“I’ll see you later,” I said.
“I’ll be asleep later,” said Flan.
I stroked her hair, just for a second, and then I said, “Oh, right.” I tried to laugh. I absolutely would not call what I had on Flan a crush. I tried not to stroke her hair again but I couldn’t help it. She smelled like clean sheets and flowers and cinnamon-flavored lip gloss.
“And I was having fun hanging out with you,” Flan said. “So what if Arno saw us? Wasn’t he fooling around with David’s girlfriend? David needs to chill with her anyway. She’s way too snarky for him.”
“I know. But David shouldn’t find out that they were together, not till he can handle it, anyway. Promise me you won’t tell anybody about that.”
“How will you know when he can handle it?” Flan asked. Her eyes were big and round and blue, like when you look at the earth from really far away. I sighed.
I tried to stand up and walk out of the room, but I was still stroking her hair. At that moment, although she was built like a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, she had on a pair of floppy green-striped boy’s pajamas that had probably belonged to Zed and slippers that had rubber-duck heads on the toes. She’d grown up so fast that her chest was about to burst the big white buttons off the front of her pajamas. And she didn’t look tremendously upset about that.
“You two dressed yet?” I called out, low, to Arno and Amanda.
“No,” they said back. There was the sound of clothes getting adjusted and then Amanda said, “I’m going down first.”
Arno said, “I’m coming in there, and you better not have your hands on our best friend’s little sister.”
“Whatever, Arno,” I said. “Let’s get downstairs and figure out what’s going on.”
Arno came into the room. I’d been sitting in a sky-blue velvet chair that Flan had by the side of her bed, and I got up. Flan had been curled in bed, and she got up, too.
And Arno started laughing and I kind of did, too.
“No way,” Arno said. “Bad enough we can’t ever find your brother. We don’t want to lose you, too.”
“My sister lets me have beers.”
“Yeah,” Arno said. “Somebody should talk to February about that.”
I gave Flan a quick kiss on the cheek and she sort of rubbed her nose on my nose in this heartbreaking sweet way she has and then me and Arno got out of there. We slid down the stairs fast, like we were on skis.
“Dude, you cannot fool around with an eighth grader,” Arno said.
“I wasn’t. I was just taking a break from all the craziness.”
“Do not shovel me that bullshit,” Arno said. “You’re not new to me.”
“I would bet anything I own that your universe is more morally fucked up than my universe,” I said.
“You’d bet your shoe collection?”
“Don’t be insane,” I said.
“Hmm. How about if I win, no more Flan Flood for you?”
I stopped for a second. Give up Flan Flood? I looked back up the stairs. It wasn’t like I had her to give up, but I knew that a lot of the reason I liked the Flood house so much was because she lived there. It wasn’t like we saw Patch nearly as much as we used to. We talked about him, sure, but we didn’t actually see him.
“No way. I can’t turn my back on her. She needs me.” We slowed on the staircase when we came across Liza and Jane. “Hi, Liza.”
“Hey, I met your sleazy cousin,” Liza said. “And where’ve you two been?”
“Crossing swords in the upstairs bathroom,” Arno said. He ran down the stairs, away from us.
Liza looked after him and shook her head. “He’s headed in the wrong direction. All that’s down there is David Grobart, and he’s pulling a pity party for one. Mickey went in the other direction, upstairs, and he took your cousin with him.”
“That’s weird,” I said. “I didn’t see Mickey. I wonder how she got to him.”
“It’s not like that bitch is going to heel if you leave her alone.”
“I thought you were over it,” Jane said.
So we turned and raced back upstairs to the roof.
The Flood roof was something special. The usable area ran the whole length of their brownstone, and they’d covered it with trellises and all kinds of plants. There was a gardener who came every other day to make sure all the growing things kept growing and that the place looked extremely cool and kind of like a jungle, with all sorts of hidden areas and babbling brooks. Toward the end of the school year we liked to blow off days and go up there and hang, if we couldn’t make it out to somebody’s house in the country. At night, it got better. There was a fridge up there that we kept stocked with beers and cans of Red Bull and bottles of vodka.
We got upstairs and Mickey was screaming, “Philippa! Where are you?”
Philippa Frady had the same setup as the Floods, across the gardens, on Charles Street. Sometimes we yelled to her, and when we were younger, we used to toss water bombs and stuff onto her roof and into her garden. But that was all before she and Mickey became Romeo and Juliet. Her dad was some big investment banker who had invested in Mickey’s dad’s career early on and then they’d had this huge falling-out and were always fighting at the dinner parties all our parents can’t stop having—the ones that inevitably result in somebody’s parents not talking to somebody else’s parents for six months or a year.
“Dude, she’s coming over, can’t you see her?” Arno said. He grabbed Mickey by the scruff of the neck and pointed his head down at the garden. Philippa was coming through her garden to the Flood house. They’d cut a hole in the wood fence back when we were in kindergarten and they’d just left it open.
“Philippa!” Mickey yelled.
“Hi, Jonathan,” Kelli said. “You ditched me.”
“Did I?” I asked. “I can’t say that I did, no.”
“I’m saying it,” Kelli said. “Some cool city cousin you are.”
There were half a dozen of us up on the roof. Me, Arno, Mickey, and then there was Kelli, Liza, and Jane.
“Where’s Amanda?” Arno asked.
“Where’s David?” Liza asked.
“Well, they go out,” Kelli said. “Maybe they’re together.”
“How’d you know that, Ooh?” Mickey said. We all looked over at him. He was clambering over the side of the roof.
“I can get down with a scene very fast,” Kelli said. She smiled and all of us looked at her. She was still in her pink sweater and white skirt, but she looked different than she had at dinner, more comfortable and sexy. Then she must’ve felt all our eyes on her—because she pointed at the place where Mickey had been, and he wasn’t there.
“Mickey!” I screamed.
“Philippa!” he yelled. “I’m coming.”
We heard him as he tried to scale down the trellis. Then we heard the trellis loosen from the side of the brownstone.
Liza called out what I was thinking: “Hey, Mick-head, why don’t you take the stairs?”
Then we heard a whistling noise, and a thud.