“Okay”—I leaned across the table to her—“listen, I can’t date a boy because it’s a guaranteed way to screw up everything. I’ll be out in ten months and on my own; I’m not trying to get knocked up so I have to buy a windowless van to run away in and travel the county busking for change because I’m just so in love with some guy who only wants me to help him cook meth and then I’m part of it and I end up in jail with him. Fuck that.”

Kira’s eyes were wide. “Okay, it’s either don’t date or…cook meth while pregnant in jail?”

“I mean. Basically. Yeah.”

She stood and retied her apron. “Listen, man. I don’t think Sean’s into that kind of thing. Like, any of it.”

“You can never tell,” I sighed, and rested my head on my forearms on the table. “Until it’s too late.”

“Oh, my friend,” she said. “You are living in an episode of Jerry Springer in your mind.” She put her hand on my back. “None of that is going to happen.”

I smiled into the table and sat up. My friend. Almost as dangerous as dating, but I couldn’t help liking how it sounded.

“I have seen some shit,” I said.

She nodded. “I bet you fucking have. I can’t imagine.”

My friend.

“Speak of the devil,” she whispered.

Bells rang on Blackbird’s glass door. And because life is insane, Sean stepped in. “Hey, Kira.” He smiled. “Can I get coffee to go? Muiriel, you taking the bus to work?”

I looked at my watch. “Yes.” I wrapped the rest of the scone in a napkin.

“Good! I’ll go with,” he said. “You guys hear about the bonfire? Tomorrow night?”

Kira rolled her eyes. As if she or I would have heard about some DL popular-kid bonfire action.

“Tons of people are coming. Some soccer guys. Dale from chem club. Few second chairs from orchestra. I can give you the details—you want to meet me there?”

A bonfire? So, kids on a beach in the dark. No adults. Strangers, probably drinking, potential interactions with cops.

My worst nightmare.

Kira lit up. “Tell us everything.”

I carry with me an AA sobriety coin.

I have never not been sober. That I can remember. I entered the foster care system as a newborn, no birth parents or blood relatives to claim or fight over me, all statistically prized and rare characteristics in an adoptable foster child. And yet, for the first year, I was passed from home to home.

Joellen waited until my thirteenth birthday to take me for ice cream and tell me the truth: I had scared away potential parents with a prenatal meth addiction. Which, for me, cleared up a huge mystery and was frankly understandable, but Joellen found it ridiculous.