Christina’s pair of black high top Converse had been through three summers of walks and bike rides across town. Their most common destination: a house with high ceilings that always smelled like lemon Clorox, courtesy of the live-in maid Angelica.

Christina went to that house almost every day to pass time with her best friend Maisie. Last summer, the two of them painted their best attempt at the Phantom’s mask from Phantom at the Opera on Christina’s high tops. They first discovered the musical through a clip of a live performance of All I Ask of You online. Both girls daydreamed of a future when they yearned for something as desperately as the Raoul yearned for Christine.

_“Say you need me with you, here beside you,_

_anywhere you go, let me go too,_

_Christine that’s all I ask of you”_

They listened to the musical’s soundtrack on repeat all summer and watched any version of the production they could get their hands on (Both of them thought the movie adaption lacked focus). Maisie started referring to Christina as Christine but would not let her mother or little sister do the same.

In late August, about a week before the start of 7th grade, the high tops found themselves on the shoe rack in Maisie’s foyer, where they had been placed countless times before. But Maisie’s eyes were blood shot and skin stripped of its usual glowing olive hue. Her parents stood with her in the kitchen, which Christina found strange since it was 1pm and they both worked downtown until at least 5:30pm.

“What’s wrong?” Christina asked, not sure if she wanted to know the answer.

Maisie turned to her mom. “Honey,” Maisie’s mother began, “do you remember a few months ago when Maisie had to miss y’all’s end of the year awards ceremony for a doctor’s appointment?”

Christina vaguely recalled. Maisie never mentioned it again so she assumed it was just a check up. “Does Maisie have cancer?!” she shrieked.

“Thankfully no,” her mother continued, “but she started some medicine that as of a few weeks ago the state has banned.”

“So, she can’t get her medicine anymore?”

“Well, she can’t get her medicine here. But the good news is there are plenty of other states that still allow teens to take it.”

“Oh, I see.”

Maisie and her family were gone within a month. Christina started the school year wearing her high tops most days, but each time someone asked about the Phantom mask, she wanted to punch a wall, or God, or whoever “the state” was. Classmates spoke to her enough that she wasn’t considered an outcast. But Christina didn’t trust anyone else enough with the vulnerable and sacred ritual of experiencing new things together and letting them change you.

How stupid, she thought, that only a season ago yearning seemed like a rebirth. Christina understood now that it was a stab in the stomach with endless pools of invisible blood pouring onto her pair of Converse.