A rest was once the distance after which a traveler must pause, which must be what I’m doing now, writing you this letter, which I may or may not be able to make myself send (by the way, this word comes from a cemetery here in Berlin)

Amy sends secret messages to her sister that her sister can’t read

She wants to make Zoe study more, but the plan backfires, and Zoe gets frustrated and threatens to give up.

Amy exchanges her first emails with Sasha. She pretends to have questions she doesn’t really have. You have to be very careful typing emails because there isn’t any way of going back, you have to just start over if you mess up. It’s a little bit like walking a tightrope over a gigantic canyon that will kill you if you fall. Amy tries to focus on the letters’ bright green lines. She doesn’t know how you send emails in Russian or if you can so she writes to him in English.

He always answers. This is the third secret that exists between Amy and Zoe, who thankfully is deemed a little young for emails still. Zoe loses interest anyway, after an initial outburst, and wanders off whenever Amy sits down at their mother’s desk.

Sasha appears not to use capital letters, which lends his emails an air of the forbidden even though they are only explaining the difference between the accusative case and the genitive case for the hundred millionth time. Amy wishes she could write to Sasha about something else, but she can never come up with anything.

Winter comes early and cold. There is ice on the sidewalks, and the dog slips and falls every time they take it out. It looks funny with its stocky little legs that fly in all directions, but Amy tells Zoe not to laugh because it seems to her the dog can understand and feels embarrassed. Amy always ends up having to scoop it up in her arms and lug it home, even though it’s dirty, although she doesn’t really mind as much as she pretends to. It’s nice to hold a living thing to you, especially a small thing like a baby or a dog.

There is an aisle at the Medex that the girls never visit

There is an aisle at the Medex that the girls never visit. One day it occurs to them that they could go by themselves while their parents are out. It is like when they learned how to read and worlds opened up before them: now they can’t imagine why they never went before, although they can’t remember what it was like before they went, either.

On this aisle they find pads for their periods and tampons, which is what they came to look at, but they also find things they’d never dreamed of, like intimate feminine wash, intimate waxing kits, and personal lubricant pumps. They widen their purview. They find condoms, pills for sexual fitness, pregnancy tests you pee on to see if you have a baby or not.

Speechlessly they agree to spend their savings on a box of tampons, a box of condoms, and a set of two pregnancy tests, one for each. Amy has more money because Zoe always spends hers, and anyway she gets three dollars less per month because she’s younger, despite her protests.

Amy makes Zoe make the actual purchase, too embarrassed, standing by the door like their parents might walk in at any moment. Too excited to resent her sister, Zoe is effervescent on the short walk home, swinging the sack of contraband wantonly around. At home they rip apart the boxes and take turns examining the instruction sheets inside. They take turns peeing on the pregnancy tests. They discuss if they will ever really use the tampons. Ever since their mom explained what being raped was they have worried what will happen to them when they grow up. Their mom said if they ever did get raped they must remember the way her brother’s girlfriend got freed without being murdered was to always look the rapist in the eye, which made him feel sorry for her, so even though he’d planned to shoot her, he did not. Their uncle’s girlfriend said he said he planned to kill her, and he had a gun, which he raped her with, as well. Zoe asked how you can rape someone with a gun as though she understood all the other parts of the story. Their mom explained that the rapist inserted the gun into their uncle’s girlfriend’s vagina.

They peer into the diagrams on the instructions, how to insert it into your vagina. They don’t know. It’s more fun to pee on the pregnancy tests.

They empty out a doll case and stuff everything inside and put it all the way at the very back of their closet, behind their shoes. They cover the case in sweaters.

Their uncle broke up with his girlfriend because afterwards it was too hard. He died of alcoholism. Not suicide.