Free The Way We Bared Our Souls by Willa Strayhorn

secretly wished to keep Kaya in one of those giant sterile bubbles.
    “Thanks,” I said, still trying my utmost to contain my frustration at having a bodyguard between me and my oldest friend in Santa Fe. “Okay if I just go up?” Before Mrs. Johnson could answer I was rocking the stairs two at a time, like I used to.
    “Be my guest,” Mrs. Johnson murmured as she retreated toward the kitchen. “But bedtime is promptly at ten. And I don’t want her leaving the house.”
    I pushed Kaya’s bedroom door open after a cautious knock, and she started. Apparently she hadn’t heard her mother announce me, due to the headphones in her ears.
    “Lo?” she said timidly. “What are you doing here?”
    I plopped down on Kaya’s purple beanbag—no hard edges in her bedroom, obviously.
    “I need to talk to you,” I said.
    We probably hadn’t spoken more than twenty words to each other in a year and a half, and now I was in her bedroom, where we used to play with plastic show horses and magic kits for hours on end. Then, when we were a little older, where we tried to summon the spirits of the dead with a Ouija board and predict our futures with tarot cards. I’d still never met anyone else with a similar lust for paranormal experiences. But it had been years since I’d even read my horoscope in the newspaper.
    “Whoa,” she said. “Is there a blue moon this month that commanded you to come here or something? Is everything all right?”
    I’d forgotten how pretty Kaya was. I used to tell her that all the time—how I wished I had her high cheekbones, fawn-colored skin, and intense cat eyes. Though I felt pretty good about my physical appearance, sometimes I still coveted her looks. My strawberry blond hair and green eyes often drove me nuts—I was a freak Irish girl in the midst of the Southwest. But the same shy body language that Kaya enlisted to protect her fragile person—head lowered, arms crossed over chest, shoulders hunched, et cetera—also served to camouflage her finer features. Now, swiveling around in her desk chair, she brushed her black bangs from her face as if she wanted me to notice those cat eyes once more, as if she wanted to show me that she was still the same pretty person I used to compliment. Then her hand shot nervously back into her lap.
    “Listen, Kaya,” I said. “I’m sorry to barge in here like this. I know that we’ve . . . drifted apart. But there are only a few people I can trust at this point, and you’re one of them.”
    Kaya had never been judgmental. I used to open up to her about every crazy thought and feeling that passed through my brain, and she’d just roll with all of it even when she couldn’t relate. I tried to do the same for her. I missed that about us. But standing here in front of her now, I suddenly felt as if my success with Thomas had been pure luck. I was supposed to pitch Kaya some story about a magical coyote and a mesmerizing forest gypsy and a five-person sacred ritual, and she was supposed to jump on board without asking too many questions. None of which I could answer, of course. I was about to call to order a wing-and-a-prayer sort of meeting, and I didn’t have any words. Where to begin exactly?
So this coyote .
 . . ? I decided to skip the preliminaries.
    “I’ve got a major problem.”
    Kaya looked at me skeptically. I didn’t blame her. How could she know anything was wrong behind the shiny veneer of Agua wishing-well happiness I usually exuded at school?
    “That makes two of us,” Kaya said.
Touché
. And it was true. Kaya had problems that even her mother didn’t know about. I knew from personal experience that she could be . . . reckless with her anesthetized body. Years ago, right around the time Kaya and I stopped hanging out every day, she told me that sometimes she cut herself at night, hoping that she’d find out what pain was. I all but freaked out when she showed me the fresh lacerations, all jagged from the serrated