Amen.

The oak seats around us ache and moan with each body that gives to them. The edges of the pews were rounded once. Now they’re jagged and chipped raw in more places than not. The unforgiving edges have scraped skin and stockings for years now. Threads of nylon cling to the splinters. The clicks of Sunday heels echo and soar to the outstretched arches of the nave; light from the painted glass windows straddles the floor. The priest sits in the chancel, his body small beneath the ceiling above him. He picks the skin around his fingernails, sucks at the blood that pools around the half moons.

An array of messy apologies to my left draws my attention. There’s Luz, in a dress too short and heels too high. Her hips jut into the pew ahead of her as she shuffles across the sea of legs. She settles haphazardly into the space next to me. Her bare leg, dotted with goosebumps, borrows warmth from mine. “God, you’re so late,” I whisper to her. “I know,” she says, hushed. She crosses one leg over the other, and the toe of her heel meets hard with the seat in front of her. “Oh, fuck,” she winces, now too focused on the scuff left on her shoe to notice the glares coming from the rows ahead of us.

Luz and I have always sat here during church, tucked away in the back. When we were small enough that the pews still swallowed us up, we’d sit cross-legged in them and paint our nails shades of red. Our mothers would sit in the front row, like good Christian women do. Once the sermon ended, my mother would tuck my hands into the pockets of my winter coat. “Put those away before someone sees them. You look like a whore.” I would cringe. Luz would laugh. I never found it funny that my pockets were left looking bloody every Sunday afternoon.

My mother was a mean woman. I always wondered how someone could be so angry for so long. So angry for so long, I’d bet her insides were black. She kept a house that wasn’t meant to be lived in. I learned how to live in discomfort, to sink into the feeling it fosters in your gut. To only feel too present in your body or entirely outside of it. To never feel like it is yours the way it should be.

I got my first period sitting on the world map rug in my fifth grade classroom. It left a kidney bean shaped stain on Ireland. The school nurse was a kind old lady who wore plaid pants and broaches and smacked her gum too loud. She gave me a hug and a pair of sweatpants to wear.

I told my mother what had happened when I got home.

“You what?” she asked, looking up from the sink, but not at me. Her fingers were cracked and raw from the scalding water.

I told her again.

She exhaled a long, cold sigh and shook her head.

Beside me, Luz tucks her hair behind her ear. Her neck catches my eye. It’s coated in powder a shade too light for her skin. In the spots where it’s most carelessly blended, deep red and purple bruises show through. A bad enough job that I wonder if she meant for it to work. I reach up and run my thumb over the bruised skin, my fingers grazing the back of her neck. “What’s this?” I whisper. She grins. There’s a streak of red lipstick on her front tooth.

“You ever fuck in a church?” she asks.

“No! Have you?”

Luz looks past the rows ahead of us, past the priest, to the room at the very front of the church. I follow her gaze to the heavy wooden door.

“Luz, in the fucking sacristy? You’re kidding.”

“Not even a little bit. In the tenth grade. Luke Romano.” My jaw dropped. “I halfway think the organ guy could hear us.”

“Jesus, Luz,” I whisper to her. She half-asses the sign of the cross and rolls her eyes.

I laugh, drawing a look from one of the old Italian ladies from the neighborhood in the row in front of us. The elderly woman shifts clumsily in her seat to look at us, or maybe just as Luz. She smells of coffee and thrift stores. “Have a little respect, girls.” Luz tells her where she can go.

“So was it good?” I ask. “The sex?”

“It was tenth grade, Gina. What do you think?”

I feel my cheeks redden. Luz’s eyes dart back and forth at mine. She starts to smile, her dimples deepening. “I’ll just say Luke Romano fucks exactly how you think he’d fuck.” She watches my smile grow to mirror hers, both of us picturing the gawky boy we’d grown up with, glasses too big for his face.

Luz has always been just a little more than me. A little more pretty, a little more brave, a little more fun. She is a supernova, so much all at once that you have to experience her in parts. And you could take her in forever.

For most of our lives, Luz and I grew up together. My father taught us how to ride our bikes on the sidewalk that bridged the space between our homes. Years later, we met Jeffrey Siciliano on that same sidewalk to buy shitty weed for the first time so we could roll a shitty blunt and pretend we were higher than we were. We spent summer nights sitting there, talking until the skin on our legs began to take the shape of the gravel underneath them.

But eventually Luz started growing up without me. When she got her first boyfriend, it felt like a betrayal. I was jealous of her. And I was jealous of him. So I started growing up too, but it wasn’t the same. Luz grew naturally. I grew intentionally.

I lost my virginity when I was eighteen to a boy I didn’t care about. A boy who didn’t know my favorite color. My parents aren’t home, but my sister is, so be quiet, he said. No problem. Lay on your back, he said. Okay. He touched my thigh. I moaned, probably. You bled on my bed, he said. Sorry.

I had sex. But Luz had sex. Loud, fun, kinky sex. Sex she told stories about. Sex that only felt uncomfortable when she wanted it to.

Throughout the church, the pews breathe sighs of relief as those around us descend to the cushions to kneel. Luz places her hand just above my knee and prods. Gently. “You there?” I nod, drawing myself out from under that boy and back to her.

I lower myself from the pew, my knees digging into bare foam where the upholstery on the kneelers is torn. The back of the pew in front of me holds a red Bible. It’s torn at the corner and worn past its cover along the spine. It smells of must and my grandmother’s perfume.

I catch Luz’s smirk from the corner of my eye.

“What?”

“Not the first time I’ve been on my knees in here.”

I shake my head, smiling. We pray.

It’s almost four by the time we leave. We’re swathed in the summer afternoon air the moment we walk outside. The kind you can feel on you. Not just on you, but touching you. It kisses the nape of my neck, caresses my shoulders, grazes my arms.

“Hey,” Luz calls. She fidgets in her purse for a moment and pulls out a joint. “You got time?”

“I’ll make time, for you.”

We pop Luz’s trunk and sit in the back, our legs dangling from the bumper. Our shoes lie in a heap on the concrete below us. She blows smoke in my face. I don’t mind. We sit there until everyone else has gone home for Sunday dinner and the sun has started to set over the steeples. Luz rests her head on my shoulder.

“What’s your favorite color?” I ask.

“Green,” she says.

Pretty.

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