“Everything’s okay,” I whisper into her ear. “It’s all good.”

“Thank you, Matt,” she whispers back. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if you hadn’t been here.”

“Anytime,” I reply. “Now come on. Let’s get out of here.”

I open the bathroom door and walk out quickly, with Kimmie right behind me.

“Can we get a snack or something?” she asks me. “I kinda need it.”

That’s when I realize I’m hungry, too. I didn’t eat anything for breakfast. “Let’s do it.”

We end up getting ice cream sandwiches, and we carry them back to the park. I’m not sure if the weather changed in the twenty minutes we spent inside the drugstore, but everything seems a bit brighter now. The air feels warmer, and the sky looks bluer than before.

“I can’t believe I thought I was pregnant,” she says, taking a big bite out of her ice cream sandwich.

“You just gotta keep being careful. You know, with Darryl.”

“You bet I will be.”

“What’s it like, Kimmie?” I ask after a short moment of silence. “Having a boyfriend?” Before any of this happened—back when Ma and Pa were still here and my life hadn’t yet been turned upside down—I used to think about this a lot. It was the kind of thing I would daydream about when I was bored in class, or imagine right before I fell asleep.

“It’s like having a best friend, only… different. Better, almost,” she answers. “With Darryl, things have always been easy. When I’m with him, I don’t have to wonder who I am. He gets me.”

I take a bite out of my own sandwich, not saying anything.

“Have you thought some more about Adam?” she asks me.

“Not really,” I answer. “I mean, deep down, I…”

“You what?”

“I wonder what we would be like together.” During my long shifts at the bodega, when Nelly or Erika are busy at the register and I’m fixing up the shelves, I’ve wondered what would’ve happened if Adam had told me how he felt about me at a different time—if he had told me sooner. Once or twice, I’ve asked myself if, in a different world, Adam and I could’ve ended up together.

“And?”

“And… who knows? Maybe we would make sense,” I say slowly. “We were best friends, and we have so much in common. I’m not used to thinking about him that way, but maybe it’s because I didn’t think we could ever be anything more than friends.”

Kimmie takes a deep breath. “Just come to the opening night of his show. No matter how you feel about him, you have to come. He would be so sad if you didn’t.”