“Wasn’t what?” she asks, daring me to finish my sentence.

My throat dries up and sweat gathers between my fingers. This is definitely going as bad as I expected. “Wasn’t such a jerk,” I finish in a low voice.

Her gaze narrows in on me. Then she brushes me off with a wave of her hand. “Mom says it’s none of our business and that it shouldn’t change anything. Especially if your mom is so okay with it.”

“I wouldn’t say she’s okay with it, but she’s not mad at him.” I pull my knees up to my chest and hold them there while I think of the right way to explain. “She knows he doesn’t mean to hurt us, but it’s kind of hard, because I think it might be easier if they didn’t like each other so much and just got divorced for the usual reasons.”

“You wanna borrow my parents?” she asks. “They’ve got no problem blaming each other.”

I laugh. It’s the kind of thing that only kids with messed-up parents can laugh at, like some awful inside joke, but at least it’s a reminder that you’re not alone.

And then Kiera starts to laugh too.

I stand up, feeling suddenly better about the whole night. “You wanna watch some TV? My dad said we can order pizza.”

“Are you going to puke it all over the place?” she teases.

I roll my eyes. “Come on,” I say. “Can you not with the puke jokes?”

She cracks a smile. “That was my last one, I swear.”

We settle into the couch to watch an episode of Girl Meets World, and it’s no America’s Most Haunted, but it’ll do.

After the pizza comes, Dad joins us, and we all eat around the coffee table. Dad and I watch in confusion as Kiera pats down her slice with a napkin.

“What?” she asks when she catches us staring. “Grease makes you fat.”

I put my pizza back down on my plate. I hate when people say stuff like that. It makes me queasy and angry at the same time. It’s like she’s not even thinking before she talks. Or like she doesn’t even see me.

I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t the first time I wondered if part of the reason Kiera ditched me was because she was tired of being friends with the fat girl. I saw in one of Mom’s magazines once a diagram of all the different shapes women are supposed to be, and they didn’t really have anything that looked like my body, because no one in magazines writes about girls who are shaped like oranges with Popsicle sticks for legs. I’m okay with who I am and what I look like, or at least I try to be. I just wish people, Kiera included, would feel the same way.

Dad takes a huge bite of pizza. “Around here neither of those words—grease or fat—are a bad thing.”

A warm glow radiates in my chest, and I feel immediately guilty for erasing Dad’s voice mail. It’s like there’s a bright neon sign above my head with an arrow pointing right on me. Worst Daughter of the Year.