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actually quite chaste. When she wasn’t looking directly at me, my eyes would fall to Ariel’s lips and I would feel the ghost sensation of them touching mine, or, when we sat on the bench or the swing, I would imagine sliding closer and feeling her arm around me.
    It was only at night, in the privacy of my bedroom, when the thoughts made me do what I knew was sinful, but felt so good in the moment I could only care when the sun came up again, and it was only one time, when Ariel and I ran physically into each other in the hallway as she was coming out of Nan’s room, that I longed for something less gentle with her and could imagine the feel of the wall at my back as her body pressed against me.
    Trained as she was, I was sure Ariel would see what was happening to me, would start to notice the sickness, but she never did, so I was left to try to stop the feelings all on my own.
    I started to punish myself when I thought about Ariel in a way no friend should think of a friend. I wouldn’t allow myself dessert. I would scrub the tea pan that had never been without a stain from its first day of use until my fingers were raw. I wouldn’t go to the garden.
    In no time at all, I was paler and thinner, and that, Ariel couldn’t help but notice.
    “Why must you listen to your mother?” Nan could see the changes in me too, and she was convinced Mama’s incessant nagging to be more of a lady, to be thinner, more alabaster, to keep my knees closer together, had to be the reason I was turning down sweets and refusing to come into the sun with them.
    “I’m not,” I insisted, channeling all my power to keep my gaze from following Ariel as she moved around the room, not quite eavesdropping, but tilting her head every so often at our conversation.
    “You do try to please her, Elizabeth,” Nan said, and her next breath was terribly labored, her chest blowing up like a balloon and then caving in so deeply as she pushed the air out again, it was almost gruesome. “You try to please all of us, but we are all so different. You have to be more careful, or you will tear yourself in two, trying to be everything everybody wants you to be.”
    I would have argued the point, lied and said I wasn’t trying to be, or not to be, anything, but Nan didn’t look right, and, watching her eyes roll suddenly back, I pushed to my feet, feeling Nan’s wrist twitch beneath my hand as Ariel rushed to Nan’s bedside.
    “What’s happening?” I asked her.
    “She’s having a stroke,” Ariel calmly returned.
    “A stroke?” I repeated, but, in my mouth, the word sounded foreign, and I couldn’t remember what it meant.
    “It’s very minor. It will pass,” Ariel attempted to soothe me with her words as her hand rubbed Nan’s arm, until, at last, Nan’s eyes were right again and she could focus them back on us. “See,” Ariel glanced softly up at me. “All over.”
    Dropping my eyes back to Nan, she appeared as she had a few seconds before, but I knew she wasn’t. Just like me. Nothing on the outside had changed, but nothing inside would ever be the same again.
    “It’s all right, Elizabeth,” Ariel explained. “She has these. She’ll continue to have them, but everything that can be done is being done.”
    “I’m fine,” Nan tried to make me feel better, but her words coming out garbled, they made me feel much worse.
    “She really is fine,” Ariel said, and, though I watched as her hand reached across the bed, it didn’t occur to me to try to avoid her touch until her hand touched mine and I felt so much from it, I thought I too might have a fit.
    It was wrong, I knew, to let Ariel touch me that way, to let her make me feel how she didn’t know she made me feel, to warp her kindness with my disease, and, pulling my hand from hers, I rushed out of the room, isolated by my shame and my thoughts, which I knew I could never tell another living soul.
    While it wasn’t exactly dinnertime discussion, I was well aware of what