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Sharon chases the sunny patch across the rug in her room, lies there on her stomach with her feet in the air and the purple boom box right up against her ear. Mom and Dad are fighting in the kitchen. Their voices drift up through the floor, their heads five feet below her knees. The house is big, but the ceilings are low.
“Come on Eileen, I swear well he means,” says the boombox.
“Well if she’s so great to him, why don’t you go live with Paul’s wife,” says Mom.
Sharon’s wearing the empty thigh holster Aunt Peggy got her, just to get used to it. It chafes a little, and she wonders if she’ll get a callous on her thigh like the ones on her palms from summer whiffle ball league with Dad.
She’s organizing her hair clips by color when Dad knocks on the door to tell her dinner’s almost ready. She scatters her careful rainbow with an elbow getting up.
Dinner is roast beef, red potatoes, and boiled carrots. Sharon hates boiled carrots.
They all sit down to eat. Sharon makes faces at her carrots. Mom and Dad start arguing again. Dad says, “Are you implying that I don’t sacrifice enough for this family,” and Mom says, “Sharon’s never going to have a normal relationship with a man if your bullshit is all she ever sees.”
Sharon says, “You don’t have to worry about that. Boys, I mean.”
Mom blinks at Sharon. “I know you aren’t thinking about that now, honey, but someday you will be.”
“No I won’t,” says Sharon.
Mom smiles indulgently.
“I won’t.”
Mom’s still smiling. “Oh? And why’s that?”
“Because I’m a lesbian,” says Sharon.
Mom drops her fork.
Dad stares.
Sharon chokes down another carrot.
“Well,” says Mom, “you’re still young. A bit young to really know.”
“You said you had your first crush when you were eleven.”
“Yes,” says Mom.
“I’m twelve,” Sharon says.
Mom’s smile changes, like she thinks Sharon said something funny. “Some people take longer. Don’t worry. You’ll start liking boys soon.”
Sharon spears another carrot, hard enough the tines go straight through and clang against the plate. “No, I won’t.”
She looks at Mom.
“Because I’m a lesbian.”
Mom looks at Dad. “See what I mean?”
Dad says, “So this is my fault?”
“I don’t see whose else it would be,” says Mom.
Sharon sneaks the rest of her carrots onto Dad’s plate and turns to the red potatoes.
***
Sharon sits next to Leila in math class, on her left so she can sneak glances at Leila while pretending to look at the clock on the wall over the door. Leila sits in the back row now, after that one time Bobby Evans complained he couldn’t see the blackboard because her afro was in his way, so that’s where Sharon sits too.
Sharon doesn’t know why anyone would want to look at boring, chalky math problems on the blackboard instead of Leila, even just the back of her head.
Leila is interesting to watch. She doesn’t chew on her pencils when she’s bored like Sharon does, and she doesn’t draw little doodles on the sides of her papers like Chris Penny who sits on Sharon’s other side, but she makes this face when she’s concentrating, like she could solve all the mysteries of the universe if she focuses hard enough.
Sharon can’t even solve the problems on the chalkboard.
Although that might be because she’s paying attention to Leila instead.
When they’re told to pair off, Sharon immediately turns to her. “Wanna be partners?”
“Sure,” says Leila, and Sharon turns to dig her homework out of her bag.
Her homework crumples in one hand as she turns her entire desk to face Leila’s, the legs scraping loudly across the floor tiles while the whole thing sort of shudders. Leila raises her eyebrows. “Okay,” Sharon says, smoothing out her paper against the desk. “How did you do number six?”
***
Joni Lavelle is the worst, and so is her party.
It’s in the backyard, which is very well-kept, not bigger than Sharon’s but nicer. There’s food laid out on nice tablecloths up against the side of the house where Mrs. Lavelle keeps chrysanthemums and five different kinds of roses. The music they’re playing is boring, no words or guitars, and Sharon wishes she had her boom box and one of the cassette tapes Aunt Peggy likes to buy for her.
