time, worrying that I was boring him, but he had this open look on his face that made me feel like he cared what I had to say.
When I’d said enough, I asked him, “What about your friends? What’s your favorite thing about them?”
He looked out over the river. A whole minute must have passed, but he didn’t seem pressed to come up with the answer right away. Finally, he started nodding to himself and said, “That I feel like I could have met them in kindergarten.”
“What do you mean?”
“I didn’t meet most of my friends until high school, but every single one of them is someone I could have met on the kindergarten playground—it’s natural and easy, nothing held against each other. Remember how easy it was to make friends at that age?”
I let that settle into me; it felt like something I’d forgotten a long time ago, but I knew what he meant. I wondered if Maritza and JaKory felt that way about me, and, more important, if I felt that way about them.
We got back to his house around dinnertime. I changed into my own T-shirt, now dry after lying in the sun. Ricky walked me out to my car and hugged me close like we’d been friends for ages.
“Text me about hanging out again,” he said.
“I will,” I said, and I meant it.
6
Summer kicked into full swing after Memorial Day. The days became sunny and scorching; my thighs burned when I plopped into the seat of my car. My dad wore cotton polo shirts to the office and my mom walked barefoot to the mailbox when she got home from work. The neighborhood pool was busy with swim meets and birthday parties, and Totes-n-Goats was flooded with moms pulling elementary-school-age kids behind them. I worked nearly every day, rubbing my arms to keep warm in the store’s freezing air-conditioning, then immediately sweating when I stepped into the parking lot at the end of a shift.
Maritza, JaKory, and I usually spent our summer days together, but this year, with my job at Totes-n-Goats and Maritza’s job at dance camp, we saw each other much less. Part of me was sad about it—nostalgic, almost—but another part of me didn’t mind having some space, especially after that day by the river. JaKory, however, was at a loss for what to do with himself. Unlike Maritza and me, he wasn’t working a summer job—he’d never gotten his license, and we didn’t have the best public transportation in the suburbs. He was so bored without our usual swimming dates that he took to texting us a running monologue of his thoughts throughout the day.
JaKory Green: I’ve decided I’m going to curate my own summer reading list featuring both classic novels and the latest movers and shakers, and maybe once the school realizes how much better it is than their deplorable compilation, they’ll ask me to sell it to the district. That’ll give me something to do while you two are “working,” a.k.a. betraying our childhood.
Maritza Vargas: If you were any more dramatic, you’d have your own Bravo show.
My brother spent those first few days of June at a basketball camp for rising high schoolers. My parents dropped him off before work in the morning, but it was my job to pick him up in the afternoon. Every day I’d wait outside the gym, and Grant would come trudging into the car stinking of sweat, and we’d make the ten-minute drive home speaking only about what our family was eating for dinner. Sometimes there would be a pocket of silence when I would want to say something interesting or funny, anything to make him look at me the way he did when he was younger, but I could never bring myself to do it.
The most exciting thing in my life quickly became Ricky’s friendship. We went for more drives, sometimes to pick up milkshakes, other times just to talk. He told me more about his family, his football stats, even the bad dreams he had sometimes; I told him about my art, my brother, and the fear I felt when speaking to people I didn’t know. When he scored free Braves tickets from his part-time job at his dad’s software sales company, he asked me to go with him to the game, and we ate hot dogs and nachos with our feet kicked up on the empty seats in front of us.
Part of me longed to tell Maritza and JaKory about Ricky,