The Best Laid Plans(6)

Hannah and I head up the stairs, passing a wall of framed pictures from Andrew’s childhood, pictures I’ve seen a million times and am mostly in—Andrew and me on Halloween dressed as Ghostbusters, fistfuls of candy in our tiny hands; Andrew and me in middle school, blond and skinny with braces and acne, the height of our awkward phase. Hannah taps her finger on one as we pass—Andrew’s tenth birthday, when he and I got in a mud fight. We’re smiling at the camera, completely splattered.

She grins. “Think everyone has already seen these, or is there still time to hide them?”

“It’s too late.”

“I can’t even tell which kid you are.” I know she’s joking, but she’s got a point; I look exactly like a boy here. But there’s no use hiding the past. If I can remember everyone picking their noses, chances are everyone remembers me like this too.

I spent all of elementary school with Andrew. I didn’t see the need to make any other friends, not when Andrew and I biked at the same pace and could quote all the Star Wars movies by heart—even the prequels. My mom warned me of the dreaded “cootie” phase—of the day Andrew would change and decide he couldn’t be my friend. But it didn’t happen. Puberty hit and we somehow stayed friends.

There were uncomfortable years, sure. I remember being the only girl at Andrew’s thirteenth birthday pool party and being terrified to strip down to my bathing suit, wanting desperately to join in the cannonball contest but worrying my suit would fly off or my period would start. I remember posing for pictures with him at family gatherings, our parents casually telling us to “get close together” and me not being able to breathe from the awkwardness of it. I remember the time Andrew invited me over in seventh grade and I showed up in my pajamas, not expecting a bunch of other boys to be there—cute boys from our class—and I was so mad he hadn’t warned me that I didn’t speak to him for three days.

And then there was Andrew’s first kiss, with Sophie Piznarski at the eighth-grade dance. He pulled me outside the cafeteria to tell me, his face a confusing mixture of excitement and embarrassment. Was this kind of conversation okay? Could we talk about these things? Was it too weird?

During those turbulent, traumatic years of frizzy hair and braces, when Andrew and I were still testing the waters, trying to figure out how to relate to each other; when he was always surrounded by other boys, and every time I tried to talk to another boy it felt like I had clay in my mouth, it was a mercy I met Hannah. She was cooler than I was, and friends with Danielle and Ava—girls who, at thirteen years old, already looked like Instagram models. She invited me to sit with her at lunch, rescuing me from tomboy obscurity and the vulgar conversations of middle school boys.

I was worried my new group of friends would make things different with Andrew—that he’d feel weird or left out that I had a new best friend besides him, but I should have known better. The first time I hung out with both Andrew and Hannah, they bonded over a mutual obsession with Harry Potter, and soon the three of us were inseparable. They’re both Gryffindors, of course, and even though I’m a Hufflepuff, they say they love me anyway.

At the top of the stairs we see Molly Moye making out with Edwin Chang, the two of them leaning against the door to the hall closet like they might try to climb inside. Edwin still has a bottle of beer in his hand, and it’s seriously close to spilling because he’s trying to hold it steady and grope Molly’s ass at the same time. Hannah is friends with Molly from field hockey, so we’ve hung out enough times for me to know that Edwin and Molly getting together like this is a momentous occasion, but for some reason I don’t feel like celebrating.

“Is everyone in this house in heat?” I mutter under my breath, walking over to take the bottle out of Edwin’s hand and setting it down on the hall table, on top of a magazine so it won’t leave a ring. He barely even notices, just gives me a quick thumbs-up, which I return, because I’m trying to act like I’m cool with everything. We edge by them into Andrew’s room, and once the door closes, I relax. The place is a mess, but it’s a mess I can clean up. The floor is strewn with laundry, and the bedsheets—green with flying ducks—are unmade and rumpled. Against one wall is the old couch I usually sleep on when I stay over. Hannah plops down on it while I sit on the bed, throwing her an extra blanket.

“So what happened?” she asks. “I was in the basement and I heard everyone cheering.”

So I tell her about Danielle and the crowd and the Madonna song, the word unfuckable loud over everything else, as sharp as a blade.

“It’s just so typical.” I take off my woolly socks and flop back on the bed. “This place sucks.” I’m going to USC for college, in California, which everyone thinks is crazy, but I need to be somewhere completely new. I’m sick of Prescott—the snow, the ice, the wind so cold sometimes it feels like it’s actually eating you. All I know is I want to make movies, and Vermont is pretty bleak on that front. All we have are writers, snowboarders, and serial killers.

Hannah is going to NYU to study art, and Andrew is going to Johns Hopkins because even though he hides it well, he’s freakishly smart. Johns Hopkins is in Baltimore, which is 2,646 miles from Los Angeles, which is 2,777 miles from New York. I’ve looked it up. Next year, we’ll just be three distant dots on a map. That’s the scariest part. I’m ready to get the hell out of Prescott, but I’ll never be ready to leave them.