Alma hurried down the school hall that afternoon. She had only waited for five minutes instead of ten today so that she wouldn’t be too late meeting Shirin and Hugo. There were a few kids milling around, but even so, she felt surprisingly calm.
“We need to make our plan,” Shirin was saying when Alma walked up to them outside. She was being, as usual, entirely too loud. “I guess we could go this weekend?”
“Sunday night would be ideal for me,” Hugo said. “My mother has a night shift. She is a much lighter sleeper than Marcus, so I prefer not to leave the house when she’s there.”
“I can go Sun—” Alma started to answer when she felt a prickling on her scalp, like someone was watching her. She turned—
There was Dustin, unlocking his bike a few feet away.
He rode off without saying a word.
“Ugh,” Shirin said, wrinkling her nose. “That boy. I am not a fan.”
Four Points Middle School was near the center of town. They set off for Shirin’s house in Fourth Point, westward toward the afternoon sun.
“What’s the deal with you and Dustin anyway?” Shirin demanded as they strolled down the tree-lined streets that Alma had only seen by moonlight.
“What do you mean?” Hugo asked, his voice shifting, flattening.
“Mrs. Brisa said you two were, like, best friends,” Shirin said.
“A duo,” Alma corrected her. “She said you both liked science.”
Hugo shoved his glasses up, then pushed them down, then shoved them up. Then pushed them down. It was the most uncomfortable Alma had ever seen him, even more uncomfortable than when Shirin had asked him about Marcus. “We were friends,” he said. “Our mothers work together—they’re both nurses at First Point Medical. But Dustin—I don’t know, he started acting very unusual over the summer. He started yelling at me every time we hung out. He—he broke my microscope. And when school started he just—he stopped sitting with me at lunch. He stopped talking to me.”
“I wonder why,” Alma said.
“Not that it’s right, but maybe”—Shirin glanced quickly at Hugo, then away—“maybe he didn’t want people to know you were friends. Things change in middle school, you know. Sometimes you have to—to act different for people to like you.”
“Perhaps,” Hugo replied stiffly. “As I told you the other night, friendship is not my area of expertise.”
Alma shook her head. “I’m sure there’s another reason,” she said.
Hugo shrugged and walked on, staring down at the ground through his visor. Shirin tugged on her braids and avoided Alma’s eyes. They both looked miserable.
Alma had never had a best friend, but she could imagine how it would feel to have someone who was close to her suddenly become the person who seemed to dislike her the most. She thought about how Shirin must feel too. At the Fourth Point Spring, Shirin had said she didn’t want to worry about being popular. She’d said she wanted to be herself. Alma had seen her staring wistfully at her table of old friends, friends who were now talking about her behind her back.
“Well, neither of you have to change for me,” she told Hugo and Shirin, the closest friends she’d ever had. “I like both of you just the way you are.”
Hugo didn’t look at her, but he smiled a tiny smile. Shirin rolled her eyes and said, “Oh my goodness.” But she linked her arm through Alma’s as the three of them climbed the steps to her front door.