I am also Innocent

Tier moves closer to his cousin. Caked in white, she’s painted in white, dusted, powdered, round the tips of her dainty breasts she’s traced a fine line of white on white. She leans into the mirror, reflecting light onto herself, and she rubs another layer on her collarbones: fine powder. Mad, they told Tier, or, later — weird, with that widening of the eyes, you know.

A speck of white floats to land on his suit. He brushes it away, it leaves a stripe. In the mirror, her face makes a smile: very sad, very pensive. She stands up, and a small aura of dust lifts and settles around her. Her breasts are small and round and painted.

“Technically, I have a right,” she says, again. She’s already told him, in stilted, jumping words. He knows some of them. The rest, he thinks, she’s learned somewhere: maybe at her school, which is in the city, or from those new friends of hers.

In the end her mother is startled, and then sad. The guests are surprised, but they’ve heard of the daughter, and they turn their eyes away. She wonders if they will whisper about her, but this evening, they only continue, in their plodding rhythm, to speak of discounts and donations and charity marathons, fundraisers and petitions and the handsome groom.

Forty-six minutes (on her leather watch, a gift) into the reception, and she wanders over to her mother, who is trembling in her white gown. Two lilies, thinks Tier, across the room, or ghosts.

Her eyes flick quickly: up down, up down. “Technically, you have a right,” she whispers, before her daughter can say it. There is a silence. Her breasts are cold. “Am I hurting you?” asks her daughter. Her mother nods, softly. Her daughter returns downstairs in one of her father’s old suits, which is even more painful for her mother, for different reasons, but she doesn’t know. “I can’t wear dresses,” she has said, many times, and this is her way of joining the ceremony. —Maya Keshav Maya is a U3 Linguistics and Classics student at Mcgill.