“Mik, why didn’t you just get all the flowers from the same place?”
He crosses his arms defensively. “Because I wasn’t sure what Mom would like! So I hedged my bets.”
“You hedged your bets with flowers?”
“Well excuse me for trying to make this nice!” He glares at me. “You want to fix it yourself? Be my guest.”
I hold up my hands. “I’m just saying, there’s alotgoing on here.”
“Yeah, well, I had to do it all myself because Allie’s running late. Per usual.”
I groan. “What’s new?”
My little sister has never been on time to anything in her entire life. Not to school, not to dance recitals, not to family dinners, not even to her own high school graduation where she was supposed to give a speech. She operates on what we’ve dubbed “Allie Standard Time,” which is approximately forty-five minutes to an hour behind the rest of the world. It drives Dad crazy.
“Where is she?” I ask.
Michalis shrugs. “Somewhere between here and Bushwick. Probably stopping for coffee she doesn’t need and texting someone she definitely shouldn’t be texting.”
“The drummer?”
“I think she’s moved on from the drummer. Now it’s a poet.”
“Oh god.”
“Aspoken wordpoet.”
“Kill me.”
“He has a man bun.”
“I need to sit down.”
Michalis laughs and heads toward the kitchen with the cheese platter. “You want coffee? Mom made a pot before she left.”
“Does the Pope shit in the woods?”
“That’s not the saying, Em.”
“Close enough.”
Michalis is just handing me a steaming mug of coffee—black, the way I’ve taken it since sophomore year of college—when the front door swings open with enough force to rattle the photographs on the wall.
“EMMA!”
I barely have time to set down the mug before Phoebe launches herself at me.
We collide in the entryway, a tangle of arms and thick red hair and squeals that always seem to escape us both whenever we’ve been apart too long. To anyone watching, we must look ridiculous—two women in their mid-twenties shrieking like we’re fifteen again, reuniting after a summer apart instead of three months. I don’t care. This is Phoebe Feldman. This is my person. My platonic soulmate since we were seven years old, sitting cross-legged on Cori’s kitchen floor, eating ice cream straight from the carton and trying to teach each other dance moves from a Britney Spears video that neither of us could actually execute.
Well, I couldn’t execute them. Phoebe could do literally anything. She still can.
“It’s been forever!” She pulls back, hands on my shoulders, scanning my face like she’s memorizing it.
“It’s been three months.”
“That’s basically forever.”
“That’s a quarter of a year.”
