roadbike became available to get one girl to school and save their aunt one person's bus fare.

Grades four, five, six, and seven, the twins alternated days biking to the school they had been placed in, by the city's random lottery, in a neighborhood one hour and two transfers from home. In fact, they fought over Tyson's bike, because the transit route went so far out of the way, all the way south to Daly City Bart Station, to catch the bus straight back north to their school in the Outer Sunset neighborhood, that a direct bike route could get there in only 40 minutes — with no risk of missing a transfer. To avoid being late, whichever sister had to take the Bay Area "Rapid" Transit to Daly City that day would have to leave an hour and a half early to be certain to not miss catching that bus. If she missed it, she would be 39 minutes late after waiting the 19 minutes and the 20-minute bus ride, and certainly earn detention.

And so the first four years they lived with Aunt Sophia, they negotiated and haggled, stored up sick days where the healthy sister could still ride, and considered inflicting mild injuries to prevent the other from being able to. In other words, they scrapped. Threw each other around Sophia's living room (where Auntie slept on a pullout because here two bedrooms slept four children), clawed at each others' faces, pulled each other's hair, and kicked each other's shins.

Their back-to-school present for the eighth grade had been a set of identical, deep purple, sturdy road bikes. The right fit — because Tyson's frame had always been too big. "That old thing still sold for fifty dollars, and this investment is worth it for what I save on Bart fare," Aunt Sophia had notified them.

For the past four years, they biked everywhere. Paying back the investment, they never rode transit.

"Those bikes are evidence," Aunt Sophia said now. "I can't believe you teleported away and left them." The three sat in her cottagey kitchen, cups of tea with mint fresh back from the back garden steaming in front of them on the tablecloth.

The scent was soothing enough while it was still too scalding to take a sip. Sophia took Dian's face in her two hands. The woman was eternally young, her hands softened with coconut-scented lotion, and she hadn't changed a bit in their memory. "Now, no contact is needed for this kind of diagnostic scan," said Sophia, talking them through what she was doing, "but everything comes down to focus. Touching will help focus. Plus, it feels good." Leaning forward in her old hand-made wooden chair, she gazed into her niece's ice blue eyes.

"I'm scanning the forebrain. It'll be important that the frontal lobe be repaired flawlessly as that's the home of humanity's higher-order thinking and problem-solving. I know this kind of visualization has eluded you so far, but remember you don't need to close your eyes to see with your mind's eye — it's like daydreaming with your eyes wide open." Her black eyes were fixed, as if staring into space, but that space was Dian's olive toned cheek.