made me think of Tracey, of the many times, as a child, she’d placed her arm next to mine, to check once again that she was still a little paler than me—as she proudly maintained that she was—just in case summer or winter had changed this state of affairs since last she’d checked. I didn’t dare tell her that I lay out on our balcony on any hot day, aiming at exactly the quality she seemed to dread: more color, darkness, for all my freckles to join and merge and leave me with the same deep dark brown of my mother.
