Mikey’s mom hollered from the kitchen window: dinnertime. It was Sunday, so everyone knew the menu: Spaghetti and meatballs, salad, and boiled artichokes dripping in butter. Mikey’s parents were Italian—well, his dad was. His mom, Carolyn, was technically half Irish, which was probably where the red hair came from. Katie had inherited that too, but hers was different. More copper, almost a strawberry brown.
The three of us wandered inside, Mikey and me slumping into the window seat at the table while Katie, head still in her novel, bumbled into a countertop.
“Katie, baby,” Carolyn said. “Book down. Wash up. Let’s eat.”
Katie marked her page with a sparkly hair clip, then flung on the faucet before sitting down across from me. I rolled my eyes. She stuck out her tongue and reached for a meatball while Paul, Mikey’s dad, opened a container of Parmesan.
“You boys were out late yesterday,” he said, dumping an ungodly amount on his artichoke. “Nothing good happens after midnight, you know.”
“All due respect, sir,” I said, “but literally everything good happens after midnight.”
I was sixteen, and so every word that came out of my mouth was more or less horrendous. But Paul smiled; he got it. Paul was the kind of dad who snuck us a couple of beers after Carolyn went upstairs for the night. Every summer, for as long as I could remember, he’d doze off on the armchair in the living room while Mikey and I watched the ballgame. Between his catnaps, Paul would tell stories of his high school glory days, which, honestly, weren’t all that glorious because he was kind of a nerd and already dating Mikey’s mom, but still. I appreciated the effort. That he was around at all.
“Well,” Carolyn said as she passed me the salad bowl. At my feet, Maple begged for a noodle, and I obliged. “After this week, party’s over, all right? Mikey needs to be at his best when we leave next Monday, and Tyler, your mom asked me to—”
“Can I be excused?”
Everyone looked up at Katie. Her dinner, virtually untouched.
“Sorry,” she said. “I just—I have this idea. I need to go upstairs.”
Carolyn glanced at Paul, and then Paul shrugged, and then Katie covered her plate with tinfoil, tossed it in the fridge, and disappeared down the hall. Seven hours later, when I finally stumbled home and into my room, Katie’s window was aglow—and shewas standing in front of her pale pink wall, dwarfed by a sea of neon sticky notes.
I crawled out onto my sill, lit a joint, then flung a dirty sock at her pane. She whirled around and clunked it open.
“What?”
“Since when do you bail on family dinner?”
“Since when are you in my family?”
I took another hit, held my breath, then exhaled. “Since before you were born. Since my dad left us. Since my mom got a second job and your parents started feeling so bad for me, I got a stocking on your mantel and a place for my report card on your fridge.”
She wrinkled her nose, then sat on her sill too. She wore a pair of sweat shorts—the same color as her wall; this was classic Katie—and a matching cropped sweatshirt with rhinestones on it. Her feet were bare and dangling, and her hair was down and everywhere.
“How was the party?” she asked.
“Stupid. Mikey left with Ingrid, and everyone else sucked.”
“Then why would you go? Why do you always go to these things if—”
“What’s on the wall?”
“Huh?”
I inhaled again, then pointed behind her. “Your wall. Are you and your theater friends doing, like, an unauthorized retelling ofLegally Blondein the Stonyport industrial car park or something?”
She crossed her arms over her chest. Her eyes, even in the darkness, even from here, in the ten-or-so feet between us, were stupidly green.
“I’m writing a book,” she said.
“A book? Seriously?”
“Yeah. Seriously. It’s my summer project.”
“Well,” I said, leaning against my frame, “I’m sure it’ll be very stupid.”
Katie, at that, glared at me. She was beginning to braid her hair—to pull her waves into loose, loopy plaits. She was twisting off her earrings, untangling her necklaces. Slipping off her bracelets, unstacking a couple of rings. Placing them all right inside her window, on the lip of the frame.
