She was on her way to the dining hall that rainy day when she noticed her finger, blood pooling in a perfect ruby sphere. It occurred to Rosa that she must have pricked it somehow, and that she should feel something. But if she had, she couldn’t remember, and if it hurt, she couldn’t tell.
She stopped in her tracks and stood still, watching the pinprick of ruby in the rain. Unbidden, the thought crossed her mind that if she brought it to her lips, it would taste of raspberries.
It was a sticky summer, that year of eleven, when they first played the game. Siri had probably started it, but it was hard to remember. They would carefully adorn each other’s fingers with raspberries — fairy hats, Rosa called them — and take turns picking the berries off each finger, one by one, savoring the taste.
Siri said it tasted better that way. Secretly, Rosa couldn’t taste any difference between their game and popping the berries straight into her mouth, although she had carefully tested it many times alone, closing her eyes and willing herself to notice the difference. But she didn’t mind pretending, and had never brought it up.
Rosa had also never told Siri that raspberries were her favorite, that singular sweetness mingling with bitter tang lasting far longer in her memories than any sweeter fruit. Siri had just showed up on Rosa’s front porch one day with a tupperware of freshly-picked raspberries from the bushes that divided their properties.
“Call me Siri,” the girl had said when Rosa answered the door. She smiled. “Your new favorite neighbor.”
She had stepped inside unasked and offered Rosa the tupperware. “Want some?”
Rosa had taken the berries and led Siri to the dilapidated white fence in her family’s back pasture, and that had been that. Siri and Rosa, Rosa and Siri, with the white fence their unspoken spot that summer, legs dangling as they picked raspberries off their fingers and watched the clouds form and unform.
Rosa had no conception of self when she was with Siri. With everyone else, there was always some part of her aware of herself from the outside, watching how she appeared and recalibrating who she was. But it wasn’t like that with Siri. Things like age and clothes and coolness fell away when they were together.
Siri was a year older, but even then, at eleven and twelve years old, it never felt that way. It didn’t matter.
At least it hadn’t then. Rosa couldn’t remember when raspberries stopped tasting of Siri, but it had to have been by the end of freshman year, certainly by the school trip to the sea.
Rosa had looked forward to the trip for as long as she could remember. Everyone did, of course — in a town the size of theirs, the high school’s excursion to the beach was as exciting as it could get. But for Rosa, who had never been to the ocean before, it held a special significance. She would dream about the sparkling blue stretching out to the horizon, imagining it to be like the cornfields behind their houses that seemed to go on forever.
When she had told Siri about the trip that first summer, Siri had immediately understood. “The endless blue,” Siri called it, devoting pages in her signature red notebook to their plans. They had spent many an afternoon planning out their perfect day. They’d bring enough raspberries to last the whole bus ride. They’d build sand castles and collect sand dollars. They’d huddle together under Siri’s mother’s biggest towel as they watched the sun set over the water.
But freshman year, when Rosa could finally go, there was a new importance to the trip. They needed it, Rosa thought. It hadn’t been the same for a while between the two of them.
Eighth grade had been different for the two of them, with Siri at the high school, and Rosa still behind. They had seen each other less and less often, as Siri became busy with track meets and new friends and Rosa began working more and more at her family’s farmers’ market stand. Rosa had thought they’d return to their old rhythms once she joined high school too, but this year, all year, something had been off.
They had no classes together, and at lunch, Siri sat with the girls from the track team and Rosa stuck with her old crowd. When she would see Siri in the hallways, Siri would barely nod hello. And when they did hang out, usually evenings after dinner and before homework at their spot — the fence, which had always been run-down, was falling apart even more now despite their repeated resolutions to fix it — it felt different. Conversation still flowed as easily as it normally did, but it felt like it was increasingly about some new joke Siri’s new friend Cara had made, or about some new fascination of Siri’s that Rosa had to attempt to be interested in.
The trip to the sea would be different though, Rosa knew it. Just like old times. She had stayed up late the night before, packing a large red tupperware full of raspberries for the bus ride.
But when they got to the bus, shivering in the early morning cold, Siri said she was sitting with Cara. “We sat together last year,” she explained.
“You could sit across from us,” Cara said hopefully. It was clear she was trying to smooth things over, so Rosa nodded. She liked Cara, well enough. And the bus ride didn’t really matter, anyway. The beach was the important part.
When they arrived, after laying down their towels — Rosa on one side of Siri, Cara on the other — Rosa stood still for a moment in the breeze, savoring the shimmering colors, the murmur of waves, the wriggle of sand beneath her toes. She closed her eyes and breathed in the scent of salt. She could almost taste it on her tongue.
She turned to Siri, eyes shining. “Ready to go in?”
Siri smoothed the edge of her towel. “You go,” she said. “I’m gonna stay here. I need to get rid of this runner’s tan.” Siri laughed, sticking out her leg to show off her shorts tan.
“Oh,” Rosa said. “Well, let’s go after then? We’ve always wanted to do this, remember?” She smiled. “You know, the endless blue and all that?”
