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onher cell phone now—unlike me, she listens to a lot of what Jake says), twisting the cord around her wrist the way she does when she’s nervous or really focused on something.
    “Neither do I,” I say. My words are edged, and I know she hears them.
    “I know,” she says. Her tone softens. “But how do you fake that?”
    I run a hand across my forehead. I think back to yesterday and try to explain what I couldn’t to Wyatt. “Rainer grabbed my hand for a second to pull me out of the way and then later I was cold, so he gave me his sweatshirt. Those pictures are totally out of context. They just look real.”
    I hear her sigh, imagine the cord going slack. “Sorry,” she says. “I wasn’t accusing you of anything.”
    “No?”
    Her voice gets quiet. “I feel like I barely know what’s going on in your life—”
    “I know,” I say, cutting her off. I swallow. “It’s just been really busy here.”
    “Apparently.”
    She laughs, and so do I. More out of relief than anything else.
    “I miss you,” she says.
    “I miss you, too. How is everything?” The line goes silent for a moment. “Cass?”
    “Yeah?” Her voice is quiet.
    “What’s going on at home?”
    “Oh, the usual,” she says. “Sit-ins. Protests. And I’m just talking about what’s been happening in Mrs. Huntington’s speech class.”
    We both laugh. It feels good. Familiar.
    “How is Jake?” I ask. I bite my lip as I say it. Cassandra knows what I’m asking—does he miss me? Is he seeing someone?—but she doesn’t really like to talk about it. Me and Jake, I mean. Cassandra makes a small grunt, and I imagine her nodding slowly, her blond hair rising and falling on her shoulders.
    When we were younger, the three of us had a “three musketeers” pact. We’d put our arms into a triangle—hand to shoulder, hand to shoulder, hand to shoulder—and repeat the slogan “all for one and one for all.” No one without everyone. There was a clubhouse in Jake’s backyard and a rule book Cassandra made. We decorated the book with glitter and leaves and named it Bob, although I can’t for the life of me remember why.
    When Jake and I kissed, I told Cassandra, of course. I thought she’d be thrilled. She was always talking about how much she thought he liked me. But she wasn’t happy. Not even a little bit. She said we didn’t understand our own slogan, that we were breaking all the rules. It had just happened. The kiss, I mean. It was the night my sister ranaway. She was always doing things like leaving for long weekends to go up to Seattle or stealing money from my parents and disappearing for forty-eight hours. Usually it was just to visit one of my brothers or something, but she never told anyone where she was going or how long she’d be gone for. It used to make my parents panic. Every single time she didn’t come home for dinner they were convinced she was dead. I never understood it. She had pulled the same thing last weekend; odds were she was alive. But they never saw it like that. They were always terrified. Like this time would be different.
    This was just a few weeks before she got pregnant, or at least before we found out. She had taken off on one of her sojourns, and my parents were furious with fear. They had called the police and were pacing our living room. Both my brothers were accounted for, and she wasn’t with either of them. And I hadn’t seen her in school that day.
    Jake was over, and we were studying for something. It was probably geometry—I always needed help with geometry.
    Jake and I were in the living room when my sister finally came home. She was drunk. Like stinking, stumbling drunk. You’d think my parents would have been pissed. They certainly would have been had it been me. But they weren’t. They were relieved. Their little Joanna was back. The star soccer player, the first girl after twoboys. The golden child. I know I sound bitter, and it’s not that exactly. It was just this moment where