With the girls back home, friendship had always felt like something I needed to earn, something that required exertion both to gain and to keep, something that would slip through my fingers like sand if I didn’t clutch it hard enough; if I didn’t dress and talk and act the way they expected me to. I had gotten good at knowing when to nod and giggle and fawn over the guys they pointed out, good at knowing what to say about the lead actors in the movies we watched even though my eyes had been glued to the actress’s face the entire time, good at hiding my phone and my playlists and anything that could give away that I wasn’t like them.

My hands had been cramping from struggling to hold onto surface-level friendships, only for them to drop me without a warning, without a second thought.

I had reached Seven Hills with my palms open for the very first time, little crescent moons still imprinted in them from how hard I had dug my nails in all those years. I had had no expectations of it being any other way here, but here I was, lying between two people who were also wonderfully strange and who knew me, and for the first time it didn’t hurt a bit.

After a few more minutes of comfortable silence, Jasper quietly said, “Pity that Noelle isn’t here right now. Drinking and looking at the stars are probably the two things she loves the most next to basketball.”

“She likes stargazing?” I asked.

“Sometimes she spends entire evenings lying in the football field and staring at the sky. She could probably tell you every single constel ation up there. Fucking nerd,” Jasper snorted, an affectionate undertone and his accent softening the words.

For some reason this unforeseen piece of information made me smile.

“Oh, you’re into that, aren’t you?”

“Talk dirty to me, Noelle,” Seth suddenly moaned, his voice pitched ridiculously high. “Tell me something about the Big Dipper, oh yeah.”

Jasper laughed, loudly enough to startle a cat that had been slinking by, prompting it to give an indignant hiss and dart out onto the street. In the same obnoxious pitch, he said, “Did you know that Jupiter is the fastest spinning planet in our solar system, babe?”

“Oh my God, that’s so hot.” Seth was pretending to breathe heavily, fanning his face with one hand.

Jasper leaned over me to get closer to him and said, his voice a seductive drawl, “Venus is the second brightest planet in our solar system.”

“Shit, I think I just came,” Seth choked out.

Jasper flopped down on his back again, equally as hysterical.

“You guys are ridiculous, both of you,” I said, but couldn’t hold back a laugh of my own.

After we had calmed down, I got to my feet, plucking off some of the grass that was sticking to my skirt. “It’s almost eleven o’clock. We should head back.”

Jasper reluctantly got up before helping Seth off the ground.