“Our mother always told us no to tell lies, even to ourselves, because they became truer every time you said them. But we had told ourselves lies, and they had become the truth. We had started to believe that Roja was the sister whose heart was a handful of hard red jewels, and I was the one as insubstantial as the hollow center of a cranberry. The lie of who we were had killed who we might have been. It had buried us. It stripped us down into girls uncomplicated enough to be understood.”
