It was my idea to get them. I arranged everything, but both of us are in deep trouble. Dad brings meals and leaves them outside our doors, announcing “Girls, it’s time to eat.” Half an hour later, Mom comes, makes sure we ate everything and checks on our bandages.

She keeps trying to get me to say I’m sorry. “Fat chance. I wish I could tell the whole world what we did!”

If I had a crowd and a microphone, I’d teach people how to get pockets sewn in your side, right below your ribs and above your waist. There are vegan pockets, but I wanted us to get ours made with pigs’ ears. They are sewn into a slide in your side, and let someone put their hand inside you, and really, really hold you. It’s cool, and I’d like you to get one even though mine is gone.

First, find a place. Tattoo and piercing parlors do this on the side, and some hairdressers. Hunting for one that didn’t want my parents’ permission took me exactly five minutes. I called to set our appointments, and the last Friday of April, we snuck out of school and got a bus out to the strip.

The tattoo artist met us at the door, pulled down the shades, and turned the sign to CLOSED.

“This is a secret, right?” he asked. We nodded our heads hard. “Good. Who’s going first?”

I raised my hand and sat down. B watched, big-eyed, and the man narrated what he was doing.

“I’m brushing this liquid on your skin to numb and disinfect. We are waiting a second to let the medicine sink in,” he said. I liked that he didn’t ask what we liked. Adults are always interrogating, do you like sports, what’s your favorite color, what do you want to be when you grow up. They never pop quiz each other like that and I loved that this guy just let us be. I gave my sister two thumbs up and a smile.

“Now, I’m using a scalpel to cut a hole in your right side. You can feel it, right? Like I’m cutting a fingernail. This will hold the pig’s ear. I will sew it in, and you will heal around it.”

I watched him work. My skin was purple from the liquid, then open. It took a second for the blood to surface, and for him to dig in me, to pry me apart like an oyster. It hurt more than he said but I hid my grimaces because B cries easier than me. I thought she was going to cry just watching.

When it was her turn, I sat on the bench with a cold soda. The bench was from a church, dark and solemn. As the guy worked on her, it felt like he was cutting me all over again.

“Good girl,” I told her when he was finished.

“Do not tell anyone where you had this done.”

“We won’t,” I promised. I gave B a sip of Coke, took her hand and left. On the bus, we felt like we were in a movie. We looked like us, and we were us, a pair of sisters, but under our shirts were big bandages and it felt like we were other people. New.

Adults think the pockets are an ad that you are ready to have sex, but this has nothing to do with that. This isn’t pushy grindy stuff, and it’s not mushy either. It’s about connection. Once you have a boyfriend or a girlfriend, it is sweet to have a pocket sewn in your side so the person can hold you, really hold you, not just on the skin but inside, steering, steadying. My sister and I planned to just hold each other for six months or a year, when we walked around the mall and on vacation. We’re not ready to date.

I thought that once we had our pockets, our parents couldn’t do anything about it. But B never stopped bleeding, and mom and dad brought us to a plastic surgeon who comes to our Christmas parties, and he removed the pockets and sewed us closed. We have been healing and isolated for a week.

On my bed, looking up at the plastic stars glued to the ceiling, I think about the pigs’ ears that were inside us. I think about the nurse throwing them away, in a bin labeled MEDICAL WASTE. I wonder about where that stuff went, probably to an incinerator. I’m mad that the animal’s parts were squandered, and I imagine what else got burnt up: people’s fingers, appendixes, and tonsils. Hearts! Maybe an arm.

Mom keeps asking, “Did you want your sister to die?”

I don’t gratify that with an answer.

We have an online tutor who works with us separately. We knock on the wall between my desk and her closet. I pretend I understand what her raps mean, that she understands mine.

I love you.

I hold you.

This will be all right.