in Seattle, really. What, exactly, was she planning—a slow drive-by of the beige ranch home that hadn’t been hers in two decades? Maybe that sounded more macabre than it needed to be. Maybe she could just park outside and say, “Hey, I was fourteen once too, and this is where I lived when I was.”
Their car rounded a curve and eased to a stop on the right side of the road, and Cleo couldn’t help but let out a little gasp of air. MaryAnne actually lived in her childhood home. She and Cleo had spent nearly every weekend here, because MaryAnne had a pool and a ping-pong table, and there was a brief stint in middle school, before they each respectively grew serious and cast all playful things aside, when her older brother convinced their parents to buy him a real-life Pac-Man machine, and that was really something.
MaryAnne had repainted the door bright red, but otherwise, the looming Colonial was just as Cleo remembered. She hesitated before popping the handle to the car door, nausea cresting in her throat. She wanted to grab Lucas and Gaby and yank them back in the Uber and flee. Her misdeeds toward MaryAnne Newman weren’t even on the list! (She didn’t think.) Now, twenty years later, should she regret them? She swallowed, waited for the unease in her stomach to pass.
She remembered a sliver of a moment their junior year, AP French. She and MaryAnne had both struggled on an exam. It wasn’t a big deal in the scheme of their world, but it sure as hell felt like one at sixteen and with college applications looming. Cleo had never come naturally to the language, but she bore down, gutted it out. Neither of them knew what exactly went wrong on this test, other than for the first time in their academic lives, they bombed it. Each sat at her own desk, slack-jawed and stunned, Cleo battling back tears, staring at the C- on her blue book. When she’d told her parents that night, ashamed and disappointed, her mom said, “Well, sometimes you have to fail to know where you can succeed next time,” and her dad nodded along, saying nothing. If they shared her disappointment, and knowing them they did, they didn’t make it known. Which, in hindsight, Cleo could appreciate. She’d do the same for Lucas. But three days later, MaryAnne asked her to hold her bag when she went into the bathroom to change her tampon, and Cleo—who was not even snooping—saw a new blue book with an A- written on the cover in their French teacher’s handwriting. It turned out, Cleo found out by sniffing around, MaryAnne’s parents had called their teacher and raised a stink, and she had been allowed a retake during lunch two days before. MaryAnne had told her she was having cramps and had gone to the school nurse.
Cleo gazed out at MaryAnne’s manicured lawn, so green that it nearly felt like an optical illusion, like a painting where the artist had intentionally used a verdant green rather than a more realistic one. She replayed her own shortcuts, ostensibly, her own regrets—the internship essay, the glancing at MaryAnne’s notes before she ran for the paper, the various other small but cutting ways their friendship fractured.
Yes, she thought. I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat.
So maybe not regrets after all.
FIVE
Gaby rang the doorbell, then scampered off the front stoop, so Cleo waited by herself, flanked by two towering potted ficus trees. It was an unusually sunny near-dusk afternoon—May in Seattle was hit-or-miss with the weather—and she reached for her sunglasses, an extra armor to shield her from whatever lay behind the door. When no one answered, Cleo allowed herself a small exhale, felt the knot in her stomach untangle.
“Ring it again!” Gaby stage-whispered from the side of the lawn. She was on the right; Lucas was on the left, their camera phones held high so as not to miss either angle of the blessed reunion. (Gaby had decided to film for backup.)
“She’s in town!” Gaby whispered back, though Cleo was honestly not sure why she was whispering. The street was otherwise empty, and they didn’t have anything yet to capture on film. It wasn’t like this was an FBI raid, which, it occurred to Cleo, she would have been much more enthusiastic about. “Ring. It. Again!”
She pressed the buzzer one more time, praying feverishly that Gaby