During Her Birthday Sleepover

The cake was strawberry, bought from the grocery store two towns over because Kaylee said the bakery near us used fondant and fondant tasted like wax. Sofía smeared a fingerful of pink icing across Kaylee's nose during the singing, and Kaylee shrieked and grabbed a fistful of napkins, and Priya filmed the whole thing on her phone for a story that would disappear in twenty-four hours.

I stood at the kitchen counter with a beer sweating a ring onto the granite and watched my daughter turn sixteen.

Sixteen candles on a cake shaped like a rectangle because the store didn't have round pans left. Sixteen years since I'd held her in a hospital room that smelled like antiseptic and her mother's shampoo, six pounds four ounces, a shock of dark hair that had fallen out within weeks and grown back the pale gold it still was now, pulled into two pigtails that swung when she turned her head to laugh at something Priya said.

Priya arrived first that evening, dropped off by a mother who idled in the driveway a beat too long, watching until the door closed behind her daughter. Priya stood taller than the other two, all elbows and collarbones, black hair cut in a sharp line at her jaw, a small silver stud in her nose that caught the porch light when she tilted her head. She hugged Kaylee hard enough to lift her onto her toes and called her birthday bitch, and they both laughed the laugh of girls who think they've said something dangerous.

Sofía came twenty minutes later hauling a duffel bag bigger than she was, her body already rounding into curves the other two hadn't caught up to yet, dark curls escaping a bun that had started falling apart before she'd even crossed the threshold. She kicked her sneakers off in the hallway and left them crooked against the baseboard, toes pointing opposite directions, and nobody straightened them.

Kaylee moved between her friends like she'd been waiting all week for exactly this configuration of people in her house. Five-foot-one in ankle socks, a build that hadn't finished catching up with the number on her cake, wearing a t-shirt with a cartoon cat stretched across it and denim shorts frayed at the hem. Her mouth, when she smiled, showed the ...