“Nothing?” Aggie guessed.
“Table manners.” Orion opened up to show Aggie a mouthful of chewed-up pancake, and Aggie laughed, and Poppy felt like she would die of embarrassment, and Penn wondered where boys learned that, that trick of attracting girls by grossing them out, which only worked for a few years, like flirting training wheels. Maybe boys had it all along, that razor’s-edge balance of disgusting and charming, and for many years they didn’t notice or care, and for a few years girls found it fascinating, and for the rest of the time, men fought to keep it under wraps and only let it out when they were alone.
Poppy and Aggie and Natalie and Kim had been best friends since first grade when Poppy had been the new kid, and Aggie was her new neighbor, and they’d formed the PANK Club, whose avowed pursuit changed over the years from hopscotch to bird-watching to detective agency but whose name never changed because its members never did. At first, Rosie and Penn had been silly-grateful for these girls, not just for how much they loved Poppy but for how ordinarily. Eventually, though, the girls stopped being miracles and settled into family: Poppy’s friends, who were just there at the table when Rosie came home from work, ready to be asked to stay for dinner, who came out for ice cream with them after school or bowling on a rainy Sunday, Poppy’s friends who came over for movie nights and said, “Hi, Poppy’s Mom,” when they met in the hall at school, Poppy’s friends who disappeared into her room for hours and never sent a tray of clay models crashing into shards or came out to ask for a snack and consumed an entire jar of peanut butter and two loaves of bread as happened regularly with the boys’ friends. And whereas the boys’ friends came and went and even overlapped, Poppy and the PANK Club never wavered. They told each other everything.
Except for one thing.
Rival Neighbor Princess
They never planned to keep Claude a secret. It was an accident. It was an accident plus opportunity plus special circumstances. You can say that about a lot of things—Rigel and Orion said it, for instance, the time they lost their skateboard in the lake when they tried to use Jupiter as a sled dog during an ice storm—but this one was different because this one was huge. This one was different because it lasted (the twins had managed to keep their secret for less than ten minutes) and because it transformed so many lives. Usually secrets that do that are kept through foresight, scheme, and strategy, careful planning and obsessive track-covering. A lot of work. In this case though, secrets were kept by accident and then mostly forgotten. But their power was therefore no less portentous.