I had always thought of our friendship as having an expiration date, but the truth was I needed Ruby. She was an escape, a door out of my own life and into one more comfortable. I didn’t much like my own house or my own mother, who was too busy finding a replacement for my father to pay any real attention to me. It was clear we were better off on our own, but still she kept on, like a kid trying to put a milk tooth back in the socket.

Ruby’s house, on the other hand, was always clean and quiet. Nana Faye liked to burn candles and would, at the beginning of every season, give me bags of clothes Ruby didn’t want anymore. If Ruby and I were sad or bored or just had ants in our pants, she’d take us out for hot fudge sundaes or to get our makeup done at Dillard’s. If we were really good, she’d flatten our hair—a long, luxurious process that involved spreading our curls onto a beach towel so that she could glide a hot iron across them, the warmth rushing up to our necks. Marcia Brady hair, she called it. Sometimes I thought of Nana Faye as a lighthouse, my mother as a boat with a hole in the bottom. And what was Ruby? Sometimes the lightbulb. Sometimes the darkness.

I didn’t see Ruby until Monday when, as usual, I took the desk beside her in biology.

“We were supposed to see a movie on Sunday,” I told her. She was wearing her hair in a way she never had before—two small braids that met in the back to form a single strand that concealed her bald spot.

“I was busy,” she said. “Treating my syphilis.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

“Anyways, I already went to the movies with Brandon. We saw the new Bond movie.” She narrowed her eyes, to show she knew exactly how much she was hurting me.

“Was it any good?” I asked, trying to sound unfazed.

She flipped her hair behind her shoulder. I noticed that a boy on the other end of the classroom was looking at her. “Who knows?” she said. “We barely watched it.”

Normally, I’d go to Ruby’s after school. We’d do our homework and Nana Faye would feed us popcorn or pizza bagels until Jeopardy! came on at six. But Ruby wasn’t out by the Dumpsters, where we usually met, so I walked home by myself.

The weatherman had predicted severe storms, with a chance of tornadoes in the late afternoon. The sky did look a bit green, the pea soup color that made my stomach feel hollow. I wondered what Ruby was doing. She was deathly afraid of tornadoes. Whenever the sirens went off, she’d gather her most precious possessions—a composition notebook in which her father had written poems and lists (groceries, errands, songs he’d heard on the radio), and a nearly empty bottle of her mother’s Chanel No. 5—and head to the bathroom in the basement, where she’d sit in the bathtub with Nana Faye’s favorite Navajo blanket pulled over her head and an old crank radio tuned to the weather report. I could picture her half-running the mile back to her house, tears welling in her eyes as the wind stirred up little cyclones of leaves. Served her right. We’d been talking about seeing the new Bond movie for months.