She shrugs. “I don’t know. I know you hate him.”

“I don’t hate him. He’s…”

The worst. He smokes cigarettes and weed constantly and completely ignores me whenever I’m around. Worse than that, he acts like Aimee is a supporting character in his story. He talks over her and doesn’t ask her questions and doesn’t seem proud of her in front of his friends. He literally stands a little bit in front of her all the time, which I have recently learned is actually called upstaging in theatre. He walks into rooms and has full-on conversations without introducing or acknowledging that Aimee is even with him so then she’s left to trail behind him like overlooked punctuation. Then she ends up explaining away every little thing he does that’s weird. I guess that if she’s a punctuation mark, she’s an asterisk.

Not to mention the night I don’t talk about. Not even with Aimee. It’s the one secret in our friendship. I keep trying to find a time to tell her about it, but then I wimp out.

“Okay, well … you and I are hanging out right now! I’m not going to his place until later.” Aimee keeps walking and I feel my heart completely sink as she pulls ahead.

I’m always afraid of her leaving me behind.

It was Aimee who grew out of playing pretend first, Aimee who was the first one to like boys. Now she’s the one who goes and watches Tarantino movies after the carnival instead of what we usually do, which is watch a movie we’ve seen a hundred times, talk through it, giggle and gossip until a parent stomps in to say we need to lower our voices, and then sneak more junk food from the kitchen once our parents are sleeping.

“I wish guys still dressed like that,” Aimee says when I catch up.

“Like what?” She can’t mean Theo and his skinny jeans, chain wallet, and pre-distressed band tees.

“Like in The Notebook.”

“Oh. Yeah. Same.”

“And that we did too. It would be so fun to wear those cute dresses and do the hair and everything. Mrs. Harper talked about doing an older play soon, didn’t she? Maybe it’ll be from that era.”

I don’t get a chance to answer before we hear a raspy, accented voice on the wind.

“Young ladies.… Get your fortune told.”

We turn—me sucking the last sticky remnants of a caramel apple off my thumb, Aimee elbow-deep in a bag of white-cheddar popcorn, prize teddy bear under her other arm.

“Do you wish to know your fortune?” asks the woman. With her very cool, very chic accent, it sounds more like D’yu wij tnoh yohr forchoon?

She really looks the part, and I start making involuntary mental notes to re-create her as a character.