Siri stared at her.
Rosa’s smile suddenly felt forced. “I mean, didn’t we?”
“We talked about going to the ocean, yeah,” Siri said. She was smiling too, but in the way Rosa did when she was talking to customers at the farmer’s market. “But I didn’t mean going in. I mean, there’s sharks, Rosa. And Cara said the seaweed’s really gross.”
“What, are you scared?” Rosa asked. She was only half teasing.
Siri shifted and dug her toes deeper into the sand. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.” She looked up at Rosa. “Look, I can dip my toes in with you,” she said.
But Rosa was already lifting her t-shirt over her head, turning away so she didn’t have to watch the expression on Siri’s face. “It’s fine,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”
She ran down the sand to the cold that awaited her.
On the bus ride home, Rosa sat toward the back, shifting every few minutes to unstick her legs from the scalding plastic of the seat. She had pretended to listen to her seatmate as they boarded the bus in front of Siri and Cara, but now she simply clutched the red tupperware on her knees and watched as, unopened, it slowly fogged up in the heat.
When Siri had left for college, Rosa had gone to her going away party, had hugged her and wished her well. She had meant it too. But she surprised herself by the lightness in her chest when she thought about Siri leaving.
“I’m probably never gonna see her again,” she told her mom later that day, sitting on the kitchen counter as her mom cooked dinner, popping pomegranate seeds into her mouth.
She imagined what she would say, if they were to meet again, in a distant future. I still remember that red notebook you used to carry with you everywhere. The heart shaped birthmark on your left collarbone. When you left, I didn’t think I would see you again. And I was secretly glad.
Her mom laughed. “I doubt you’ll never see her again,” she said. “Believe me, college isn’t the end. And honey, why don’t you put down the pomegranate and get started on the salad?”
Over her senior year, wrapped up in final activities and last hurrahs, Rosa’s mind would only occasionally wander to Siri. She didn’t feel anything, not really, in those times when she thought about Siri being gone. Still, there was a sort of faint aching when she thought about it too long.
The summer after Rosa’s senior year, Rosa was stretched out among the weeds behind her house, naming the shapes of the clouds one lazy afternoon, when she received a text.
Hey, it read. I’m back in town if you want to hang out. But if you’re busy I get it. Just miss our crazy talks.
Rosa looked at it a second and then turned off her phone and resumed looking at the clouds. But the shapes were no longer anything recognizable.
That night, after dinner, she found herself padding across the back pasture in the near darkness. Her feet carried her to the old white fence, now half fallen down.
A familiar figure sat perched against it, faced away from her, head tilted up at the stars.
Even before Rosa reached the fence, the figure turned at the sound of her footsteps and hopped down, hugging her tightly.
“I really missed you,” Siri said, pulling back after a long moment, serious for once.
Rosa smiled and said it back. But she didn’t think she had, not in the same way, and the feeling gave her an uncomfortable and unfamiliar sense of power.
Talking came easy that summer, like always, on drives to concerts in nearby towns, hikes around the abandoned racetrack. In gazing at the stars from the weeds in an empty field. Raspberry picking in the late afternoon sunlight.
It wasn’t like high school, but it wasn’t like that first summer either. It was different. They were different.
Rosa drove that summer, with Siri in the passenger seat always, feet out the window in the breeze. In their endless conversations on those drives, she felt a small pleasure each time she disagreed, openly, with Siri. Rosa, as she told herself, was a more confident version of who she had been.
One evening, they sprawled out in the tall grass that grew behind the town library, watching the sky change colors in a contented silence. Rosa looked over at Siri, her arms tucked above her head, eyes closed. The light filtering through the trees cast endlessly changing patterns on Siri’s face. Rosa rested her cheek on her knees.
You know, I don’t really wish for any of that time in high school back, she wanted to say. Because it wouldn’t have been like this.
But then Siri sat up and stretched, smiling sleepily at Rosa. She was talking about ice cream, about library books, and Rosa let the moment pass.
They never did talk about how Siri had left, in more ways than one. Rosa told herself she didn’t want to ruin it, and that it didn’t matter now.
That last day at the abandoned racetrack, they stood at its edge, empty picnic baskets in hand, as the crickets began to hum. They had circled the track twice, and the light was fading now. Still, they stood facing each other, neither moving to leave.
“You won’t be back next summer,” Siri said softly, breaking the silence. It wasn’t a question.
Rosa nodded, watching Siri’s face.
Then Siri was reaching out and pulling her into a hug, tightly, briefly. Rosa held on and breathed in.
Rosa wasn’t coming back after leaving for college. That had always been the plan. She took a step back, swallowed, and inclined her head to the path ahead of them.
There wasn’t anything left for her here, after all, unless you could count the raspberries.
Now, Rosa stood still in the rain a thousand miles away from home, motionless as figures hurried around her. She watched the ruby droplet on her finger expand. For a moment, she felt certain of its taste. Heart beating fast, she brought her finger to her lips.
She dropped her finger quickly.
It tasted of salt, the ocean. She began to feel its sting.