Sharon is wearing the nicest dress she has, even though she doesn’t like dresses. They’re not practical. She can wear her thigh holster under it, though, so that makes her feel a little better. She leans up against the wall, the table, the side of the hot tub, pretends she’s not listening in on the conversations the adults around her are having, and imagines a gun pressing up against her thigh under the clouds of taffeta.
Leila’s here too, and Sharon’s standing by the koi pond staring at her while pretending not to. She has a lot of practice with that, which is good. It’s a very important skill for secret agents to have.
Joni notices Sharon looking. Apparently she hasn’t practiced enough.
“Oh my God,” says Joni.
“Shut up,” says Sharon.
Joni sniffs and sticks her chin up. “It’s not like it’s a secret. Everyone knows you’re a freak. I’m surprised they even let you in the girls’ bathroom, considering how much of a creep you are.”
“I’m surprised they even let you in the school, considering how you’re failing art.”
“Dyke,” says Joni, and pushes Sharon with both hands.
The koi pond has a little wall of stacked stones circling all the way around it. When Sharon stumbles back, she trips and falls right in.
***
The next time she sees her, Sharon shows Aunt Peggy the ruined thigh holster. She stares down at her toes the whole time so she doesn’t have to see the look on Aunt Peggy’s face.
“That’s all right,” says Aunt Peggy. “We’ll get you another one.” She takes it for a closer look. The leather got all water-logged, and now it’s ruined, warped and rough and covered in squiggly lines. “May I ask what happened to it?” asks Aunt Peggy, and when she looks up her eyes are dancing. “You didn’t wear it into the bath?”
Sharon looks down at her socks again. They don’t match, one green and the other pink, both completely different lengths. She tells them, “Joni Lavelle called me a dyke and pushed me into the koi pond.”
“She didn’t,” says Aunt Peggy. Her eyes aren’t dancing anymore.
“She totally did,” Sharon says miserably. “Now Leila’s never gonna want to be girlfriend-girlfriend with me.”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” says Aunt Peggy.
“I got algae in my hair. I’ll be lucky if she ever even talks to me again.”
“I don’t know why anyone would pass up the prettiest girl in the school,” says Aunt Peggy, smoothing down Sharon’s hair even though the algae is long gone.
“Leila’s the prettiest,” says Sharon.
Aunt Peggy smiles. “Let’s make it a tie.”
Sharon looks up. “Do you think I’m a freak?”
“No, Sharon,” says Aunt Peggy, hand still stroking over her hair. “I don’t think that. It would be a bit hypocritical of me, considering.”
Sharon snorts. “You dated Captain America.”
“I did,” says Aunt Peggy, nodding. “But there was a woman, once. Her name was Angela. Angela Martinelli.” She smiles. “Nothing ever happened. But… she was a lovely girl.”
***
Joni Lavelle snickers when she passes the lunch table where Sharon’s sitting by herself, since all of her friends have “mysteriously” disappeared. Everyone knows Sharon likes girls, now. She doesn’t know why anyone cares. It’s only the truth.
Joni has her yellow sweater tied around her waist by the arms, and as she walks by Sharon sneakily moves her chocolate pudding so the sweater trails through it.
Joni’s still smirking at her, but Sharon smirks right back. Joni’s smirk falls away under the scrunch of confusion, and Sharon would keep smirking at her just to keep that look on her face, except that’s the moment Leila Taylor plops her lunch tray down right next to Sharon’s.
Sharon does not stop breathing, because secret agents do not lose their breath over cute girls.
Leila sits and narrows her eyes at Sharon. “How did you know she’s failing art?”
Sharon didn’t even know Leila had been listening. Finding out she was sends little lightning bolts through Sharon’s knees and the soles of her feet, and she bounces her legs under the table. She leans in. “If I told you,” she says, “I’d have to kill you.”
