“So you were invited?” I squawk.

“I found the invitation in my mailbox last Tuesday,” he admits.

I cross my arms over my chest and blink back any stray tears. Valentine Primary School has a rule that if you’re going to hand out birthday-party invitations, you have to invite the whole class, so of course Kiera would be clever enough to get around that rule by mailing invites to her guest list. And no offense, but if she invited Oscar, she invited basically everyone. Except me.

I don’t even want to open my mouth, because I’m scared that if I do, I might cry. So I just shrug and wave to Oscar to follow me to the bus.

“You’re not even friends with Kiera,” I remind him.

“She probably just invited me to annoy you.”

“That doesn’t help,” I say through gritted teeth.

“We’ll have our own dang party,” he says. “Me, you, Cheese, and some R-rated movies from my brother’s stash.”

Oscar’s my best friend, and I think I would actually die without him, but part of me will always miss Kiera and our Saturday mornings in the bowling alley arcade.

My earliest memories of hanging out with Kiera are from the bowling alley. Our dads would meet for bowling league, and Kiera and I would find ourselves lumped together. It wasn’t friendship at first sight or anything. She liked sitting there on her dad’s knee when it wasn’t his turn, and I preferred to get lost in the arcade while I checked every crane machine to make sure someone hadn’t accidentally left their prize behind or maybe even a few spare tokens.

It was pure luck when the only time someone actually forgot their crane-machine prize, Kiera was passing through the arcade on her way to the bathroom. I gasped so loudly, she froze right there on the black carpet with neon geometric shapes.

“Is your hand caught?” she asked immediately. Her nose wrinkled up. “Or is it something gross? It’s something gross, isn’t it? The one time I stuck my hand in one of these things, I found a half-eaten hot dog.”

“What do you call a hot-dog competition?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “I don’t know, but are you ever going to pull your hand out of that crane machine?”

“Wiener takes all!” I said, and yanked my arm out of the crane machine, my fist clenched around a hot-pink stuffed elephant.

“Oh my gosh! You found that?”

She and I spent the rest of the morning checking every machine for tickets, loose change, gumballs, and whatever other treasures we might find. When we came up with nothing else, I offered her the elephant and she took it.

On the way home, I told Dad that I felt bad because I really wanted to keep the elephant and didn’t actually want to give it to Kiera, but I felt like the nice thing to do was to at least offer it to her.

“But you gave it to her anyway?” he asked. “Right?”