“Hug her,” said Vicky. “Then your faces will be close. If she gives a sign, you’ll know it’s all right to go ahead.”

“Thanks, guys,” he said. “You’re the best.”

“But if you take too long, she might go for it herself.”

“Oh, shit . . .”

“No, Billy, that’s a good thing! It shows you’re a gentleman.”

“Girls like that.”

When we’d hung up, I lay back. It was exhausting having to care whether Wade was good enough for Vicky, or whether Billy had kissed Carina or not, or whether she would dump him and destroy his confidence forever.

“How’s Jack?” asked Fiona.

“Great. There’s this publicity drive for the march we’re working on.”

Vicky was at my dresser giving herself a cat eye. She turned around, one eye winged. “I think it’s great you’re into all this. I really do. But to be totally honest with you? I can’t get excited about it.”

“You don’t want to think about the end of the world as we know it?”

“She does it to be with Jack,” put in Fiona from the beanbag.

I did not like being talked about as if I wasn’t there. “Not just that.”

Vicky gazed at me for a moment, eyeliner wand poised in her long fingers. “Take asteroids.” She turned back and raised her brows to start the second eye. “There’s a hundred percent chance the earth will get hit by an asteroid. Hundred percent. Sooner or later. Boom. Finito. So why sit around and worry? You can’t move someplace else. Same with the climate. We might as well live it up now. That’s my thinking.”

“Do you want your children to grow up in a desert?”

“What children?” said Vicky to the mirror. “I’m not having any boring kids. I’m going to have fun.”

“Well, I want kids,” Fiona announced.

“Same,” I said. “And I’d want them to have polar bears and trees.”

“Go right ahead.” Vicky’s hair lay across her shoulders like a thick black shawl. Italians know how to make hair. Nothing like Fiona’s cotton candy or my reddish brown waves way back when; hair-wise the three of us could belong to different species.

“Where are you meeting Wade?” Fiona wanted to know.

“He’s picking me up. Four-thirty. Remember he got his license?”

“You’re abandoning us at four-thirty? What happened to chicks before dicks?”

“Sisters over misters!”