Leila raises her eyebrows. They’re very sleek and smooth-looking. Sharon wants to run her fingers over them, the way Mom does to Sharon’s when they start sticking out all over the place. “I’m going to be a journalist,” says Leila. “I’m good at protecting my sources.”
“So you can keep a secret?”
Leila tips her head in agreement. “Any good investigative reporter knows the importance of confidentiality.”
Sharon leans in even farther. “I want to be a secret agent,” she says, barely more than a whisper, right into Leila’s ear. It really is a secret, but it’s also an excuse to get closer to Leila. “And it’s not just a dumb kid thing. My aunt already is one.”
Leila looks at Sharon for a moment with an expression she can’t read.
She needs to get better at that.
Finally, Leila turns to her lunch tray, picks up her fork and says, matter-of-fact, like she’s talking about Social Studies or something, “Don’t join the CIA. They have a history of racism and sexism. I can cite you some sources if you want me to.”
Sharon grins at her. “Thanks.”
Leila smiles back.
***
So Leila and Sharon are actually friends now, not just occasional study partners in math class. It’s probably the third best thing that’s ever happened to Sharon, after the day Aunt Peggy first told her what she really does for a living and the time she used the self defense moves Aunt Peggy taught her to totally take out that creep Jake Parent during the neighborhood ice cream social when he tried to touch her boob.
Now every day at lunch Sharon sits at Leila’s table, and Leila is popular enough in her own circle that no one says anything about it except “hi” when Sharon first sits down. It’s almost enough to make Sharon forget the way none of her old friends want to talk to her anymore. She only truly forgets when Leila smiles at her. Then she forgets everything.
Even how to breathe.
Luckily, Mom is still pretending Sharon’s big dinnertime announcement never happened, and she can’t object to Leila coming over without upsetting her frilly little fantasy world where Sharon likes boys and hangs pictures of Brad Pitt all over her bedroom and wants to be a waitress or a professional knitter or something.
Leila comes over a lot, and mostly they do homework in the kitchen and make elaborate snacks for themselves and talk about what’s going on with Leila’s friends, who are rapidly becoming Sharon’s friends, too.
In May, three months after the koi pond incident, they walk to the theater together after school, lunchboxes swinging between them, to go see Twister for the matinee. They each get a soda but share the bucket of popcorn, balanced on the armrest in between them. When it gets down to the last couple extra-buttery pieces at the bottom Sharon chases them around the edge of the bucket with her slippery fingers, just for an excuse to brush her hand against Leila’s.
Leila’s house is on the way to Sharon’s, and they bicker back and forth about the movie the whole way there. Sharon liked it because action is mostly what she looks for in a movie, but Leila disparages its lack of real-world accuracy. She read a news story about storm chasers, once. Leila’s read news stories about everything.
When they get to Leila’s doorstep they stand there for a second, like they’ve forgotten how to say goodbye.
“Well—” Leila starts to say, and Sharon cuts her off by rocking forward on her toes and kissing Leila on the cheek. Leila stares at her for a second with wide eyes, and Sharon flies down the porch steps, across the yard and onto the sidewalk, the nervous lightning bolts back in her knees and the soles of her feet. When she looks back Leila’s still there, and she’s smiling.
Sharon smiles back at her, and runs all the way home.
***
Sharon kisses Leila again one day when she’s walking her home, by the swing set at the park halfway between their houses, a quick peck on the cheek before she swings back away. This time Leila kisses her back.
***
School has been out for a week, and Sharon’s planning to invite Leila to see Independence Day together when it comes out in July, and maybe try to kiss her again, when she finds out her parents are getting divorced.
Both of them are moving.
Sharon fusses and stomps her feet and gets sent up to her room. She refuses to pack so her parents do it for her, and they fight the whole time about what goes with who because apparently they’ve been planning this for months and never told her anything about it. They knew it would be hard, they say, so they wanted to do it quick, like ripping off a Band-Aid. They’re all leaving tomorrow morning, her father to New York and Sharon and her mother to Rock Creek, California.
