You wield the hose while your father cleans birds—cold, clear water trickles feathers off grey meat. His thumb huge below the breastbone. You grope inside the sack of doves attending each others’ funerals, give each one a little squeeze. The light pigeons out flecks of violet in their small, flopped heads. When he finishes, you make a pile of guts and bone the dogs can’t keep away from. Mornings before school you hear their coos in a thick mist over the driveway, a pall for your black jelly bracelets as you trudge tile square to square. Pizza with milk. Brownies big as your hand. Don’t turn your head when a boy screams “Hottie!” at you to make his friends laugh. Don’t even twitch. Think of Thursdays when your father drives you thirty minutes to soccer, makes sales calls in his truck and watches you scrimmage, dribble through cones, take penalty kicks, watches so closely he can break down each graze of the ball against your instep. To make him laugh, you take off your shin guards and put your nose deep in their cotton grooves, inhale and tell him they smell like victory. The truck is never quiet. The two of you are wings gliding cool air, purple beads in an orange sky. At school, you are the dove at the bottom of the bag, bodies crushing you against cinderblock walls. You count lines in the floor from Language to History, too dead and muffled to tense at the grasp of fingers. Boys spike thumbs beneath your ribs, turn you inside out.