I try not to think that maybe Becky was right.

January 1983

The three of us spend the first day of the new year at a place in Chinatown with no English menu. The fun of it is pointing at the signs on the wall and eating things we can’t identify.

When we’re too full to move, too talked out to focus, James pays the check, and the waiter brings us fortune cookies.

Becky’s fortune says she’ll come into money. She laughs as if it’s the funniest thing she’s ever read and sets the paper on fire by holding it over the candle on the table until the slip turns to ash.

Mine says, Change can hurt, but the pain always leads to something better. I read it twice and shove it in my pocket, pretty sure I’ll be awake all night trying to figure out what it really means.

James’s cookie is empty.

What the hell? Becky asks. Her hair is in a long braid, and it swings emphatically as she shakes her head at the affront.

James pushes his bangs out of his eyes and gives her a reflective look.

I guess I get to write my own future, he says.

This sums up the difference between me and James. I would have assumed that a cookie with no fortune meant I was going to be hit by a truck.

After, Becky suggests we go to a party. She has a friend who has a friend whose older brother has a houseboat docked at the 79th Street Boat Basin and is celebrating 1983.

Are you sure they won’t mind us coming along? I ask.

Oh, Michael, she says looking me up and down, no one will even notice you’re there. Besides, they’re only making spaghetti. Not like you eat that much.

James hesitates because he knows I hate inviting myself places, hate the feeling that I might be intruding.

He says, I have an idea. Then he leads us into a bodega where he piles a mountain of Ronzoni noodle boxes on the counter and gives the clerk a twenty. He stuffs the change, well over five bucks, into the cardboard charity collection box that’s raising money for a little girl with cancer.

The clerk stares at him. At his long, white-blond, New Romantic hair, at his cat-eye eyeliner, at his favorite powder-blue linen jacket—the one with the linebacker shoulder pads, cinched waist, and rhinestone belt.

You ain’t up to something, are you? the guy asks.

James doesn’t answer, but shakes his head as we walk out. Sometimes you can’t win, he murmurs under his breath.

Will Andy be at the party? I ask.

Becky fiddles with her braid, her all-black watch wrapped around her wrist, reflecting the sun.

I don’t think so, she says. He’s on duty again.

James coughs deliberately, and I knock my shoulder into his.

James thinks Andy isn’t good enough for her. But aside from the fact that Andy loves to patrol the creepiest parts of New York City and help make citizen’s arrests, he isn’t that bad. He brings Becky presents every Friday in homeroom. Flowers from his mother’s rooftop garden. Iron-on patches for her favorite ripped jeans. Song lyrics scrawled on rough, old paper.