Sharon runs all the way to Leila’s house to tell her, but all the windows are dark and the yard is quiet. Leila isn’t home.
***
Over the next four months, living in the little white house with the red door in Rock Creek, Sharon sends Leila three letters and Leila sends three back. At the start of the fifth month, Sharon sends another. She waits.
***
Sharon follows in her great aunt’s footsteps the way she always wanted. Her mother is devastated, but Aunt Peggy congratulates her personally. She doesn’t join the CIA, but she does join SHIELD, and it’s better than she ever could have imagined.
She hasn’t seen Leila in over seven years, but she has seen Roxy, and Dakota, and Amelia, and Lauren.
On a stakeout, she sees Peter Bergeron. He’s her mark.
He’s also the most attractive man Sharon has ever laid eyes on.
Fuck. Her mother was right.
***
“Agent Thirteen,” says Hill, voice sharp, and Sharon spins on her heel to take out the man in a black mask who’s steadily creeping up behind her.
“Thanks,” Sharon says. She flashes a grin, putting her boot in another guy’s back. He makes a satisfying choking noise. Something in his spine cracks under her heel. “What is it with these guys and masks.”
Hill shrugs and catches someone in a sleeper hold, locking his body down with her own so he can’t fight her off. “Probably too embarrassed to show their faces.”
She has a point. These particular goons are exceptionally incompetent. It’s the only reason Sharon and Hill can talk right now at all.
Hill throws the next guy right into Sharon’s waiting fists. Three swings and he’s out. Hill doesn’t smile, but Sharon can see the suggestion of it in the corners of her eyes.
Sharon’s finally been promoted to field operative, and she knows the higher-ups are impressed, has snuck in to take a peek at the files herself. Her teammates trust her to do her job and watch their backs, any whispers of nepotism long since faded in the face of Sharon’s high learning curve and vicious right hook.
Maria Hill is Sharon’s first team leader. Hill is a force to be reckoned with, like a natural disaster, controlled chaos, fierce and deadly and competent.
She’s also totally smokin’.
Sharon’s mother was only half right.
***
After yet another successful op, all of Sharon’s teammates go out on the town. SHIELD agents never go to the same bar twice, because in this business to be known is to be at risk, but there’s a new place in Columbia Heights they’ve been itching to try.
They invite her too, but Sharon declines.
“Agent Thirteen. Why are you in my office,” says Hill. She doesn’t phrase it like a question.
Sharon smiles and sits. The chair isn’t very comfortable, hard uncovered wood seat and a back with no curve to it, but it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t plan to stay here long. She slouches down, in a way she knows from experience looks good, and props her feet next to the pile of forms Hill is filling out, her shoelaces dragging against the desktop where she’s pulled the knots loose to give her feet a little breathing room.
“Sharon. Get your feet off my desk.”
“Okay,” says Sharon. She moves her feet off the desk.
Into Maria’s lap.
Hill raises an eyebrow. Her eyebrows are dark and smooth and very straight, curving up into wicked arches when she lifts them.
Sharon’s always been a sucker for a nice set of eyebrows.
“Feet,” says Hill, “off.”
Sharon smiles. “Aw, you don’t really mean it, do you?”
Hill’s other eyebrow joins the first. She taps her pen against the sole of Sharon’s boot and says, “I mean it.”
The hidden smile is back, tucked like a secret into the corners of her eyes. Sharon gives her a knowing little smile. “No you don’t.” She raises her eyebrows right back. “If you did, I doubt I’d have feet anymore at all. Or a job.”
Hill rolls her eyes. It’s the most expressive Sharon’s ever seen her. Sharon feels little lightning bolts jolting in that old familiar way through her knees and the soles of her feet, still propped on Hill’s thighs. She slides them up a little and watches that one telling muscle jump beside Hill’s nose. The smile in her eyes deepens, pulling at the corner of her lips. “Put your feet down, Sharon.”
