Queens of All the Earth by Hannah Sternberg

Brown’s book? Were you reading it last night? What if he wanted it? What if he was looking for it?”
    “I didn’t think he’d mind,” Olivia said, noting that while the book had returned to the windowsill, the pastor’s glasses had vanished. Olivia creaked toward the hall and bathroom, finding feeling in her knees and ankles again and wishing she hadn’t.
    “Aren’t you going to have some breakfast?” Miranda said.
    “I’m taking a shower.”
    “Don’t forget breakfast!”
    Breakfast slid from Olivia’s mind as she slid out of her clothes and into the water. There were two stalls in the shared ladies’ room, and one was occupied, so Olivia took the other one, with a broken shower fixture that wouldn’t stay clipped to the wall. She turned it on and held the showerhead by its handle over herself. The water was shockingly cold at first, and she flinched away, a stab of irritation waking her. Then the warm water came, and she sprayed it over herself until her face molded upward into a close-lipped smile.
    Olivia knew she should be polite and conserve the water, but other impulses ruled. She recalled afternoons as a child when she’d move and look at each finger and toe individually, totaling twenty distinct, minute actions and inspections—and the evenings when, refusing to turn on thelamp until the last shred of daylight had faded, she would sit immersed in the shifting tide of twilight’s blue and gray. With one hand on the showerhead, she used the other to examine every part of her that she could see or reach, even the parts she tried not to think about. She was short, not thin but healthily soft, and, since the age of thirteen, accustomed to ignoring everything below her chin with steady resignation.
    In the shower in Barcelona, she extended one arm, and then the other, and flexed her fingers, and peered up along the length of each limb until it looked like a long, fleshy willow branch. She cleaned herself until all the dull parts glowed and the light seemed to come from inside, and she no longer felt her face to be separate from her naked body.
    And then she turned the water on her hair, which was long and knotty and wild. It took a few seconds for the steady stream to soak through, and when it did, she leaned her head back and felt her hair’s weight pulling her chin up.
    Water ran into her ears—she shivered. It streamed in round, galloping rivers down her back, and she curled her toes. The warmth spread across the nape of her neck. When her arms became tired from holding the shower over herself, she turned it off and, hearing silence in the bathroom outside, wrapped her towel on her head and stepped boldly out.
    That was a miscalculation. Sophie was there, in front of the mirror, braiding her stick-straight blond hair. Olivia ran back into the shower before she could even blush. Hearing the door open and close, she breathed deeply. But after it opened and closed again, footsteps approached, and when a pale shape lurked on the other side of the frosted doors, Olivia panicked until, with a thwap , a second towel, white (the color of lilies), was flung over the top of the stall.
    After her eventual exit from the bathroom, she slipped back into the clothes of a sensible, safe traveler, laced on her battered sneakers, and wiggled into her extra sweater, though she knew it would soon be tiedaround her waist in the trademark style of tourists and five year olds. She girded herself with a spacious water bottle and divided her cash among several pockets. There was a rhythm to these things Miranda had taught her to do.
    She even ate breakfast, though it was awkward, because Miranda insisted on snatching the blow dryer from the bathroom and plugging it into a socket in the common room, wielding it against her sister while Olivia ate. Toast crumbs were dashed away into obscure corners, to be discovered some loveless day in the future when the building came down in ruins.
    Marc, meanwhile, sat sedately on one