Dani pulled Jess by the sleeve toward her room. “Don’t mind them. Another ordinary day at the mental asylum.”
Jess was surprised to find that Dani’s bedroom was messy. Clothes were piled on the two twin beds taking up one side of the room, and her desk was strewn with loose paper and drinking glasses. A yogurt cup with a metal spoon lay toppled on its side. One wall was a bookcase, crammed with books and magazines shelved both upright and stacked on their sides. Above the desk was a giant world map, the globe of Earth cut and spread flat. Multicolored pushpins dotted multiple countries.
Jess pointed. “Are those the places you’ve been?”
“Not yet. Where I’m going to go.”
Jess peered closer. Colors in all continents, in countries Jess couldn’t even name. She wasn’t sure what her own map would look like. She had the vague word overseas in mind, images of trains, of bicycles with a loaf of bread in the basket, of tile-roofed casitas perched on a steep hill. Sometimes she pictured a loft—massive windows, burnished wood floors—in an unnamed city, skyscrapers strung like a child’s paper cuttings; sometimes she saw Phoenix and its clean, straight lines, its dusty flatlands and jagged peaks.
“Check it out,” Dani said, pulling her by the wrist closer to the desk, where a microscope sat. “I found a dead horned toad in the yard today.”
“You have a microscope?”
“My mom got it for me. A hand-me-down from a biologist at her school. Look.”
The reptile lay on a piece of cloth next to the microscope. The creature looked intact, not squished or injured. She’d always thought of the sharp spikes on their heads as Mohawks. Punk-rock lizards. “I used to call them horny toads when I was a kid,” Jess said.
Dani put her eye to the microscope and twisted a dial. “Phrynosoma platyrhinos. When they feel threatened, they shoot blood from their eyes. Here,” Dani said, pointing at the lens. Jess leaned over and peered in. Cells whooshed into focus, a cluster that looked as if it had been scribbled and scratched in pencil, the lines fuzzy and blurred.
“That’s part of its eye,” Dani said.
Jess pulled her face away and looked at Dani, whose face was lit with energy.
“You’re a weirdo,” Jess told her.
She grinned. “Well, how often do you get to see a lizard’s eye like that?”
“Not often,” Jess said. “Practically never.”
Dani changed her voice, affecting the accent of a hokey 1940s movie director. “Hang with me, kid. I’ll make you a star.” She waggled an imaginary cigar.
Jess laughed. “What?”
“I don’t know,” Dani said. “Just in a goofy mood.” She shrugged. She took off her glasses and wiped them with the hem of her shirt, then sighed and put them back on. “I guess we have to study.”
“I guess so,” Jess said.
They sat across from each other on the beds and pulled out their books and notebooks, spreading them across the matching blue bedspreads. No, duvets. The cloth was soft as talc.
Jess had finished most of her Humanities essay on Antony and Cleopatra, so she thumbed through the play, double-checking her quotations, and then they exchanged papers. Dani wrote notes in the margins with a purple pen. Sometimes her lips moved as she read, and when she focused intently, she put the tip of her tongue against her teeth.
Dani said, “God, I’m going cross-eyed.” She pushed her glasses up and rubbed her eyes and then shut her book with a snap. “Let’s do something else. Something we don’t usually do. What do you usually do?”
Jess thought about it. Write bad poems. Read. Listen to music. Watch sitcoms with her mother over dinner. Flip through the dictionary and encyclopedia, close her eyes, and pick entries at random. Sneak out and roam around in the dark streets of a town she still didn’t know. Try not to think of the Boy, of her father with his new family, of her mom crying in her sleep, but then think about all those things anyway, the images flipping fast behind her eyes like an animation.
“Not much,” she said.
Dani said, “Do you think being only children makes us smarter? Or weirder?”
Jess shrugged. “Both, probably.” Except she wasn’t an only child anymore. She said, “I have a sister now. My dad had a kid.”
“Really? Where are they?”
“California.”
“Do you visit him?”
“No,” she said. She wished this was because she’d refused, but the truth was, he hadn’t asked. He had started including his phone number in the cards, though, with a note: “Call if you need anything.”
“Do you miss him?” Dani said.
Jess looked at the microscope, at the lump of the toad next to it. She had told herself she didn’t, but in that moment she could feel his shoulder where she so often rested her head, the scratchy hair on his knuckles. She smelled the scent of basil from his “world-famous” spaghetti. She heard the sound of his honking laugh. She didn’t know how to express this kind of missing. It was as if he was both there and not there, like the horned toad, and she squinted at the microscopic moments, looking for answers. She didn’t know how to say any of that. She nodded instead, offering a small shrug.
Dani said, “I hope you get to see him soon.”
“Thanks,” Jess said.
Dani hugged her knees. “Have you had sex?”
Startled by Dani’s bluntness, Jess stuttered a moment but then admitted it. “With one guy, back home.” That was the first time she’d said it to anyone. Not even to her mother.
Dani flopped backward and kicked her feet in the air. “I can’t believe how much I love it. I mean, love it.”
Jess watched as Dani pointed her toes and pedaled her feet, trying to reconcile this giddy version of her with the standoffish girl in the classroom and wondering what else she had misjudged. For her, sex hadn’t been terrible, but it sure as hell didn’t make her want to kick up her feet. The sharp pain would start to ease, but as she would begin to feel a tingling warmth and lift her hips higher, the Boy would groan and stop moving. And that was it.
Unsure of how to respond, Jess walked over to the horned toad and peered down at it. Still dead. She touched the long spines on its head, the shorter ones on its tail.
Dani sat up and folded her feet under her. Her neck splotched with red, she pushed her glasses up her nose and looked away toward the window. Jess realized Dani was embarrassed, and she squeezed her hands into fists, trying to think of what to say to make it okay.
“Sorry,” Jess said. “I don’t know how to do girl talk. If that’s what this is.”
“Me either,” Dani said.
“I spend most of my time talking to my mom. Or to myself.”
Dani smiled. “Me too.” She gazed out the window as if searching for something, and then turned to Jess. “I know. We could do faces.” At Jess’s blank look, she said, “You know, like makeup. My mom has a ton of theater stuff upstairs. She used to practice on me, making me up into characters. I haven’t done it for a long time.”
“Like who?”