“No,” I say. “Not at all.”
“Good. Because Kate needs to be careful. Very careful. Lehna’s really mad. And at first it was just Lehna being dramatic, but now the reason is serious, because Lehna thinks that Kate’s playing with Violet. Like, really playing with her. We all saw Violet at the art thing last night, and Violet was like, ‘What’s Kate’s deal?’ And Lehna was like, ‘What did she do to you?’ Violet said Kate stood her up and was being deluded—no, it wasn’t that. Not deluded. The word that means hard to get. She said Kate was being that, and while she understood everything was like, wow, sudden, she’s not going to wait around forever for Kate to focus. And Lehna—ohmygod, Lehna. Lehna was like, ‘She’s not worth it if she’s going to do that to you.’ And she’s right, right, because no one should treat you like that. But she’s also wrong, because it’s Kate we’re talking about, and we all know Kate’s only acting like this because she’s afraid. Or at least I think we all know that. It just stops being a good excuse after a while. And what I’m trying to say is, the time it stops being a good excuse? Well, that’s now. Lehna’s already sure of it. And Violet’s getting there. So you have to tell Kate to do something. Really do something.”
“But I have told her to do something. Just this morning.”
June locks me into a look there, and it’s like finding out that Hello Kitty doesn’t have a mouth because she can beam words directly into your mind. “Well, try harder,” she says. “We’re all going to the Exploratorium this afternoon—if you and Kate come, I can make sure Lehna’s distracted so Kate and Violet can talk alone. This is it—her last last chance. Give me your number.”
I tell June my number and she enters it into her phone. Then she calls me so I can have hers.
“There,” she says. “Remember: We never had this conversation.”
“You’re not taking sides.”
“Right. I just want all my friends to be happy. And sometimes you have to do that one friend at a time.”
*
I’m aware that I should contrive a reason for me and Katie to go to the Exploratorium—it’s a fun place, so it wouldn’t be too hard to say I need the pick-me-up that playing around at an interactive science museum can bring. And then, surprise!, we’ll bump into Violet there.
A trick. I could easily trick her into going.
But I don’t want our friendship to be like that.
So instead I sit down next to her at the start of math class and say, “I know where Violet’s going to be this afternoon, and I think we should go there.”
Kate sighs. “How do you know this information?”
“A little bird told me. And I’m not going to tell you anything more than that. I promised.”
Katie nods.
I go on. “Also, I found out Ryan’s going to be at Quinn’s poetry thing.” I tell her about the conversation Ryan and I had, and how weird it made me feel.
“So do you want to go?” Katie asks after I’m done. “Do you think he’ll read?”
“I don’t know. And I don’t know. What about you? Do you want to go to the Exploratorium?”
Our teacher is clearing his throat, waiting for us to settle down so he can start.
“Let me get back to you on that,” Katie says.
We make it through class. It’s the end of the year; there’s no real reason to pay attention except to be polite to the teacher as he goes through the motions.
As soon as the end bell rings, I turn to Katie for an answer.
“Yes,” she says. “But only because it’s the Exploratorium.”
*
I went to the Exploratorium so many times with my parents and on field trips as a kid, but the last time I went was with Ryan.
It was one of our first city excursions alone, and for two hours I wasn’t worrying if we were boyfriends or best friends, or if someone was going to see us, or if this was the moment it would all click into place. No—for two hours, we got to be kids, running around and playing. We got to fool around with sound waves and pulleys. We got to pixelate ourselves and dance as a projector turned us into shadows on a kaleidoscope-colored screen. At the end of an exhibit about artwork created in a nineteenth-century mental asylum, we waded through the comment box and found a comment card written by a young kid: I have lost my turtle. His name is Charles. For weeks after, we pretended to be looking for Charles.
“He couldn’t have gotten that far,” I’d say.
“Maybe we should try the Shell station,” Ryan would say back.
Eventually we forgot about Charles and moved on to other inside jokes, other references to what we’d shared and continued to share.
Charles is still out there, I’m thinking now. He must be entering his awkward teenage mutant ninja years by now.
I don’t turn to Ryan and say this, because it’s not Ryan who’s with me. It’s Katie, and she’d have no idea what I was talking about. I could explain it to her, but it wouldn’t be the same.