So, we were friends now. And maybe, by August, we’d be best friends. It had been a long time since I’d had a best friend. Zeke was still smiling, still staring at me, like I was supposed to say something, like I was supposed to do something important. I felt like if I did the wrong thing right now, if I messed up, it would all go wrong. But I was frozen, staring at him. Finally, he said, “So are we gonna eat lunch?”

I took such a deep breath. “Oh, yeah, sure. Let’s, um, let’s go to Hardee’s,” I told him. “My brother works there. He’ll give us free fries.”

And after I scrounged around my room for money, we went outside, where my shitty Honda Civic was parked in the driveway. I tried to remember what was in the cassette player, if it was cool. Maybe it wouldn’t matter to Zeke. Right now, with the sun so high in the sky, we walked side by side. We’d make art later. There was, I thought, so much time.

Three

ONLY TWO DAYS LATER, WE WERE COMPLETELY BORED OUT OF our minds. It’s weird, but things I did on my own and had no problems with, like dumping out my drawer of rolled-up socks and then trying to knock down an old My Little Pony on my dresser, felt sad and childish when another person saw me do them.

“What did you do for fun before I started coming over?” Zeke asked me, genuinely curious.

“This!” I said, holding up a sock ball, hitting Rosedust so hard that the toy skittered across the dresser and fell onto the floor.

“Maybe,” he said gently, like trying to talk someone off the edge of a cliff, “we could think of something else to do.” Everything he said, no matter how innocuous, sounded like he wanted to make out with me. I felt like maybe my anxiety around people was because I’d never kissed anyone before, and that if I just did it, I’d calm down a little, stop being so strange. But I was just too much of a prude, I guess.

I’d had friends, boys and girls, in elementary school and junior high, but it seemed like they subsequently matured in ways that my own body and brain refused to allow. They started liking sports. They started drinking and going to parties, smoking weed. They started having sex, or at least doing stuff that made me blush when I overheard them talking about it. There would be a Nancy Drew book, which I’d read four times already, hidden in my backpack, and I’d nod along while a girl I’d known since I was four years old talked about this boy I’d known since I was six trying to put his finger inside of her. No, thank you.