by Amelia Stone
Guys and girls can’t be friends.
Well, that was bull. And I would prove it. Krista would be my friend – just my friend – forever.
“Let me know when you’re done, honey. I don’t want you going up and down those stairs too much with that knee, you poor thing.” Mrs. Summers gave me a kind smile, like she always did. Krista got embarrassed by her mom a lot, because she was kinda corny. But I seriously loved that woman.
“Will do. Thanks for the nosh, Mrs. S.”
“You’re welcome, Seth,” she replied, patting my shoulder again.
Krista said nothing. She was still staring at her keyboard, actually.
I couldn’t blame her. I was freaking out, too; I was just better at hiding it than she was. I had the unsettling feeling, as I watched her eyelids working overtime, that things would be different now. Even if – no, when – we went back to being friends, there would always be this thing hanging between us. Years from now, we’d be talking about something else altogether, and one of us would say hey, remember that one time we both lost our damn minds?
Shaking the doom from my shoulders, I nudged her chair with my good foot, and she jumped in her seat like I’d just poked her with a cattle prod. She turned to me, eyes wide, and I nodded at the tray.
“Oh. Right. Thanks, Mom,” she said, smiling tightly.
Mrs. Summers looked at both of us in turn, her smile never fading. “You’re welcome, kids. Enjoy your game. Just make sure you get that homework finished.”
I gave her a huge grin. “Consider it done.”
She turned to leave, but just before she was out the door, she turned back to us. “Make sure this door stays open,” she reminded us. Her smile never slipped, but her eyes found mine and held them, and I got the creepy feeling that she could see through me. It was like she knew what Krista and I had almost done just a few minutes ago.
I quickly nodded, and Mrs. Summers left without any further comment. Krista and I were both silent for a minute or so. Then we turned to each other, both trying to speak at the same time.
“So-”
“That was-”
She made a weird noise, like a donkey. “Go ahead.”
I inhaled. “That was crazy.”
She just stared at me for a beat. Then she nodded slowly, and for some reason her shoulders slumped, like someone had stuck a pin in her and all the air was let out.
“Yeah,” she agreed in a quiet voice.
“I mean, I don’t even know what was going on there,” I said.
“No?” She took her glasses off, wiping them on her Ravenclaw tee shirt. I got the impression she was trying to avoid looking at me.
“No, I mean, we’re friends, right?”
It was a long time before she answered. She just kept wiping her glasses on her shirt, like she was trying to rub off the anti-glare coating or something.
Finally, she looked up, and I got lost. When she had her glasses on, I kind of skipped over her eyes, because the lenses were so thick that everything behind them got distorted. But without her glasses, her eyes were… I didn’t even know the word for them. I was just lost.
She blinked, and so did I. “Yeah, we’re friends,” she finally said.
I didn’t want to think about why she sounded so sad when she said the word ‘friends.’ This whole afternoon was confusing enough. I didn’t need to add anything else to the list of things making me lose my mind.
So instead, I asked about her game.
“So, The Golden Goddess, huh?”
Slowly, she nodded, smiling shyly.
“What’s it about?”
“Well, I got this book on Greek mythology from the library, and it was just so cool.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I remember some of that from Hercules. Thanks to the songs, mostly.” Then I frowned. “Wait, no, what was the one with the songs I liked?
“Tarzan,” she answered immediately.
“Right, Tarzan.” I smiled. “Good old Phil Collins.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Ugh. I hate Phil Collins.”
My mouth popped open in mock outrage. “How can you hate Phil Collins?”
“Because!” she cried. “He’s so like, generic, with his lite FM songs and his soothing voice and his stupid drum solos.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I just hate him, okay?”
“Okay.” I chuckled. “So anyway. Greek mythology, minus the soundtrack.” I bumped her elbow with mine. “Tell me more.”
“Well, there were hundreds of gods and goddesses in ancient Greece, right, and the stories are wild.”
“Hundreds, huh?”
She nodded. “Yeah, and you prayed to each of them, depending on what you needed.”
I raised a brow. “Seems kind of crazy to believe in all those gods.”
She shrugged. “I mean, no more crazy than just believing in one.”
I nodded. “Fair enough, I guess.”
“It’s really all about context, when you think about it,” she said. “It only seems crazy because our cultures were different. Believing in multiple gods was normal for them, but believing in just one God is normal for us.”
I grinned. “So if you were a rebel kid in ancient Greece and you wanted to curse, you’d be like ‘oh my gods!’”
