On her last painting, Marisol let me draw a green saguaro in front of the house. Art class was her favorite, especially the waxy pastel crayons. They’re not really pastel colors, those crayon sticks. They’re vivid. Brown, red, orange—Marisol never used girly colors. Her best drawings were corrals full of horses, trotting near farmhouses. “It’s hard to shape their legs right,” she said, head bent, shiny black ponytail hanging over her shoulder. She sketched U-shaped horse hooves. Then she bled the color sticks all over the page, smearing them, bold, with her thumb, the pastels shining like jello. So we licked her drawing. Till Miss Evans said, “Stop! Girls. Lunch is in twenty minutes!” Shaking her head, laughing at us. 

I wonder what would have changed if I had gone to school that particular day. I stayed home. With the stomach flu. The shooter let himself into our elementary school through the open side door. Marching, serious, rifles and ammunition packed on his shoulders. Marisol hid in the art room closet with three other kids—they told me that later. Then the colors of the kids get smeared together in my head. Miss Evans was shot too. 

When I sleep, I hear Marisol breathing quietly, her breath, cinnamon-sweet, like the churros she shared from her lunchbox. It’s like we’re having a sleepover now. I draw horses for Marisol, brown and yellow, galloping through waving green grasses on small fast hooves. Running on crooked legs—she’s right, the legs are so hard to draw—out from their corrals, past saguaro, towards the sun. Ponies, just running. They’re not afraid of anything, those horses.