The Takedown(14)

I shivered. Weirder than Jessie’s human projects was that in thirty seconds of searching, I’d found zero ways to reach her. No e-mail, profile links, Doc digits, nothing. How was that possible? Thanks to Park Prep’s alumni breeding program, my Doc was constantly updating my classmates’ contact info. I could txt the entire student body, going back twenty years, if I wanted. Yet for Jessie all that came up was a physical address in Brooklyn Heights. What good was that?

Also, there was her Quip stream. It said she hadn’t logged in for two months. Still I sent her a private Quip asking her to txt me, then sighed and tossed my Doc on Ailey’s desk.

“I don’t know what to think.”

“So you came here?”

“I just thought maybe you were still mad at me for—”

“Scraping me off like something nasty on the bottom of your shoe?”

“I wouldn’t describe it like that.” I laughed. “Okay, maybe I would. But I mean, people grow apart, Ailey.”

Ailey was fidgeting with her bra strap, a lacy lime-green number, way fancier than anything she’d owned when we were friends. The Amundsens’ household was like a thousand degrees. I took off my hat, scarf, and then, after another second, unsure how long I really wanted to stay, my coat.

“You think we grew apart?”

“I dunno. I mean, I guess we just grew different. I’m sorry, Ailey. Chalk it up to being fourteen?”

Ailey flapped a hand, waving away my transgressions.

“Of course. Forget it. That’s all nothing now, for real.”

It was then, as we sat there, not meeting each other’s eyes but uncomfortably smiling in each other’s direction, that I realized something strange. Ailey wasn’t on her Doc. And Ailey was always on her Doc. I’d checked mine at least twenty times since I’d been there, and I wasn’t nearly as Doc-dependent as Ailey. In fact, I didn’t see her Doc anywhere. She must have stashed it somewhere when I came in. But why would she do that?

I popped out of my chair and opened her walk-in closet just like I used to, pretending I wanted to admire her boring shoes and sweaters. Ailey got stuck with the smallest bedroom in the brownstone, but glass half-full, it had the largest closet. When I was out of sight, I checked the floor and along her shelves. No Doc.

“Oh holy gosh,” Ailey squealed. “I know who it is. Who’s the one person who could get their hands on video-editing tech like this?”

You? I wanted to say, but instead guessed, “Reed Winters? He’s doing that internship with Magnus Pictures.”

“No.” I could hear Ailey shake her curls with exasperation. “Don’t get frowny face, but it’s Sharma. It has to be.”

“Sharma?” My head rocked back in surprise. “Why would she do something like this?”

“Because she equals the fourth friend. Like Abel in Twilight Girls. Nobody cares about Abel. Who needs more motive than that? I mean, how much do you trust any of the girls, for that matter?”

Ailey said it innocently enough, but it was still trash talk. And nobody trash-talked my girls but me. Before I could stop myself, I snapped, “Sharma isn’t the fourth anything. We’re all integral.” Then I lied, “Plus the girls are outraged about this. They have my back, always.”

“Of course they do,” Ailey said quickly. “Sorry. I was just thinking out loud.”

This was pointless. Ailey’s closet was identical to Ailey: long, slim, and hiding nothing. I went back into her room and began to gather my stuff.

Above her desk she still had her Wish Board. A rinky-dink corkboard that always held dozens of cutout images of cars she liked, houses she wanted to live in, and boys she had crushes on. It had dwindled over the years as printed materials became harder to come by. Now the board was filled with photos of her and Ellie Cyr. Actual printed photos. Apparently, they did everything together. Ball games, Coney Island, the ballet, sleepovers.

“I can’t believe you still do this.”

Something constricted a little in my chest. Maybe it was that I could so easily envision myself in those photos replacing Ellie. If I hadn’t ditched Ailey, it would have been me. But I guessed things had all worked out the way they were supposed to. Seeing the girls’ pretty, happy smiles, I knew that Ailey had clearly found her people. People who, unlike me, wouldn’t dump her because better ones had come along. And then I noticed something else: almost in equal number to the shots of Ailey and Ellie were pics of Ailey with a boy.

I lightly touched one of those photos as if it were an ancient artifact. In it, Ailey and the boy were wearing enormous sunglasses, hugging. The photos made me notice the dried roses pinned next to the board. The lone teddy bear on her bed where a pile of childhood ones used to be. It stopped me in my tracks.

I gasped. “Ailey, do you have a boyfriend?”

“Triple smiley face,” she said as an actual smile lit up her features. “I hoped you’d notice. We met at the Y. He’s a lifeguard and goes to that new charter Learn in Excellence. That’s part of why Mom takes my Doc away when I come home. He’s on it, like, equal sign, always. ‘Homework first, Ailey.’”

And that was why Ailey didn’t have her Doc.

I had an urge to rip up the pic of Ailey’s boy. I don’t know if it was jealousy for the normalcy of it all, or that the boy looked wholesome—obv no checkered past there—or that Ailey was so clearly happy. She stayed good, didn’t abandon anybody, and she still got the friends, the boy, and the smooth complexion. For the first time I had a tiny sense of how she must have felt when I dumped her. It was a thick, gooey kind of awful—like existential tapioca.