“Okay, okay,” she interrupted. “I don’t mean always. I just meant you didn’t listen to me about the crickets. Don’t start telling me I made your paper heart wrinkly or whatever again.”

“Then be more careful with what you say.”

“Fine.” She didn’t sound mad.

“Hey, I’m going to miss you.”

“You’ll be too busy kissing Izzy to miss me,” Frankie teased.

“Shut up.” I threw a Tot at her, and she dodged it, looking at me sternly.

“Sorry,” I said, shifting my legs; they were falling asleep. “Honestly, I’m worried about all that stuff.”

“Kissing’s no big deal,” Frankie said, half shrugging. I couldn’t believe she’d let her boyfriend, Kai, get close enough to her face to kiss her, but she had. “And besides, you’ve already done it!”

The alarm went off on my phone; I needed to finish packing. “We have to go,” I told my sister, sad that it’d be another six weeks until we could have our Tater Tot date again.

Frankie stood up, brushing the dirt off her shorts. She always made such a mess. “Remember to just schedule your kissing worries for the middle of the night,” she said. “That’s what I do.”

“Cheat the system,” we said in unison.

I brushed the dirt off the back of my shorts, too, and leaned over to grab our trash. “Hey, who told you to do that, anyway?” I asked, stepping on a stray napkin that was trying to escape on the breeze. “The thing about scheduling worries.”

“I told you already a million times.” Frankie wiped ranch dressing from her wrist onto her shorts.

She definitely hadn’t.

“Tell me again, then.”

Frankie rolled her eyes and patted the marble next to her. “She did.”

I looked at Colette’s tombstone, at the deep engraved letters of her name, her birthdate, and the day she died—now more than a whole year ago. The year had gone by fast and slow at the same time.

“Of course she did,” I said, thinking of how much Colette had been there for my sister. How much she’d been there for me. Quieter, I repeated, “Of course.”

Two days later, in a town I now thought of as my second home, I stood like a superhero on the animal overpass, the blue streak in my hair blowing wild in the Wyoming wind. Cars and trucks zoomed by on the two-lane highway below and an aggressive horsefly hovered close, but I wasn’t afraid.

I looked over my shoulder and waved at the boy waiting by the gate, the one who’d known to let me come up alone and who I’d have to get on tiptoes to kiss when I was done, he’d grown so tall this year.

I think I love you, Izzy, I thought, smiling, my mean voice silent.