You Know Me Well(19)

I honestly don’t know.

June and Uma, yes. Now they are changing positions, sitting so that their backs are together, June’s short black curls against Uma’s blond waves, each using the other for support. If I saw them, let’s say, getting burritos after school, I would find them irresistible. But even that certainty doesn’t feel like enough right now. An initial spark isn’t enough to sustain a friendship. June and Uma are the kind of couple who can’t even have a one-on-one phone conversation. They always put me on speaker. And their voices sound so alike that I rarely know who is saying what, which used to bother me before I realized that it hardly mattered. They’re practically conjoined anyway.

Uma catches sight of me. She waves. And guilt crashes in. These are my friends. I walk down the steps to the wide, wooden deck and sit next to Lehna without looking at her.

June and Uma turn their faces to the side to look at me, cheek to cheek with their backs still pressed together.

“Hi, Rising Art Star,” June says, smiling at me behind glamorous sunglasses.

“Hi,” I say back, grimacing in a way I hope shows that I don’t take myself that seriously.

Lehna pulls a peach out of her bag and takes a bite. She holds it out to me. It’s such a tiny gesture, but it makes me swell with gratitude, and that makes me want to cry.

I’m so confused.

I take a bite of her peach and hand it back.

“I want to hear all about Candace,” I say.

“She’s totally in love with Lehna,” Uma says.

“I don’t know about that,” Lehna says. “We talked, though. We talked for a long time.”

“Three hours,” June says. “That’s an epic conversation.”

“What about?”

Lehna shrugs.

“Everything,” she says. “College. The future. Everything.”

I nod, but as she tells me more all I think about are the conversations that she and I have not been having. About college, about the future. The one where I tell her how afraid I am and how this new fear scares me. The one where I confess that I don’t know how I got into UCLA’s art program, because I’m sure my work isn’t good enough, and once I get there they’re going to find me out. I’ll be laughed at; I’ll be humiliated. And the one where I tell her that nothing about college excites me: not the dorms or the dining hall, not the possibility of a great roommate or great parties, not the classes that will supposedly blow my mind or the memories that will supposedly stay with me forever. Nothing. I feel like a fraud every time anyone asks me where I’m going. They are always impressed, and I always feign excitement, and all the while I’m trying to stop time from passing, stop summer vacation from coming, stop classes from ending, stop everything.

“She’s going to Lewis and Clark,” Lehna’s saying, “which is great because Portland isn’t that far from Eugene, so we could meet up on weekends. She can’t decide whether she wants to major in history or math. She knows she wants to be a teacher. Can you imagine being just as good at history as you are at math? She’s so smart.”

“Cool,” I say, trying to sound enthusiastic, but I wonder if she can see through me.

I feel like she should, because friendship is about more than facts. It’s about knowing what someone is thinking, or knowing enough to know that you don’t. But I guess it’s also about not letting too much time go by without asking them questions, so you don’t end up looking at them one afternoon, the sun so bright you have to squint, realizing that you hardly recognize the person they’ve become. Maybe, when it comes to friendship, both of us are getting this wrong.

“Holy fuck,” Uma says.

“What?” Lehna and I ask in unison.

June doesn’t have to ask, because Uma is showing her something on her phone. Both of their jaws drop.

“Katie,” Uma says.

“Kate,” June says.

“Have you been on Insta today?”

I shake my head. I’ve been avoiding my phone.

“You have, like, five billion new followers.”

Uma shoves her phone at me, and it’s true. Where I used to have a modest number of followers, mostly people I know in real life and some friends I’ve made online, now the number doesn’t even make sense to me. There are way too many digits. I click on my latest picture—an elephant painting—and there are over three thousand likes.

“What the fuck?” I say. “Look at this.”

I hold the phone out to Lehna. It takes her a moment too long to take it, but she has no other choice. She looks. She frowns. She scrolls through the pictures and comments until she stops and her eyes narrow.

“AntlerThorn says: ‘Rumor has it a show with the fabulous Kate Cleary is in our future.…’” She hands the phone back to Uma. “That gallery was on the list I found. The best new galleries? How did they…? How did you…?”

She stares at me, waiting.

I could tell her about Garrison Kline and his friends and how they promised to work magic for me, but Lehna isn’t asking out of real interest or curiosity. Instead she seems angry, as if the art show wasn’t her idea in the first place. I barely looked at her stupid list.

“Isn’t this what you wanted?” I ask her.

She turns away.