Sharon can see it now, in the set of Maria’s shoulders and the slant of her mouth.
Sharon grins the same vicious grin from earlier, when she had her foot on the back of some gunrunner’s head, pressing his face into the ground.
Mission successful.
Her voice goes low, a fighting voice. She whispers, “Make me.”
***
Sharon and Maria shine bright but burn out quick, like a supernova. They’re not in love, until they are, until they aren’t again, and they can still work together but after a while they don’t, Hill promoted to Fury’s right hand and Sharon moving fast down a divergent path.
It’s okay. Sharon knows how it goes. You can’t keep sending letters if they won’t send any back.
***
She’s gotten very good at compartmentalization over the years, so it doesn’t really show, but after the funeral Sharon’s kind of a mess. She cries the first time she hears “Come On Eileen” on the radio, never wavers in the field but can’t even fire when she goes to the range to try and forget, palming the grip thumb-over-thumb the way Aunt Peggy taught her.
When things start to go down, the bombing and the chase and Steve on the run, it’s awful, of course, but Sharon can’t help feeling grateful for the distraction.
She kisses Steve on a whim. He’s handsome, he’s beautiful, and kind and funny and wicked with his fists, but more than that he knew her. He’s the only other person who really did.
He loved her, too, and he misses her. He understands how much darker the world is now that she’s gone.
Because Aunt Peggy is gone, even if sometimes it’s hard to remember that. Other times, Sharon worries she’ll forget her slowly, by degrees, the sound of her laugh and the look on her face when Sharon made field operative, the feel of her smooth firm hands, the way she smelled sweet and clean with danger underneath, the barest hint of gunpowder that never really leaves you.
On night two months after the funeral, Sharon takes her first thigh holster off the top shelf of her closet and traces her fingers over the swirling patterns of water damage. She remembers Aunt Peggy’s hand smoothing over her hair, hours after the pond water had been washed away.
When Steve asks her to dinner, Sharon says yes.
***
Sharon and Steve are fine, and that’s the worst part. Their first kiss was awkward, but since then they’ve been blazing, heat in every look, fire in every touch. They like all the same movies, and they learn to love each other’s music. Sharon sits at night with a wineglass in her hand and her feet in Steve’s lap while he draws her face, Sam’s, a long-dead tree in the Central Park of his childhood, part of Tony Stark’s armor. Sometimes, they fight together.
Apparently that’s the problem.
It shouldn’t be. They’re good together, they compliment each other, they’re both stubborn and idealistic and in love.
So this is kind of like a sucker punch in the gut. Swift and sharp and unexpected.
Sharon paces away from him, then spins back around. “It’s not because I’m a woman,” she says, on the seventh step in his direction, and turns on her heel once again. “You don’t talk to Natasha that way. And I know you would’ve never talked to my Aunt Peggy that way.”
Steve looks at his feet. Sharon stops.
“It’s because of Aunt Peggy, isn’t it. You think of me as a kid. And it’s not that way with Sam—I know you look at him, Steve, it’s okay. I look too. But you didn’t know any of Sam’s family back then.”
Steve glances up, then looks away. Sharon glares.
“You think, what? You think you owe it to her to protect me or something?”
Steve doesn’t say anything at all.
“That is fucked up, Steve.” She rakes both hands through her hair. One strand gets left behind, falling right into her eyes, and she blows it away from her face. “Jesus.”
Steve’s whole face is an apology. Sharon kind of wants to punch it. “Whadda you want me to do about it?” he asks, and it’s a genuine question, his New York accent made thick with regret.
Sharon is good at her job. Sharon loves her job.
She presses her fingers to both temples and sighs.
“I think… nothing. I don’t want you to do anything. With me. Anymore. I think… I think I’m going home.”