She huffed a laugh. “Yeah, I guess you would.”
“So what does all this have to do with a Golden Goddess?”
“Well, did you know Athena was the goddess of all crafts?” Her voice got more and more animated as she continued talking, and I smiled. I loved it when she geeked out over stuff. “And wisdom and warfare. But like, strategic warfare, not just charging at each other with spears or whatever.”
A good man uses his wits, not his fists, to solve problems. And a good woman, too, apparently. A goddess.
“And there used to be a golden statue of her in the Parthenon in Athens,” she continued. “You know, that huge temple on the hill? Only the statue was lost when the Romans sacked Athens in the fifth century C.E.”
My brow crinkled in confusion. “C.E.?”
She waved a hand dismissively. “A.D. But historians and anthropologists use B.C.E. and C.E. now, because they want to stop using Jesus as the base line for all of history, and also they argue that the birthdate of Christ was probably not accurate anyway, and they want to be as scientific as possible.”
I frowned. “So now we have to learn a new time line?”
She shook her head. “No, same time line, just different nomenclature. Anyway, the more I started reading about the Greek gods, and Athena especially, the more inspired I was, and I had this cool idea for a combat game that wasn’t just a first-person shooter. Those are okay or whatever, but I wanted to try something different. So I wrote this story where the main character is this young Greek girl, and she goes on like this epic adventure at Athena’s request, and it ends up affecting the whole outcome of the Peloponnesian war.”
She stopped to take a huge breath, and I jumped in. “And you just… started making it?”
She nodded. “Yeah, well you know I’ve been learning how to code. And Lindsay and Owen got me that software for my birthday, and I’ve been figuring out how to use it.” She looked up at me through her lashes shyly, like she was waiting for me to tell her it was terrible or something.
But it was the opposite of terrible. I stared at her for a second, totally in awe of my creative, talented, amazingly smart friend.
Yeah. I definitely could not lose her.
“Show me?” I asked.
She smiled as she turned back to the screen, and it was like nothing had happened earlier. Here we were, just two friends, playing video games together, just like we always had.
Just like we always would.
When I reached the hotel’s cavernous marble lobby, there was a table to my right that seemed to be the checkin desk for the reunion, since its polished mahogany surface was topped by neat rows of name tags and an opened guestbook. But it also seemed to be unmanned, despite the crowd mi
ngling around it, so I decided to just check myself in. Easy, efficient, and a reduced chance of running into anyone I didn’t want to see. Win all around.
Once I was standing in front of the table, I quickly found my name tag. I gave the fancy calligraphy a frown, and it only took me a second to decide to stick it in my clutch rather than pin it to my dress. Then I turned to the guestbook, but just as my fingers closed around the pen, a familiar voice made me freeze in place.
“Plus-ones don’t have to sign in. This is for St. Erasmus alumni only.”
I cleared my throat as I turned to face my least favorite former classmate: head cheerleader, student council president, and all-around pain in the ass, Melody Reyes. As a kid, I’d hated Melody so much that I used to call her Bowser in my head. My hatred had mellowed with age, but I still wasn’t thrilled to see her.
As I might have foreseen, she appeared to be less than thrilled to see me, too. She was standing before me with an expression like she’d just stepped in dog shit, though I noted with some surprise that this was more like the smile-sneer she gave most people, rather than the specific, venomous expression she used to reserve just for me.
Huh. Apparently I was now unrecognizable to the people who’d known me as a kid. Oddly, I wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad thing.
Melody raised an impatient-looking eyebrow, reminding me I still hadn’t answered – or let go of the pen.
“I am an alumna,” I replied, trying my best to keep my tone friendly.
“Well, I don’t recognize you at all,” she huffed. She crossed her arms and narrowed her dark eyes in suspicion, as though she was the Reunion Police, in charge of sniffing out imposters. Then she scanned my dress for a name tag, frowning when she didn’t find it.
“I’ve changed a bit since high school,” I replied, bending again to the guestbook.
She leaned forward, peering over my shoulder as I printed out my name. And then she let out a gasp that was dramatic enough to silence the conversation around us. Several people turned to stare, and I shifted uncomfortably in my heels.
“You are not Krista Summers.”
I was going for a smile, but it probably looked more like a grimace. “Guilty as charged.”
She gave me a more thorough perusal, her frown deepening with every second that passed. “You look… different.”
Unsure how to respond, I simply nodded. Then we stared at each other for a few moments, not speaking. When I couldn’t take the awkwardness anymore, I decided to break the silence, if only because I really needed to escape.
