We were mermaid-young, our hips unformed against the July heat as we slipped noisily into the pool. You told me that I could be the prince that came to save you from the tyranny of your father, a god of the sea, the man who turned your legs into fins and scales and your heart into salt water.

It would only take a kiss. Pretend, you breathed at me and then on three! We submerged ourselves into the cool water and you pressed your lips to mine, softly, my eyelashes touching the tinted glass of your goggles.

We stopped playing after that summer. We both grew hips and breasts and starting shaving the downy growth of our calves and shins and knees. There was a boy at school who you began to talk about with a fervor, his floppy hair trimmed just above his shoulders and his smile changing color with the different rubber bands twisted around each one of his braces. When you asked me about which boy I felt the same kind of passion for, I would shrug and smile and you would take that as mystery, that I was hiding something from you. You were furious, but let it go, because we were pool sisters and your mother liked me, liked that I thanked her for when she made horchata and that I would go to mass with you every Sunday night.

We lost each other, in a way all things are lost: they go different places but never are not what they had been. You are still the same, a princess of a tyrannical father-god, swathed in layers of chiffon, frosted like morning ocean foam. The cathedral is full, my family and yours, joined in a way that I hadn’t foreseen or wanted. Your mother lays a cool hand on my cheek and says she is glad to see me again after all these years. She asks if my cousin ever spoke of you when we were still mermaid friends, you in a wave of white, you who is standing next the tower of cake, grinning up at my boy cousin, the one whose teeth are a perfect line after all those years of braces.

You hold the knife, aloft. His hand covers yours, curling it almost into a fist. Before the knife slides in, you look up, catching my eye. A twitch of the mouth, almost a plea of Pretend and then the knife divides, a clean and perfect tear.