“The point,” I spit. “The point is that when you’re friends with someone, you’re supposed to care about their feelings, not just about impressing everyone all the time.”

She was calm before, but now her whole body juts forward. “I care more about your feelings than you ever do about mine!” she shouts. “And you’re like that with everybody. If it’s ever about one person, that person is always you.”

“What are you talking about?” I shout back. She has never spoken to me like this before.

“How do you think it feels to know that my best friend, who comes over all the time, couldn’t care less if I’m home or not, as long as Micah, or my mother, or anyone else is there?”

“That’s not true!” I cry. I take a step back as if she has pushed me. I want to say that I come for both: her and her family. The baseball is out now, and my chest feels funny.

“And then”—she pauses and fixes her eyes right on mine so I have no choice but to meet them—“and then you complain about your own mother nonstop, but you’re the one who’s horrible to her!”

I take another step back and stumble on a clump of mud. What is Honey saying to me? She is flinging my mother at me like a weapon she’s been keeping in her pocket. Since when does she feel this way?

“You don’t know anything about my mother!” I say.

“No, I do!” she says. “I’d be mad at you too if I was her. She never asks you to help with anything, and you just sit there and let her do things for you and buy things for you like it’s your right. And you don’t even say thank you!”

“I do too say thank you!” I say, stamping my foot onto the muddy grass, soggy and yellow from melted snow. “But everything has to be her way—she never asks me what I want!”

“Milla, do you think my mother has taken me on shopping sprees so I can have a different dress to wear to every party I go to plus some for spare, just in case I change my mind?”

I hesitate. It’s not a secret that Honey’s grandparents pay for her to go to camp and her school fees too. And even though my family’s definitely not rich-rich like Natalie’s, I know we are what Aunty Steph calls “privileged.”

“But—but she only buys what she thinks is nice—it’s never what I actually want,” I say. And how can I explain to Honey the look on my mother’s face when she was leining?

Honey rolls her eyes. Her mouth is set. She doesn’t get the difference. Like my mother. She’s making me sound selfish and unappreciative.

How typical: I am the one who’s mad at her, but she’s taken charge of the argument. Honey has started walking again, and I have to take fast steps to catch up with her.