“Did you break up with Tyler?” Morgan asked. “Or did he break up with you?”
“Getting right to it, huh?” Alexa sipped her straw-less water.
“Well, did you?”
“Technically, yes,” said Alexa. Their food arrived, and for a few minutes they were busy and silent, eating. Alexa offered the street corn to Morgan, who shook her head violently.
“I don’t like Tyler that much,” said Morgan.
“No? Why not?”
Morgan dipped a fry into ketchup and considered this question. “I just don’t think he seems very nice all the time.”
Alexa was almost seven when Morgan was born. The year Morgan turned six and entered elementary school Alexa was already ensconced at the middle school, wearing a bra and getting noticed for her well-put-together outfits. That was the year thecrop top came back, and Alexa got dress-coded more than once. She’d come home from school, tugging off the T-shirt they’d given her at the nurses’ office, and there Morgan would be, wearing her certified Disney Anna dress and wig and singing “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” at the top of her phlegmatic lungs.
In one year Morgan will be the age Alexa was when she first had a boyfriend (an ill-fated romance, please don’t remind her); in two, the age when she sneak-watchedFifty Shades of Graywith Destiny. (Their mothers had dropped them at Cinemagic for what the mothers thought was the evening showing of the second SpongeBob movie:Sponge Out of Water.) She supposed she hadn’t given her little sister enough credit for maturing all of these years—for having her own, sometimes possibly anguished, interior life.
“No,” agreed Alexa. “He’s not very nice all the time.”
“Is that why you broke up with him?”
AfterFifty Shades,emerging from the lobby into the parking lot, Alexa and Destiny were shell-shocked, unable to meet each other’s eyes. Neither would ever admit it, but both wished they had stuck with SpongeBob. Sometimes, after all, innocence was a blessing.
“Yes,” she said. “And you should do the same, if you ever have a girlfriend or a boyfriend or anyone in your life who doesn’t treat you well. Okay?”
“Okay,” said Morgan.
“I mean it for real, Morgs. Seriously. That’s really important, okay? You have to take care of yourself. Promise me.”
“I promise,” said Morgan.
Alexa had so many other things she wanted to say to Morgan: don’t grow up too fast, stay true to yourself, think for yourself and talk for yourself and don’t turn down dessert, and show your body if you want to but not if you don’t. “You know what I do if I find myself in a tricky situation?” she asked.
“What?” Morgan was all ears—well, and elbows and collarbone and ketchup-smeared face, but mostly ears.
“I ask myself what Peter would say to do. I find I really don’t go wrong if I do that.”
Morgan stared at the water for a moment, taking this in, and tears filled her eyes. One dropped onto the napkin in front of her, and then she nodded. “I like that,” she said. “I’m going to do that too.” After a beat she said, “You know who I do like?”
“Who?”
“That one who came to Canobie Lake with us. The one you were holding hands with on the street the other day.”
“Cam?”
“Yes. Cam.”
They ate and looked at the water. The sun shifted and Morgan started to squint.
“I like him too,” Alexa said at last.
“Maybe he should be your boyfriend.”
Morgan’s features had been changing steadily over the course of the summer and probably before that. There were new mature hollows in her cheekbones that offered a preview of what her face would look like when she was a teenager and then an adult. Her eyebrows, once they were professionally shaped, would be stunning (those came, frustratingly, from Peter; Alexa would have loved to have them too), and after Dr. Pavlo, the orthodontist who was responsible for Alexa’s smile, worked his magic on the space between her front teeth, Morgan’s smile too would be irresistible.
“Maybe. Or maybe nobody should.”
The rest of the meal they ate in companionable silence, and when Soccer Maya dropped the check, Alexa tipped extravagantly, just because she could.
