Nova's driving. Rosa's got shotgun with her boots on the dash.
Ruby and Lashes are on either side of me, Hope's in a car seat wedged in the way back with a diaper bag the size of a body.
And there's a Chevy with two of the guys in it forty feet behind us the whole way into the city, because Amara doesn't let women off the property alone and hasn't since before I got here.
"Okay, ground rules." Nova catches my eye in the mirror. "We're not buying anything practical. Ruby already tried to make it about dish towels. It isnotabout dish towels."
"I need dish towels," Ruby says.
"You have ahusbandand apaycheck, buy dish towels on your own time." Nova takes the exit. "Today we look at things we don't need, and we make Mila try on something that isn't owned by Lashes'."
"Hey," Lashes says.
"Your clothes are great. They're four sizes too big for her and she looks like a kid in her dad's shirt." Nova glances back. "No offense."
"None taken," I say.
It's the truth.
Ten days in Lashes's clothes, the shirt hanging off me, the jeans rolled six times at the ankle, and I've stopped caring what I look like so completely that I almost can't understand what we're driving to a shopping center to fix.
Almost.
There's a part of me, small and buried and nine years old, that heard we’re trying on clothes with women who I think are my friends, and got excited.
* * *
The mall's got a fountain, a food court, and too many people. I hate it for the first ten minutes.
Nobody warns you about crowds after. It isn't fear, not exactly.
A crowd is two hundred people you can't track at once and two hundred sets of hands you can't see, and my whole body lights up faster than I can answer it.
I'm through the doors with my back already against a support pillar before I've decided to move.
Lashes appears at my shoulder.
She doesn't say a word about it. She stands next to me, half a step back, so there's a wall on one side and her on the other.
She reads a store directory she isn't reading until my breathing comes down. "Better?"
"Yeah."
"Malls are a lot. It gets easier over time." She hooks her arm through mine, light enough that I can pull out of it, and I don't. "Come on. Nova's already gone feral in a shoe store."
It does get easier. Not all the way. But by the second store, my back's come off the walls, and I'm standing in the open like a person.
By the third I've picked something up off a rack to look at it, a scarf I don't want, and put it back, and the small ordinary motion of it—wanting nothing, buying nothing, just touching a thing because it's soft—undoes something in me I didn't know was still knotted.
Rosa buys sunglasses she doesn't need and wears them inside.
Nova tries on a hat that's wrong for her and makes us all vote on it and overrules the vote.
Ruby carries Hope when Lashes's arms give out and hums to her, low, in Spanish, and Hope watches her mouth move.
Nobody asks me anything. Nobody makes me the center of it.
They fold me into a normal afternoon and let me stand in it, and for a couple of hours I'm not a woman who got out of a hole in the ground.
