This Is How It Always Is(117)

“Promise.”

“Are you a boy or a girl?” said Aggie.

“No.” Poppy made herself look up at her best friend in the entire universe. She thought of the fairy tale she’d told her students in Thailand, how much easier this would be if she had magic and a wand. “I’m not.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Aggie made a face. Then she softened it. Then she asked, “What are you then?”

“I don’t know. Something else instead.”

“What else is there?” And for the first time all night, Aggie sounded like the question she was asking was actually the question she was asking.

“I’m all of the above.” Poppy couldn’t help smiling, which was kind of like magic because then Aggie couldn’t help smiling back. “And I’m also more to come.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s complicated.” Now that Aggie had smiled at her, she felt almost giddy. She realized she was dying to talk to her about all this. “I guess I’m complicated. I’m hard to explain. I’m kind of a weirdo.”

“You’re not the weirdo,” Aggie said. “I’m the weirdo.”

“True,” Poppy admitted. “Very true. Then I guess we’re both weird. Maybe that’s why we like each other so much.”

“We’re too old for princesses anyway.” Aggie was full-on grinning now. “We can be rival neighbor weirdos from now on.”

*

Everyone was still up when they got home.

“Did Mom and Dad dance?” Ben’s face was pure commiseration.

“Yup.”

“Eww.” A chorus.

“Slow dance?” said Rigel.

“Yup.”

“Eww.”

“Did he touch her ass?” said Roo.

“Don’t say ‘ass,’ Roo.” Penn was looking for ice cream.

“Eww, Roo, gross,” said Orion.

“But he did, right?”

Poppy squeezed her eyes shut and tried to think of something else.

“Your mother has a great ass,” Penn conceded from the freezer.

The ewws rose to a cacophony. Which was just where he liked them. He found ice cream as well as fudge to heat and cherries pinked by some brine that could probably provide fuel in the event of an apocalypse.

“What did you guys do all night?” Rosie started slicing bananas. No reason not to impart at least a few vitamins.

“Kept our hands to ourselves.” Ben got out bowls and spoons.

“Worse luck for you,” said his father.

“If Dad touching Mom’s ass is the most embarrassing thing that happened to you at your first school dance, you’re doing pretty good,” Roo congratulated his sister. “Ben went to the eighth-grade Halloween dance as a robot with those fake arms coming out of the front of his robot body, and when he asked Cayenne to dance, they totally groped her. First time he got to second base, and he missed it because they weren’t his real hands.”

“What about the time Alexie Gawersky asked you to retie her sash-thingy at the Spring Fling?” Ben could play this game all night and never run out of embarrassing Roo stories. “You tied it to the balloon rainbow as a joke, and she pulled over the entire thing plus the sound system when Andy Kennedy asked her to dance.”

“For our eighth-grade Christmas concert”—Orion didn’t even look up from the sprinkles he was sprinkling—“everyone had to wear a white top and black pants, but Rigel showed up in this yellow shirt.”

“What does this story have to do with school dances?” Rigel took off his socks and threw them at Orion’s sundae.

“It has to do with a time you embarrassed yourself.”

“That shirt was off-white.”

“It was the color of a banana.”

“It was beige.”

“So Rigel had to borrow a shirt, but the only person who had an extra was Mandy O’Lackey, and it was all gathered and padded and girly at the front so it looked like Rigel had boobs.”

“Where’d she get it?” said Poppy.

“And his solo in ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ was, ‘Two turtledoves,’ and he had to sing it twelve times, and every time he sang it, everyone cracked up.”

“Eleven times,” said Ben.

“Duh. It’s the twelve days of Christmas,” said Orion.

“Duh. The first day she gets a partridge in a pear tree and nothing else.”

“How do you know it’s a she?” said Poppy.

“Guys don’t want a partridge in a pear tree for Christmas,” said Roo.

“No one wants a partridge in a pear tree for Christmas,” said Poppy.

“That’s where these gifts fall apart for you?” said Ben. “You think this person—regardless of gender—had ten lords a-leaping on his or her wish list?”

Rosie smiled at Penn. She felt that truly she could be perfectly content sitting at her kitchen table eating ice cream with her family and listening to this conversation go on forever. These kids, her multitudes, they could grow up. They could move Away. They could—they would—become new, become changed, become actual adult people in progress, people she wouldn’t recognize, people she could not imagine. People remade. They would undergo miracles. They would transform. They would make magic. But they were her story, hers and Penn’s, so however wide they wandered, they would always be right here.