The front door bangs open against the foyer wall and I bolt up, the laptop falling to the floor with a crash. I check the screen quickly, make sure everything is in working order, before I minimize the Instagram window as I hear Mom approach my room. It’s like I’m in high school again.

“It’s almost 4:00 p.m., Vera. Are you seriously still in bed?” Her voice screeches and I wince. She rarely raises her voice above the gentle yogi lilt she has taken on, so when she does, I know she has had a bad day, that her inner irritated bitch, the one I know is always hiding not very well under her performative, relaxed demeanor, has its claws out.

“What’s up?” I say nonchalantly, not willing to engage with her judgment.

She stands in the doorway, her jacket still on, her hair done up in some bizarre topknot-adjacent look that would probably flatter someone about twenty to thirty years younger.

“Guess who I saw at the farmers market?” I wriggle my feet under the covers, the arches tensing with her tone. Of course, she doesn’t let me guess. “Candace Roberts. Remember her?”

I don’t, but I decide not to answer because I know she’ll bulldoze over anything I have to say. “She was in your high school graduating class. She was part of that whole PTA fiasco your freshman year, if you recall?” She folds her arms and I wince again, the pang trembling to my toes.

Candace Roberts. Candace Roberts. She’d been my friend for about three weeks of freshman year when she first moved to Westchester from some unknown southern city. Or at least unknown to me at the time, though it was probably something like Atlanta.

My friends and I had invited her to a slumber party, our annual one at the start of the school year. But then two weeks in, she got her period for the first time and didn’t know where the nurse’s office was. So she walked around with a wad of toilet paper in her underwear and then that slid out in PE and she was toast. There was no way we could have a newbie, public period shedder at our slumber party. We said it was canceled.

Someone put up photos of the party on Facebook. In one of those photos, my friend Ashley had accidentally spilled red nail polish all over her pajama bottoms. And oh so cleverly I’d pointed out in a Facebook comment “Ha! Ash, you’re such a Candace Roberts! She wasn’t invited but she still showed up!” Of course it was a dog pile from there; the comment went semi-viral in our school, and again, Candace was tortured in the halls because of her menses mishap.