Free Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth by Edeet Ravel Page A

her machine at the back of the shop, where the suffocating heat enveloped her like a malevolent balloon.
    “Maya, right? Your mother’s talked about you. Do you want to come over?”
    Come over . The words dislodged me, as though an enormous celestial map were spread out before me, a map sprinkled with shooting stars and new planets and dotted lines. Come Over would be the name of the bridge that led there.
    Two black braids, large dark eyes, black eyebrows, heartbreaking mouth. Skin that glowed like the skin of red-cheeked children in coloured frontispiece illustrations, carefully preserved under a sheet of onion paper. Ted and Ellen flew downhill in the sled .
    I saw at once—anyone could see—that Rosie was a hybrid: beauty queen and do-gooder. I had thought that popularity and charity were incompatible; the leading girls in elementary schoolwere shrewd, vigilant, and deliberately coarse, and their good looks had more to do with authority and a sense of privilege than with appearance. They sucked in available rewards like plants curling towards light, and their occasional handouts were self-serving. Rosie, for all her glamour, was on the alert for opportunities to rescue—not conspicuously but incidentally. It made no difference to me, knowing that I was only another hapless delegate of need. I didn’t mind that Rosie was indiscriminate in her invitations. I smiled and nodded.
    And yet I was filled with grief. In the beginning of all love there is grief, because at that moment you’re closest to the ghost of parting. You know how easily it could all slip away, how easily it could evaporate into eternal, never-to-be-consummated longing. “Sure,” I said.
    “Great. I live on Coolbrook—we just have to take the 161 to Decarie, and we can walk from there. It’s such a nice day.”
    “I walked all the way from Victoria,” I said. “It didn’t even take that long.”
    “We can start walking, and then if we see the bus, we’ll run for it … I love your dress. And I love your hair! It must have taken you years to grow it that long.”
    “I’m thinking of cutting it all off.”
    “Oh no, please don’t ever cut it!”
    “All right,” I said, secretly vowing to obey her request. A vow would bind us.
    “We always bring our things here. Your mother’s really good. She fixes stuff for us all the time.”
    “Her mother was a dressmaker too. I guess it runs in the genes.”
    “Does she make you dresses and things?”
    “She tries. I don’t always like what she makes.”
    “You’re lucky for that, at least,” she said, divining it all: Maya and Mrs. Levitsky, a tense and tipsy acrobatic act.
    Though I was a head taller than Rosie, we fell easily into step: I was a slow, lackadaisical walker, and Rosie was light and quick, soit evened out. She was wearing a navy blue skirt, an ironed white blouse, black penny loafers. There was an alluring inevitability about this Spartan outfit, like the ruby flash on the wings of a blackbird, or the immortalized gown of the cloak-bearer in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus . Later, when I had a chance, I would casually touch the navy skirt, feel the cotton fabric for myself.
    “What school do you go to?” I asked Rosie.
    “Eden. Well, Mei-Eden really. We call it Eden for short. It’s a Hebrew school—my father teaches music there.” She pronounced Eden so it rhymed with heaven .
    “Like Paradise? Adam and Eve?”
    “Don’t get the wrong idea! It’s just a dumb old school. You’re so tall—how old are you?”
    “Thirteen and a half. What about you?” I asked.
    “I’m fourteen, but I just finished grade seven, same as you. I missed a lot of school in grade five, so I had to repeat.”
    “How come you missed school?”
    “Daddy was sick—I had to help out.”
    “I almost had to repeat too. Not because I was away, though. I just got bad marks.”
    “What are you doing this summer?”
    “I wanted to go back to the camp I went to last year, Camp Bakunin. I