“Just so you know, it was bloody and it hurt like hell,” Ruby said. “I could barely sit on a chair the next day. But it was also the best thing to ever happen to me. You really should try it sometime.”

“You used protection, right?”

“Why would I? I’m on the pill.”

“Since when?”

“Since forever. You know, there’s stuff I don’t tell you. Lots of stuff. Hadn’t you ever thought of that?”

“Well, there’s stuff you don’t know about me, too. Don’t think there’s not.”

“Like what?”

I scanned my mind. “I once let my cousin Harry look at my boobs. And then he grabbed them.”

She busted out laughing; it was the wrong thing to say.

“I hope you get syphilis,” I said. “And just so you know, it’s obvious this guy is only using you.” I then gathered my things and left, not even bothering to say good-bye to Nana Faye, who was clanking around the kitchen, making our dinner.

I spent the rest of the weekend waiting for Ruby to call, but that call never came. That we were fighting was not unusual. We fought often, about stupid things like her not returning my favorite sweater or why I didn’t say something when the other girls laughed at her for running funny in gym class. But this fight was different. I could feel it.

I wasn’t entirely worried, as our friendship had always felt like something that could live or die by my hands, not Ruby’s. We were friends mostly because of inertia, because it would have taken more energy on my part to reverse our path and become enemies than to simply keep on with the friendship and its weekly sleepovers and study sessions and trips to the mall. There were more complicated moments, like the time at the seventh-grade Valentine’s dance when Wesley Pittman asked me out as a joke, and Ruby—seeing the whole thing from the sidelines—came and swept me into a waltz. Or the time she told our Brownies leader, Miss Wheeler, that she, too, was allergic to horsehair and would have to stay behind while the rest of the troop rode off into the Flint Hills—then, too, the time she didn’t laugh when I told her I was afraid of horses. I tried not to think about these times. It’s a difficult trick for the young heart to love and hate at once—like trying to write the number six while you make clockwork circles with your foot.

Our friendship was, after all, a kind of arranged marriage, formed by my mother and Nana Faye when Ruby and I were ten years old. As the story went, they met at a temple luncheon. My mother and I were new to town, having just fled my father and his girlfriends in Topeka, and Ruby’s parents had recently died in a car accident on the way to Oklahoma, where they were going to pick up a puppy for Ruby’s birthday. Ruby was exhibiting strange behaviors: eating Q-tips, sleeping in cupboards, pushing pins into her teddy bear’s privates. Nana Faye thought having a friend might help her. And so, like a piece of ugly new furniture, she appeared in my mother’s house with an invisible nametag that read DELIVERY FOR LOTTIE. Even then, my instinct was to dislike her. She smelled funny, like an old pillowcase, and always had snot coming out of her nose. At school she ate lunch alone, by the trashcans, or in the counselor’s office.