Jo Ellen cracked up. “Please tell me you remember the time we walked to 7-Eleven because wehadto bake a cake. Please.”
Maggie closed her eyes. “It was chocolate and we put that canned frosting on it. My grandmother probably rolled over in her grave.”
“I’d eat that frosting now,” Jo Ellen said. “With a spoon.”
“Exactly how you ate it then.”
“And remember the kitten?” Jo continued, her mind in seventy different directions. “Crystal? The one you found right outside Jackson Street Cemetery? Oh, my God, how do I remember the name of that place?”
“How do you remember the cat’s name?”
“Crystal Blue Persuasion? We found it that summer right after the azalea thing. And we loved that song! The cat was pregnant and had kittens in the closet—do you remember? We were watchingLaugh-In!”
Maggie dropped her head in her hands, recalling the night with a mix of horror and hilarity. “We heard the awful mewing from the closet and discovered…five kittens!”
They sat in the echo of their laughter for a while, then Jo looked at the homemade cigarette in her hands. The joint looked just like Maggie remembered them—good to knowsomethings didn’t change.
She watched her friend’s face in the bare-bulb light. Loose and easy and every bit as young as that Jo from UGA.
“What does it feel like?” Maggie asked, genuinely curious.
Jo Ellen turned her head, slow and pleased.
“It feels,” she drawled, “like being eighteen on a roof in May with your best friend and your whole life ahead of you and a moth that was, at the time, as pretty as a butterfly.”
“And white azaleas,” Maggie whispered, back there on that roof again.
“It feels kind of young and free and like the girls we used to be. Especially you.”
“Me? I haven’t touched that thing.”
Jo held it out. “Lighter’s right here in front of the Heinz 57.”
Maggie eyed the joint again, as her heart beat a little faster. Then reached to take it out of Jo Ellen’s fingers.
“Don’t throw it away, Mags. It isn’t going to hurt us!”
She jutted her chin to the ketchup shelf. “Give me that lighter.”
Jo Ellen gasped. “Really?”
“Also, shut up.”
She did, biting her lip as she handed the lighter to Maggie. “It might make you cough, so?—”
“I can handle it, Jo. Don’t make it a thing.” She flicked the lighter and put the joint to her lips.
“Magnolia Fredericks Lawson.”
“If you narrate this, I will put it out in that vat of ketchup,” she said around it.
“My lips are sealed.” Jo Ellen was practically vibrating with excitement on her milk crate. “I am a vault.”
Maggie drew in a small, cautious, experimental breath, and was immediately and thoroughly punished for it.
The cough came up from the soles of her feet. It bent her in half on the milk crate. It was loud and undignified and it went on for some time, and Jo Ellen—no help at all—was laughing too hard to even pat her back.
By the time Maggie sat up, eyes streaming and throat scorched, she was laughing, too.
