I really don’t feel like talking about Micah and our fight, so I just tell her I think Micah is busy today. She gives me a funny look like she knows I’m not telling the truth, but she doesn’t ask me to explain. Instead, she slurps the milk out of her cereal bowl and puts it on the floor. George jumps down and licks it.

“Gross,” I say.

Ivy leans back on the couch and snuggles as the theme song to SpongeBob finally starts.

“You’ve seen this a million times,” I say. “Haven’t you outgrown it yet? We could go to the library and check out some new movies.”

“No. It’s comforting,” she tells me.

“You’re such a weirdo.”

She sinks lower into the couch and, just to annoy me, sings along to the opening music as loud as she can.

In my room, I find my phone and check for messages. Zero. Usually by late morning, I have at least ten from Micah telling me to wake up, sending me funny cat GIFs, or something. But today, nothing. I guess it won’t be long before we can’t afford to buy more minutes for my phone anyway, so it doesn’t matter. I flop on my bed and watch out the window. Every so often, the breeze picks up and sends the smell of summer across the bed. I roll over and watch my lantern sway when the breeze comes through the window. I think about how, whenever Micah and I worked on something like the lantern, we’d talk for hours about everything under the sun. About what we wanted to be when we grew up. About where we would live. About how many kids we’d have. And what kind of pets. I never felt uncomfortable around Micah. We never ran out of things to talk about, or felt like we had to fill the silence when we just didn’t want to talk for a while. We have always been perfect friends. Always, except for when he wanted to be more than that.

I try to imagine what it would have been like to kiss him instead of Evan last night.

But I don’t want to kiss him.

Hug him, yes. Hold his hand, yes. Lie next to him and look up at the sky and daydream, yes. But not kiss. I try to think of any boy I might like to kiss, and there isn’t one. There never has been, as long as I can remember. Not since that time under the lilac bushes. But back then, it wasn’t the kissing that made my heart flutter. It was the excitement of doing something I’d never done. And realizing how much I loved Micah. Back then, I didn’t know the difference between loving a friend and loving someone for any other reason.