“Sharon…” says Steve, but she looks up into his eyes and he stops.
She smiles, and she can feel how crooked it is, sadness weighing it down on one side. “Bye, Steve,” she says. She kisses him on the cheek before she goes.
She thinks she hears him whisper it back as she’s closing the door, but Sharon’s already gone.
***
“I thought I told you not to join the CIA.”
Sharon is graceful. Her job requires a firm and absolute control over her body, and the rhythm of her boots comes out gibberish in Morse code but somehow she still spells danger when she walks.
And yet, when she hears that old familiar voice, deeper now but still smooth and clear and unmistakable, she almost trips over her own feet.
At least there aren’t any koi ponds nearby.
She spins around to find Leila Taylor walking down the hall toward her in the residential portion of Avengers Tower. She has a press badge pinned to the front pocket of her pale yellow blouse, a crisp gray suit jacket folded over one arm and a sheaf of paper tucked into the other.
Sharon rights herself and realizes it probably looks like she’s staring at Leila’s boobs.
She might have been, a little.
Sharon reaches into the pocket inside her jacket. “What, this?” she asks, lifting her badge. She smiles to match the picture. Most people hate the picture on their badge, washed out by the flash and the bright white background and their own discomfort, but Sharon likes hers. It had been a great makeup day. “That’s just temporary.”
Leila snorts. “Of course.”
They fall into step together.
Apparently Leila is The Avengers’ official press contact. Sharon has heard Steve talking about “Ms. Taylor” before, but she never thought to make the connection.
Leila is an investigative journalist who never works the tabloids or the more sensational news outlets. Her most famous work has been a series of exposes on the nature of some of the team’s more ambiguously amoral adversaries, specifically a thoroughly vicious takedown of Roxxon’s massively corrupt but slippery CEO. She’s fearless, getting right into the thick of the action, corroborating all the most important details first-hand. So much of the information Sharon learned obliquely through files and debriefings for undercover ops first uncovered by Leila, and Sharon hadn’t even known.
And apparently she dated The Falcon. It ended when The Avengers’ PR rep forbade them from making any kind of definitive statements on racially motivated police violence, to avoid further alienating certain sections of the American public. Sam Wilson went along with it.
Sharon’s brow furrows. “I thought he has talked about it. Several times now. Steve, too. It ran on the news for a while.”
‘He’s working on it.” Leila smirks. “I’m very inspirational.”
Sharon grins back. “Yeah. I’ll bet. So, are you guys thinking of going for it again?” She tries to sound casual, but the glint in Leila’s eye doesn’t exactly spell success.
Leila shrugs. “I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure he’s got his eye on someone else.”
“Oh yeah? How about you?”
Leila glances at Sharon sidelong. When they reach the elevator Leila presses the button, and Sharon holds the door open with her arm to let Leila walk in first.
Leila hums.
“I didn’t think so,” she says, canting her head to the side thoughtfully, her afro bobbing. “But you know.” She smiles at Sharon, a real full smile now, with teeth. “Things change.”
***
After two coffee dates, Sharon invites Leila to watch Independence Day in her living room. Sharon never saw it back in ‘96, in a protest that didn’t make much sense but made her feel a little better all the same.
She makes three different kinds of snacks for them, the greatest hits of what they came up with in Sharon’s sunny Virginia kitchen at age twelve, throwing walnuts at each other and sliding around in their socks on the ugly green linoleum. Leila laughs when she sees them. Sharon grins and throws a walnut at her.
The movie is full of action the way Sharon likes it, and not very true to life, which always gets Leila going, but after The Incident it seems almost disturbingly prescient.
When it’s over, Sharon kisses Leila in the middle of her analysis while she’s all lit up with the point she’s trying to make, radiant with it, just like Sharon imagined doing all those years ago.
In the bedroom of Sharon’s apartment, Leila brushes her thumb over Sharon’s cheek, her mouth soft and fond. She whispers, “You used to have freckles.”
