One day, Janie McDonagall, a little girl filled with cruelty and hate, cut off Martha Johnson’s hair, almost all of it with just one quick snip, publicly, in Math class, making the former little girl very popular while ensuring the latter little girl remained shamed, and decades later, Martha, still angry and seething, has forgotten that before the whole hair cutting debacle, they were friends. In fact, these two little girls were best friends forever, had gone so far—up in Janie’s treehouse over invisible tea but very real Oreos and orange pop—as to make themselves blood sisters, and it was Janie’s idea to make slits, incisions she called them, on their bellies and rub them together, she said the mixing of their two different bloods would promise they stay bestest friends—and not just friends, o no no, but sisters, like real sisters, only not really—forever and ever and ever until the end of time, and there was absolutely nothing else in the whole entire world Martha wanted more than this, and so the two girls performed the rite and recited some chants they’d composed not twenty minutes earlier, while giggling with delirium and sugar the way only girls left alone can do, and afterwards, it was Martha’s idea that they should kiss, it’s what they do in movies to prove commitment, but it was Janie’s tongue that peeked through lips and teeth, eager to make contact, and yes, they were just girls, probably too young to know what was going on, their kiss was passionate—something closer to two sixteen year olds coursing with hormones finding themselves surprisingly alone and with complete privacy—I mean: it didn’t stop with the kiss, they kissed and although it was their first, it wasn’t sloppy, it was ginger and tentative, and then without pausing, without removing her lips from Martha’s for even a nanosecond, Janie was naked and guiding Martha’s hand down past the blood sister incision, below her belly button, and on, and she undressed Martha, slowly, and she took her mouth away, put it on Martha’s skin, her carnation tongue gliding, without shame, until she reached Martha’s button, no not her belly button mind you but her button down below which her mama had taught her never to touch expect in the bathtub and only for the purposes of cleaning but her mama had never mentioned her best friend forever touching it much less with her mouth especially when it felt so nice and refreshing, and Janie didn’t really know what she was doing only that she’d spied her parents doing this like all the time and now Martha made the very same sounds her mother made, and since this was just an experiment, she put her fingers into Martha’s hole and sucked on her button like it was a piece of strawberry hard candy, the kind with both fruit and cream swirled together in one, her favorite, and Martha the whole time just moaning, she’d never felt such pleasure, o and it was amazing she wished for this every single day of every single day of the rest of her life please and thank you, and all the while, her button growing larger and broader in Janie’s mouth until one slight flick, just on arbitrary up and down, and from the toes on her feet up to her belly something like a shock, a burst, her thighs shaking uncontrollably but the movement slight, and Janie rises, her face shiny and wet and she asks, “How was I?” and they kiss some more, the whole time Janie still fingering Martha, her little girl thumb making loops around her little girl clit, and she brings Martha to orgasm at least once more, and even though she’s scared of not being able to do what Janie’s done for her, she wants to give it a try and so she follows by example, doing exactly what Janie’d done, until Janie is the one writhing on the treehouse floor, sighing and breathing all deep and heavy, and this goes on for a while and then there’s that one magic flick of the tongue, just like it was for Martha, and Janie’s the one with the shaking thighs and she lets out a scream, small but shrill, and this is how she learned that she too could fulfill her friend. Afterwards, they played house and Janie was the mama and Martha was the papa, but they didn’t have any babies because the mama said babies are dirty and they smell bad and in the end, they just grow up to be ungrateful bastards, her words. They agreed, tacitly, they were after all blood sisters, to never talk about what happened, even though it could still happen, every day if it could be arranged, it was the first thing they did when they got home from school, unless there was someone else around. Even as girls, they understood something wasn’t acceptable about what they were doing, or at least, that other people would maybe think it’s wrong, but this didn’t stop them, no, they kept at it, pleasuring each other almost daily, each girl becoming more and more adept at knowing what the other wanted, until they could bring each other to orgasm in under thirty seconds, they timed it, not that either of them knew a lick about words like orgasm or come—not in the sexual sense at least—or clit or pussy or cunt or oral sex or head or even sex, much less sixty-nine, which was their preferred position, but they didn’t need this vocabulary to act it out, to please, mutually, but all this stopped one day when Mr. McDonagall came home from work early to surprise Janie, he was going to take her and her best friend—Margot or Mary, the fat one, he could never remember her name—to McDonald’s, which had just opened their brand new play park, fully equipped with curling slide and ball pit, and he walked into her daughter’s room without first knocking, not that it would’ve made any difference anyways, and found Janie’s head lodged deeply between Martha’s big thighs, like she was about to explore a cave that’s how deep she was in there, and that was it. He sent Janie to a special church camp for kids with “problems” just two days later, barely bothered discussing it with his wife, though he didn’t spare Martha’s mama any mercy, and when Janie came back, she was different and she hated Martha. She was only back for a few days when Martha got an A on her Math quiz and Janie got a D, and God she’s always hated Martha, that pig, and that was all the impetus she needed, one quick squeeze and Janie felt vindicated. She waved the ball of hair over her head, a victory flag, and Martha, well, Martha was still in love.