Dori nodded. It was common for others to know James better than Dorothy, or before her, considering his lust for good company. When they lived in the same house, all the neighbors liked him while they treated her as a strange growth protruding from his body: best to politely ignore. Now came the inevitable questions as to why he was black and she was white. She headed it off with a simple, “We were adopted.”

As she stood there, she found herself looking the girl over, searching for signs of sickness, badness. There was nothing but health, a good thing considering the last time Dori had taken one of James’s friends, a girl named Meka who hadn’t been sick at all, only very, very present. Always. Later she had trouble explaining the flash of jealousy that had come over her; she was thirteen and her brother, whom she hated half the time, had forgotten about her, and that was unacceptable.

Nowadays Dori kept her hands to herself unless death was imminent, or someone was rude, or she was being paid to do it.

She tilted her head. “Do you want to sleep with him?”