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Nick tells my best friend that he loves her using the alpha function of a TI-83, and I write in my diary that I’ll probably be a spinster for the rest of my life, as well as a note about a blue bruise spidering out from my inner elbow.
My best friend and I tell our parents that she’s missed her bus, so that she has to come home on mine, which is also Nick’s. Our skin unsticking from the vinyl seats, popping gum-- I only chew cinnamon because I read in Seventeen that scent is the sense most closely tied to memory, and so I think if I’m consistent, I can train people to think of me every time they chewed Big Red. Plus, my cousin told me cinnamon is the most fearless flavor, although I might not be. We draw in the window fog with the pads of our fingers: peace signs, flourishing signatures, blind contours of our faces. We call the elongated shapes penises, because that’s the only joke we know. When the mist erases into suburban sprawl, we breathe hard on the glass. Each time it returns a little softer.
Nick throws grapes from a Ziploc bag at my best friend, although a couple hit me instead, and I think that was on purpose. The bus is still moving when he walks down aisle and sits turned around, elbows resting on the seat in front of us. He tries to guess our bra sizes, and, in spite of myself, I bask in the peripheral glow of attention, the rays that refract through her.
She tells me by the lockers, In pre-algebra, he was like, come on baby, and so I just looked him dead in the eyes and told him, I’m not your baby. Another day she says, I have something to tell you but you’re going to hit me over the head with your backpack. I ask Nick? and I don’t hit her over the head with anything, but maybe she would prefer that to discouraging eye rolls and impatience, maybe then I wouldn’t be the last to hear what they did in the parking garage, waiting for his parents to pick them up from the movies—information that I, as my best friend’s best friend, have a right to know. I thought it was a big deal at first but, you know, it’s just skin. Like sucking on your arm.
They must be broken up in the winter, or at least for parts of it. It must be before I write Nick off, or after I accept that I’ll lose my gossip privileges if I disapprove too loudly.
I stuff my jeans into off brand uggs, while she folds a print out of MapQuest directions. I keep it in my hoodie pocket, clenched and wrinkled. And I walk with her as she walks a mile and a half through the snow to pass his house three times, his little dog yelping silently in the window. I hope to see him too. His brother has a lot of problems, she tells me, That’s why he’s the way he is. On the way home, we count how many men yelled at us from passing cars, double points for kissing sounds.
