“You aren’t going to jump, are you?” she asked, hurt giving way to annoyance.
I reached for the large, rectangular basket on top of my bookshelf. “I don’t think the bed is high enough to end it.” I kneeled and dumped the basket’s contents onto the comforter. A few cootie catchers tumbled onto the floor. “Most are from middle school. I didn’t organize them chronologically. You made them, and how could I throw away our maybe-futures?”
She picked through the shapes, like white paper flowers of all sizes. “You kept all of them. You are a cootie catcher hoarder.”
“Guilty.”
She tucked her fingers in the folds of a catcher with different kinds of dogs we wanted to have on the outer flaps. “Remember the one with super powers, or the Halloween one with the grisly deaths, or the one we used to tell the first Broadway role I’d land?”
“Christine in Phantom of the Opera,” I said.
I scooped up about ten cootie catchers and let them fall into the basket. Viv studied the flaps of each before placing them away.
“Viv?”
She looked up.
“You are my drama queen.” There was a funny quiver to the words, but I meant them. Without judgment. To me, friendship meant seeing a person. Seeing their flaws. Loving them more for them.
She smiled drowsily, like she hadn’t slept well.
“Forget brain twin. You want to be my heart twin?” I asked.
Her red rain boot nudged my knee. “Shut up, sappy.”
I grew serious. “I am sorry. You take up space. No one else has a whole shelf dedicated to them in here.”
She toed one boot off the side of the bed, then the other, and squirmed back onto the pillows.
“So, I said you like Graham. Want to talk about it?”
“No.” I stared at the cootie catchers interrupting the violet pintuck comforter. There was one, somewhere in the pile, that we’d written Harry’s and Graham’s names as potential senior prom dates. “I like Harry.” It came out meek. “He’s the one I want to kiss and go on dates with. Graham is, I don’t know, maybe without Harry. But Harry . . . is.” I swept my arms encompassingly. That was wrong. I tapped my hand over my heart.
“I know,” Viv said. “But liking them both, in different ways, it wouldn’t make you bad. Not like my mom and your dad.” My eyes felt cornered by hers. She smiled. I couldn’t help returning it. “Okay. Harry.” She sprawled forward, a new lightness to her voice. “You went to homecoming together, but he didn’t make a move—granted, the afterparty hijacked the night.”
“I’m going to his house later,” I said, nerves strumming my throat.
“Is it like, an official date? Or a hangout?”
“The difference?”
“An official date means he’ll probably kiss you. A hangout makes it ambiguous, and if he kisses you on a hangout, it doesn’t mean as much as if on a date.”
“Says who?”
She smirked. “Says every magazine’s dating advice.” Viv was the only person I knew who subscribed to magazines that arrived in the mail.
“Then it must be gospel,” I said with an eye roll. “What if I kiss him?”
“Yes,” she said exuberantly. “Go for it. It took him five years to ask you out and I’m not waiting five more to find out how he is. But wear a pretty bra.”
She deflected the pillow I tossed at her. “I’m just talking about kissing him.”
“If only you were more scandalous. I want to live vicariously through you.” She sighed wistfully. “Do you think he’s done it before? Sex?”
“Uh. No.” My head wobbled in indecision. “I actually don’t know. Maybe.”
“There was that mysterious girl bagger last year.”
“True.” I bit my lip. “I want to know what it’s like.”
“Sex?”
I nodded.
“Me too. I mean, I think it’s different, depending.”
“On what?”
Viv’s brows angled together as she said, “Mechanics. Position. Formulas. Aerodynamics,” imitating Graham.
“Formulas?”
She nodded sagely. “Formulas that equal one sum. It’s supposed to feel really good. Especially for the girl, or I guess girls if there are two involved, but somehow I think it would automatically feel good if two girls were having sex since they have the same equipment.”
“Sound reasoning.”
“Graham hasn’t done it,” she continued. “Not with a human girl. He would have told us. Tried to make us jealous.” We sat lost in thought, until Viv added, “We’re all going to school separate tomorrow so we can deliver the rites before classes. Easier to be clandestine if we’re not rolling as a pack. We can each take one or two initiates theirs.”
“We have to decide what order the larger rebellions will come and on what nights,” I said. “Plus, we have to break them down and assign each initiate their rite.”
She nodded, saying, “We’ll finish tonight.”
? ? ?
In Harry’s front yard, I paused by his mom’s flower bed. All her pretty violet and orange flowers were mangled, their stems bent, buds brown and dry. The soil was upturned like someone had ridden a bike through it.
“What happened to your mom’s flowers?” I asked as I ducked under Harry’s arm holding the front door for me.
He craned to see. “Maybe moles.”
“Mutant moles,” I said.
His dad shouted hello from the kitchen table. Simon was sprawled out on the living room floor surrounded by flash cards with Italian vocabulary words on them. “Buon pomeriggio, Isadora,” he called as Harry led the way down the hall toward his bedroom.
“His accent kind of sounds—”
“German. I know,” Harry said.
“Isn’t it weird that Simon’s the only little kid we know? Eight-year-olds who learn Italian and build robots and act like tiny adults are our normal.”
“Normal Simon is not. He isn’t the worst, though.” Harry’s tousled hair stirred and resettled as he collapsed onto the carpet. “Remember when he’d tell jokes without punch lines? He’s getting funnier at least.”
I sunk to the ground in a gap between the records laid out over the floor. “I used to want a brother so bad when I was little,” I admitted.
“And then you met Simon and thought, forget it,” Harry said with a chuckle.
“Nah. Then I found Graham in kindergarten and it was better than getting a brother. It was like getting a twin.” I felt guilty for bringing Graham up, which led to feeling weird for feeling guilty. “What were you listening to?”
Harry grinned and lifted up on his knees for a stack of records on his dresser. “I’ve been searching for the perfect song.”
“And you think it might be hiding on one of these?” I tapped a black disk on its paper sleeve. He had hundreds, on shelves, in piles, on the floor—almost every surface covered in vinyl.
“Not anymore. I listened to them and it isn’t here,” he said.
I could imagine that all the light in his eyes came from listening to music, a fleck of gold added with each note. “How will you know it when you hear it?”
“Ummm.” He drummed his knees. “It’ll sound sort of familiar. But also really different.”
“The same and different,” I said. “Like the worlds you used to imagine in space.”
“Exactly like those.”
“You want to hear my perfect song?”