“Sorry, sorry,” Kat resituates, wedging the pillow beneath her forearms to prop herself up. “I may also be a little stoned.”
“A little? You’re stoney baloney.”
“Stogna bologna,” she whispers, pronouncing the silentg’s and ushering us both into another laughing fit. “Fuck,” she wheezes as we both catch our breath. “I’m sorry. I suck. Please keep going.”
“I would if I remembered what we were talking about…”
“Ellie. The fight.”
“Right, thank you.” I shuffle my mental note cards and pick up where I left off. “I don’t know. Ellie thinks we’re, like, weirdly close.”
“Me and you?”
“Yeah.”
Kat hums in thought. “I mean, yeah, we’re close. But I wouldn’t say it’s weird.”
“Maybe it’s weird by some people’s standards,” I say.
“But I bet Ellie wouldn’t think it was weird if we were sisters,” Kat points out.
A warm, easy feeling settles through me like honey. “Exactly,” I say. “You get it.”
In a brief bit of silence, I almost convince myself this conversation is done and we can go back to being stogna bologna, but when Kat speaks up, the warm honey feeling crusts over. “So that was the fight?” she asks. “It was about me?”
“It wasn’treallyabout you,” I say, mostly just to make her feel better, but once it’s out there, it feels truer than I realized. “It was more about…how I put you first. Like, above myself, even.” I swallow hard, then in a smaller voice add, “That’s what Ellie thinks, anyway.”
Kat’s lips part on a breath. “Huh. Like when?”
“Like…when I stayed back from the family Florida trip to see you, I guess.”
“You didn’t have to,” Kat says. “I didn’t like…force you.” She glances away, but not quickly enough to block me from seeing the guilt in her eyes.
“Of course you didn’t force me. We planned that together,” I say. “And it worked out with the Sip reopening anyway.” I’m hesitant to say anything else. We could sweep all the hard stuff away and just smoke and laugh till we both doze off, like we’ve done a hundred weekends before. It’s tempting, but that’s not why I called her. That’s not why she’s here. So I keep going. “She also mentioned, y’know, how I wanted to go to the same college as you,” I say with a little less confidence than before.
“But that’s just how it worked out, right?” Kat says. “That we both wanted to do the community college and state school thing?”
I’m not brave enough to tell her that’s not quite true, that theprimary appeal of my college plan was that it was the same as hers. I can’t admit that, when she transferred and left me behind, I couldn’t bear to think that maybe I needed her more than she needed me. It hurts too much to say out loud, but my face crumples, and Kat’s knowing gaze says it all. I don’t have to say a word.
“I miss you at U of I you know,” she whispers, reaching over to give my hand a little squeeze.
“You don’t have to say that.”
“I’m not just saying it,” she insists. “It’s true.”
“Yeah, but you’ve got so much other stuff going on.” My voice cracks, and I wish it wouldn’t.
“You have stuff going on too,” Kat says. “The Sip stuff is your stuff.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“What do you mean you guess so?” There’s a playful shimmer to her voice that scares off the threat of tears. “You saw the place today. It was packed. You did all the marketing for that. That was you.”
“It wasn’t all me,” I admit.
“That’s not the point. You’ve got stuff going on in your life outside of me, and I’ve got stuff outside of you too. Stuff with Daniel, with school…we’re just on different paths right now.”
I blink up at my glow-in-the-dark stars, allowing myself to remember the magic of how things used to be, back when Kat and I were building a shared path. Middle school, high school, community college—anywhere I went, Kat and I were in lockstep, and nothing was too scary when I knew we were in ittogether. I never wanted to build a path of my own so long as I could stay on hers.