***
Sharon knocks on the door firmly, just like the nurse instructed, and waits a moment for courtesy before sticking her head in the door.
“Angela Martinelli?”
“Yeah? Who’s askin?” asks the woman on the bed, hair perfectly curled and makeup neat despite her shaking hands. She has that old-timey New York accent, like Steve’s.
“Hi, Ms. Martinelli. I’m Sharon Carter.”
“Oh,” the woman whispers, and her mouth opens a little in surprise before it’s overtaken by a small, sweet smile. “Well, you better come in, sweetheart.” Sharon slips through the door and sits in the chair by her bed. “And call me Angie.”
Angie’s smile goes sad and faraway.
“I heard about English.” She blinks quickly several times, then laughs. “Captain America went to her funeral, isn’t that somethin?”
Sharon smiles back, soft and sad, though she tries not to let that part through. “When they first brought him back she told me, ‘must have been some kiss, to have him coming back to me after all this time.’”
Angie laughs, a little. “Musta been. Peg was a real firecracker.”
“Yeah,” Sharon whispers, looking down at her hands folded in her lap.
Angie reaches out to lay her hand over Sharon’s. She brushes Sharon’s knuckles with her thumb, the way Aunt Peggy used to do, and Sharon bites her lip to keep it from trembling. “She sent me letters about you, you know,” says Angie. “Said you took after her, and I can see it. I mean, you look nothin like her, but it’s in the eyes. In the way you hold yourself. Just like Peg.” She lifts her hand from Sharon’s and brushes her knuckles over Sharon’s chin. “And you’re both beautiful.”
Sharon smiles shakily.
“She was a great gal,” says Angie, and Aunt Peggy’s words from so long ago come floating through Sharon’s head, almost like she’s hearing them aloud once more. She was a lovely girl.
Sharon breathes. She asks, quietly, “Will you tell me about her?”
“Sure.” Angie settles back into the bed and smiles. “I’m sure you know this already, but your great aunt never took shit from anybody. And certainly not from the complete bastards she worked with. There’s a million stories I could tell, really, I have no idea where to even start. Ah,” she says. “Let me tell you about the time she hid outside my window.”
***
Tony Stark throws what he’s taken to calling, very loudly, Stark’s Spectacular Secular Seasonal Celebration, and Colonel Rhodes is calling, under his breath, Boozapalooza ’87 Take Six.
Both Sharon and Leila are invited. The residential portions of the tower have been decked out in lights and baubles, and in the room where it’s being held, a huge tree towers in every corner. Of an octagonal room.
Sharon and Leila come in arm in arm, and several minutes later, so do Sam and Steve.
“Looks like those boys have finally stopped making cow eyes at each other,” says Leila, and Sharon laughs.
***
“Sharon,” Angie had said as Sharon was leaving the room. Sharon turned back to look at her lying there in the bed, small and frail but still beautiful. Angie smiled at her and Sharon felt a deep, endless sadness like a noose around her heart.
Angie held out an old, creased piece of paper. Sharon went back to take it from her, opening it slowly, the words swimming before her in Aunt Peggy’s familiar looping script.
She can’t read it through the tears in her eyes, and when she tries to give it back Angie pats her hand and gently pushes it away. “You should keep it.” She hasn’t let go of Sharon’s hand. “Peg, she was—” Angie smiles, and there are tears in her eyes, too. “She was so proud of you.”
***
Several months after Stark’s party, Leila is getting ready to leave, following a story halfway across the country. Sharon woke up when Leila slid out of bed, and now she’s drifting somewhere between waking and sleep, the whole world soft around her and time a liquid, malleable thing flowing out in all directions.
“Hey, Leila? While you’re out there…”
“Yeah?” Leila asks, looking over her shoulder as she zips up her dress.
Sharon smiles into the pillow. “Send me a letter.”