unreadable even on the rare occasions I got a good look at them.
“We’re fine,” Dee said finally. “We just had a slow summer.”
“It’s almost November.”
“A slow summer and fall, then.” She shrugged.
If Jamie had never said anything about it to me, I would have taken Dee at her word. But what I loved most about the coffee shop (its protective near emptiness, its free books, its often-free coffee) looked different to me now.
“Is there anything I can do?” I asked.
Dee pointed to my glass, perspiring on the counter. “You already did it.”
“What do your arms say?”
Dee laughed, a single bark she directed at the ceiling. She held up one forearm and then the next. “This one means ‘I’ll never stop loving you,’ and this one is, like, ‘Even in death, love survives’ or some shit.”
“Wow, you were really serious.”
“I was the first person in history to fall in love,” Dee said, grinning.
“Gaby?”
“We broke up, like, a month later,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Everyone told me not to get these and they were right.”
“I like them,” I said. “And anyway, you do still love her. It’s just a different way.”
Dee considered this. “You’re a sharp one, Q,” she said. “Except for the straight-girl thing. Not that I haven’t been there. Several times.”
I wanted to defend my honor and tell her Ruby really did like me, because we’d held hands, and because Ronni said so. But then Jamie walked in the door, and the subject had to be changed. Dee and Jamie exchanged warm hellos.
“Iced vanilla?” Dee asked.
Jamie glanced at me before she nodded, and I felt a tiny thrill of smugness.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hi.”
“What do you have in there?” I asked, pointing to the backpack dwarfing Jamie’s body. “Actual pot?”
“What?” Dee yelled over the milk steamer.
“Kidding!” I shouted.
“I went to the library,” Jamie explained.
I smiled. Of course she had. Jamie had never met a humanities assignment she didn’t overprepare for by a thousand percent. Science was different (we both hated that), and math she seemed to know inherently, but if there was an opportunity to research, to borrow books and print academic papers and buy and organize color-coded note cards, Jamie took it and ran. She was going to be so good at college.
My backpack, meanwhile, contained my laptop, my Civil Liberties notebook, and about seventy-eight pens.
Jamie paid, and we carried our coffee over to our favorite table. I surreptitiously stared at her as we sat and arranged our things into serious homework mode around us. Between the end of the school day and now, she’d changed her outfit and put on mascara. A small, ridiculous part of me wondered if she’d done all that for me, but a much bigger part worried she was going to see Natalie after this, or that she already had, during the two hours I was at practice.
“What did you do today?” I asked casually.
Jamie looked at me like I was the hugest idiot in the world. Which, apparently, I was. “School,” she said.
“Well. Yeah,” I said.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing,” I said. (Everything.) “I’m just making conversation.”
“Okay,” said Jamie. “Well, let’s converse about legalization.”
I sighed, and Jamie passed me a book called The Legalization of Drugs (For and Against). Then she pulled out another called Weed the People.
“Yours sounds a lot more interesting.”
“Sorry.” She didn’t look up, just opened her book and ran her thumbnail along the binding, pressing the cover flat. Jamie treated her own books like a hot stovetop, touching them as little as possible, but with library books, she read the way she wanted to read: ruthlessly.
For what felt like at least an hour we read in silence, save for the soft scrape of a page being turned and Ani DiFranco warbling faintly overhead. I checked the time when the college student