They drove home under streetlights that turned the bouquet into brief moons. Tiana had kicked off the gold heels in the footwell and flexed her toes. Novah's crystal award sat buckled into the middle seatbelt like a passenger. Rochelle drove more slowly than usual.
"Are you mad at me?" Rochelle asked the rearview, addressing both and neither.
Tiana answered first. "I'm mad you made Novah feel small. I'm also mad at myself for liking the smallness sometimes because it made more room for me. That part's ugly. I'm not proud of it."
Novah looked at her sister. "You said my name on the stage."
"That doesn't erase the bedroom," Tiana said. "It just means I'm not only the bedroom."
Novah considered this with the seriousness she brought to fractions. "I'm not mad like fire. I'm mad like a bruise. It'll show for a while."
Rochelle's hands tightened on the wheel. "Bruises are honest. I can live with honest. I can't live with you thinking love is the same as spotlight."
"I don't think that," Novah said. "I think you get confused."
"I do," Rochelle admitted. "I got confused tonight in a way that hurt you. I'm sorry. I'm going to be sorry again on less decorated days, when I catch myself doing it in miniature."
Novah's voice was small but steady. "You can help with my hair next time without me having to ask while you're looking at Tiana."
"Yes."
"And come to the pantry Saturday once. Not for Instagram. For the boxes."
Rochelle almost smiled. "Dr. Bellamy got to you."
"Dr. Bellamy likes me," Novah said simply. "I like being liked for the work."
Tiana leaned her head against the window. "For what it's worth, Novah—if you ever want to come to an Ambassador practice and read your essay out loud to us while we walk, I'll make them listen. Sequins and all."
Novah's mouth twitched. "Your friends will be bored."
"Then they can be bored better," Tiana said.
At a red light, Rochelle reached back blindly. Two different hands found hers—one smaller, one manicured for photographs—and held on through the green.
XI.
Home again, the elegant bedroom looked like a theater after the audience had gone: beautiful, a little foolish, scattered with evidence of effort. Rochelle hung the red gown and stood in a robe, face washed clean of event armor. Tiana showered the gel out of her curls and emerged in an old T-shirt that said RIVERVIEW TRACK, though she had quit track last year and kept the shirt for soft reasons. Novah set the crystal award on the dresser beside the jewelry stand, then moved it to her own bookshelf in the room she shared with posters of the solar system and a signed flyer from a children's book author visit.