Step one: In the same bowl, combine one jar of peanut butter and two bags of chocolate chips. Melt until smooth.
I twist the top off a peanut butter jar, peeling back the paper while Ellie collects an armful of last night’s snacks from the living room floor. We work silently for a few minutes—her, cleaning up our mess; me, making a brand new one. Once she has the air mattress crammed back into its storage bag, she wanders back to the kitchen, munching on some leftover pita chips. “These are still good,” she says, holding the bag out. I politely decline.
“Can you make sure there’s nothing in this your family is allergic to?” I ask, fully aware that I should’ve asked an hour ago. I slide my phone across the counter, and Ellie taps the screen, taking her turn with the recipe.
“Only allergy I know of is Aunt Carol, who can’t have shellfish.” She looks up, a no-nonsense look in her eyes. “How much shrimp were you planning to put in these?”
“Three, maybe five bags,” I joke, ducking down into the cabinets and sizing up a gradient of pink mixing bowls. “Should we make a single or a double batch?”
“Depends,” Ellie says, “Are we using three bags of shrimp or five?”
A laugh explodes out of me, bouncing off the vaulted ceilings. “Double batch it is.” I grab two bowls on the bigger and pinker end of the spectrum, then unleash a chocolate hailstorm into one of them as I rip open four bags of chocolate chips with my teeth. “Grab that rubber spatula, wouldja? We need to scrape both jars of peanut butter into here.”
Ellie pauses, eyeing the mixing bowls. “Are those microwave safe?”
“Probably. Let’s find out.”
While I dump the first box of Rice Chex into the empty bowl, Ellie meticulously scoops every last smear of peanut butter onto the pile of chocolate chips. She’s an artist at work, scraping every inch of the jar with laser focus. The pink tip of her tongue peeks out between her lips in pure concentration, and I’d tease her about it if it weren’t so cute. I can’t imagine being so diligent about a recipe that boils down todump a bunch of good stuff in a bowl and stir.
“Can I help you with something?” Ellie asks, glancing up just long enough to catch me staring.
“It’s okay if you don’t get all of it. You know that, right?”
She juts her chin toward my phone. “The recipe says two jars of peanut butter.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t have to be perfect to be good.”
Her attention doesn’t budge from the jar. “But if we can make it perfect, why wouldn’t we?”
“I think you’d have a lot in common with my mom,” I mutter.
Ellie breathes a laugh. “Just what every girl wants to hear.” She drags the edge of the rubber spatula along the lip of the mixing bowl, adding a fraction of a gram of peanut butter. “Are the two of you close? You and your mom?”
“Closer than it sounds like you andyourmom are,” I say, although based on previous conversations, that’s not saying much. “I think we’ll get along better once I move out though. Like, even now, I’d love to be in Florida with them, but the time apart is sort of refreshing.” I look up from the second box of cerealI’ve been struggling to open, locking with Ellie’s narrow gaze. “All relationships need a little space, right?”
“Makes sense,” she says, then mushes her lips together in thought. “Do you think that’s true for you and Kat too?”
“I…I don’t know. This semester is the first time we’ve been apart.”
“In how long?”
“Since we met,” I say. “Since we were six.”
“Wow.” Ellie’s hand stays suspended in midair, wielding the rubber spatula like a magic wand. “I wish I had a friend like that. The longest friendship I have is from”—she squints out the window as her lower lip stiffens—“second semester freshman year, I think.”
“Of high school?”
She shakes her head. “College. We moved around a lot when I was a kid, and I just never really clicked with anyone once we got to Geneva. Even with the art kids, I always felt like a weird extra because everyone else had been friends for so long.” Deeming the first jar of peanut butter officially empty, Ellie picks up the second one and resumes her work. Meanwhile, I’m fighting off the pity creeping into my chest. Everyone deserves a friend like Kat, the kind of long-term friend you can show all your cards to without questioning the consequences. The kind of person you can answer a FaceTime call from while you’re on the toilet, who, even the morning after a fight, will pick up your call on the first ring. Some of that is just the side effects of a fifteen-year friendship, but I imagine there are other ways people end up that close.
“I don’t think it’s always about how long you’ve known aperson,” I say. “If it were, we’d all be best friends with our moms.”
“Fair,” Ellie agrees. A golden thread of hope outlines her voice. “So you have newer friends that you’re close with?”
My argument collapses. “Well, no,” I admit.
“Oh.”
“But I’ve also barely left Geneva,” I remind her. “I’m not really meeting people out here. Before remeetingyoulast night, it’s been years since I’ve made a friend.” My own word choice doesn’t sit well with me, and my stomach churns in protest. Are Ellie and I friends? That’s what she wants, right? Maybe we’re just partners on the world’s most deranged group project. In a different world, we might’ve been something more, but given the circumstances, I’d be stupid to waste my time on what-ifs.
