I kiss Jonah Daniels four thousand times, every second his family isn’t looking. We bicker about everything on planet earth and beyond. I think jellyfish are so beautiful! Translucent and dancing underwater in fringed skirts. Jonah wishes they would drop dead in the sea. I like boxed mac and cheese with that gooey yellow cheese sauce. Jonah’s face turns pink with frustration, and he makes me homemade mac and cheese to prove his point. And of course I believe in extraterrestrial life! I bet they’ve already been here, I say, but Jonah shakes his head.
I drag him out to the beach late, late at night to see the sun rise. But we get all tangled up, tongues and skin and hands and gasps and yes, and, by the time I’m fully aware of the world again, it’s gone from dark to glowing. I don’t care that I missed the sunrise, because I’d much rather make one of my own.
My birthday dress arrives, and I hang it on a nail in the wall because it is art. I order white butterfly wings online, and it takes me three tries to mix the perfect blue paint.
On the day of my birthday, I open my eyes to the sound of my mom’s off-key voice singing me “Happy Birthday.” I wasn’t sleeping, but I was lying in bed, dreaming. She’s holding an oversize strawberry cupcake in her hands, and the tall gold candle flickers as she walks toward me.
“Make a wish, chickadee,” she says.
I sit up and blow it out and make my wish, and we relax against my pillows, devouring the cupcake and ignoring the crumbs that drop to my duvet cover. I open her glittery card, and a gift card for my favorite online art store falls out. There’s also a scrap of paper which reads: IOU, Save This Ticket.
“It’s not quite ready yet. I pick it up on Saturday.” Her smile is very self-satisfied, so I’m intrigued. “Oh, and I almost forgot! This came for you, too.”
She hands me a white envelope with my name in handwriting I know well enough to imitate. Return address: Ruby Oshiro, Seattle, WA, and I stop breathing.
“She called me last week for our new address,” my mom is saying. I don’t want to open this in front of her because I have no idea what it might say. “I was so glad to hear you guys are back to normal. She said you hadn’t been in touch with her at all.”
I told my mom that Ruby and Amala wouldn’t speak to me after what happened in March. Which would have been true—I’m sure of it. So I didn’t give them a chance. Amala didn’t try, but Ruby called and texted and knocked on my front door. I never opened it.
“Chickie?” my mom asks quietly. “Ruby knows, right? About the bipolar disorder?”
My silence serves as an obvious answer, especially since I can’t meet her eyes.
I feel my mom draw away from me. “Vivian! Ruby is your oldest friend. How could you not tell her? After everything that happened?”
“I don’t have to tell her everything! And I don’t have to tell you everything either!” Before she can protest, I cut her off. “You won’t even tell me who my dad is. So I don’t think I need to provide you with the status of all my relationships.”
“That,” she says darkly, “is entirely different. I am protecting you until you are old enough to deal with certain . . . realities.”
“Maybe I’m protecting you.” If she only knew. I mean, she knows a little—the tattoo, the outrageous money I spent on clothes and presents. She doesn’t know exactly what happened at Ruby’s sixteenth-birthday party last March. What I did.
“I know you’ve been asking to stay in Verona Cove. And I’ve told you that I’ll consider it. And I will, if it is genuinely what is best for you.” Her eyes narrow, the smugness of someone who is revealing the ace up her sleeve. “I will not consider staying here if you’re just hiding.”
She says this as if the two things are mutually exclusive.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Viv. You have an illness—”
“STOP. You are obsessed with this.” Tears fill my eyes, and I feel my hands clench, bending the card. “It’s my birthday—God, Mom!”
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I shouldn’t have . . . I just worry, and . . . well. Come downstairs if you want more breakfast. I got everything for German pancakes.”
I open the envelope after she’s gone and find a handmade card—of course. I’ve admired Ruby’s cut-paper art for years, the intricacy and detail. She can slice a National Geographic photo of an oil spill into a tiny leather jacket, a cotton-blossom pattern into puffy clouds, trim strips of chevron and polka dots for a hot air balloon.
This card is more sentimental than Ruby’s usual work, and the paper girl staring out her bedroom window is Ruby herself. Her jet bangs feathered on her forehead, her trademark fuchsia lips and black leggings. Floral for her comforter, birch for the window frame, stripes for her little boatneck shirt.
But her heart is pasted on the outside of her chest, as hot pink as her mouth. Beyond the window, instead of blue sky, is a square of paper from a map. A tiny red heart at the top of California.
My tears make it hard to see the inside. Oh, Roo. Break my actual beating heart, why don’t you? In her calligraphy script: Happy birthday, Viv. Miss you. Nothing more, nothing less. No demands for an explanation, no accusations, no hint about if Amala hates me as viciously as I’m sure she must.