it real, and right now it doesn’t feel real. Instead I say, “What are you doing later?” Just to see what happens, I poke my skin with the tip of my pen, again and again, until the skin is blue all over from the ink, or maybe from bruises.
“Nothing. Right now I’m kind of half watching a movie and making a Leah Basco voodoo doll.”
“Can you get the car?”
“Probably. You can always come over here.” Saz lives three blocks away.
“Okay.”
“Or we can go to Dayton instead.”
I think of driving fast and turning the music up loud, loud, loud. “That sounds better.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
I look down at the notebook, where I’ve filled the page with my name. Claude three hundred times. At the little spots of blue on my arm.
“I’m sure.”
We hang up, and I prepare to wait in my room for the next five or six hours so I don’t have to sit downstairs and talk to my mom.
* * *
—
Saz drives. Her car is a five-year-old Honda that she shares with her brother Byron. We drive fast with the music up and the windows down, and we don’t talk about Yvonne or Wyatt or Shane. We let ourselves become part of the air and the night and the song, and we sing until we’re hoarse.
This is part of Saz and Claude, of two best friends growing up in a town that is too small. She was the first person who made me feel at home in Mary Grove. We bonded over the fact that neither of us was born here, and we became outsiders together. At ten, as soon as we discovered that we were both planning to be writers, we decided we were going to leave Mary Grove and be Big Deals out in the world someday. Leaving this town and Ohio behind was something we agreed was necessary to our survival. That’s when the list started—a list of everything we would do and accomplish once we were free. In fifth grade we formed an all-girl band so that we could leave sooner. We weren’t very good at playing music, but we were great at listening to it, and our love for all decades and genres brought us to Françoise Hardy and the yé-yé girls of the 1960s. These were women we learned about in seventh-grade French class who—in all their amazing, exotic Frenchness—transported us out of ourselves and away from our small Midwestern town and inspired an obsession with all things old and French.
In Dayton, we climb the steps of the Art Institute, which is closed tight but lit up on the outside. We sit huddled against the wind and the cold, even though it’s nearly summer. We watch the sky change from gray to gold to pink to navy. The moon appears, followed by the stars, which are too bright. There is something unfair about them.
At age eleven, when Saz concluded she was adopted because her small, quiet brothers and small, quiet parents didn’t begin to understand her, we decided she was a foundling instead. And even though I love my parents and I am exactly like them, split down the middle, I decided I might be a foundling too. In spite of Saz’s Lilliputian size and my too-long limbs, her brown skin and my freckles, her dark, straight hair and my electric orange mop, we told ourselves we were separated at birth, and the only explanation had to be that we were stolen from our real family. We created an entire written history for ourselves of our original parents, our original siblings, and the people who had stolen us. At thirteen, we made a plan—when high school was over, we would go to California and share an apartment and earn our living as writers. Over the years, as we became better and better friends, it was hard to tell where Saz began and I ended.
Yet somehow, this fall, we are going to different schools. Me to Columbia in New York City. Saz to Northwestern in Chicago. We’ve agreed not to talk about it until the end of summer because the thought of being separated is unbearable.
Saz pulls a bottle of vodka out of her bag. She passes it to me and I drink, hating the taste. What I do like is the warm, burning feeling I get in my chest as soon as I swallow. Like there’s a little furnace deep inside. We sit, staring out over the city. Since sophomore