“Go Mariners!” I raised my fist halfheartedly, cheering the school mascot as I inched my way toward the double doors leading into the ballroom.
She gave me another “I don’t like you” smile, which was better than the Krista-only “I hate your guts” glare, to be fair.
Little freaking victories.
“Have fun,” she called after me as I stepped through the threshold, her flat tone plainly wishing me anything but. I waved a hand in acknowledgement, rolling my shoulders to try to shake off the tension in them.
As I entered the palatial Beaux-Arts ballroom, one of my favorite tunes by Arcade Fire began playing. I took a deep breath, closing my eyes for a moment to center myself. I still wasn’t sure coming here tonight had been the right move, but at least the music had been great so far.
When I felt a little calmer, I opened my eyes and took a look around. The whole room was decked out almost like a high-end nightclub, complete with mood lighting and a couple of strategically-placed bars. Somebody had done a great job of making the formal, stuffy space feel intimate and inviting. The atmosphere had definitely helped to ease my nerves a bit.
And as I glanced at the DJ booth, I smiled to myself. I should have known who was responsible for all this.
My cousin, Kit Summers, stood behind the turntables, his curly head bopping to the beat. No wonder everything was right up my alley. Kit and I had always had the same taste in music, and we’d been trading new tunes back and forth since elementary school, though as the years went by, I had an increasingly tough time trying to find something he hadn’t heard. He had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of music, with a knack for finding obscure songs and bands. And when I listened to them, his picks were always exactly what I needed at that moment.
Kit truly had a gift, and when he wanted to take his occasional DJ gigs to the next level and start his own event-planning business a couple of years ago, I believed in him so much, I helped him with the seed money. Clearly that was a good idea, if his handiwork here tonight was any indication.
I headed over to say hello, and he gave me a one-armed hug and a quick peck on the cheek.
“You look sensational, doll,” he said.
I gave him a tight smile at the compliment. “You don’t look so bad yourself, Christopher.”
He was nattily dressed in a button-down, vest, and tie. The sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, though, and if I wasn’t mistaken, he had a couple more tattoos than the last time I’d seen him.
He gave me a dirty look, but there was no heat behind it. “And this is how you repay my compliment,” he muttered, just loud enough to be heard over the music.
Kit had always hated being called by his full name. Christopher Summers was his father, and my father’s identical twin. Christopher Junior was the rebellious, creative, sweet guy who’d been like a brother to me growing up.
But right now, his head was cocked, his teeth busy worrying the piercing in his lower lip, just like every other time he was annoyed with me.
“You know you’re at least my fourth favorite cousin,” I assured him.
He rolled his eyes, but his smile told me I was forgiven. “Yeah, yeah. You just love me for my impeccable taste in music and my sweet Subaru hatchback.”
I chuckled. “There is that, yes.”
“Anyway.” He bumped shoulders with me, smiling shyly. “What do you think?” He spread his arms wide, gesturing to the space.
I looked around at the room once more. The lighting was dim enough to be intimate, but not too dark to see. The music was loud enough to encourage dancing, but not too loud to prevent conversation. The tables and bars looked sophisticated, but somehow casual and cool at the same time. And everyone around me seemed to be having a fabulous time.
“It’s perfect, Kit,” I told him.
His face lit up like I’d just made his night. “All thanks to you!”
I shook my head. “I just gave you some money. You did all the work.”
“Yeah, but without the money, I wouldn’t have been able to do the work,” he argued.
“I’m serious.” This time, I bumped my shoulder into his. “You made your company a success. I’m proud of you.”
He mimed sniffing and wiping his eyes, because he and I were on the same wavelength when it came to compliments.
“Aw, thanks, little cousin.”
Kit was two years older than me, and he never missed an opportunity to remind me of it. I stuck my tongue out, and he laughed.
“Anyway,” I drawled. “I’m going to grab a drink.”
“Keep on keeping on,” he replied, giving me a final wink before turning back to his equipment.
I made my way to the bar as quickly as I could on my heels, ordering a Diet Coke and grabbing one of the complimentary cookies from the basket on the bar top. I wanted to find a corner table somewhere so I could sit and eat in private, but as I turned around, I was accosted by a short, blonde, very pregnant someone.
“Oh my God, Krista?”
It took me a moment to recognize the woman in front of me. Her hair was no longer flat-ironed to oblivion, and her eye makeup looked more like a YouTube tutorial than a My Chemical Romance video.
Plus, she hadn’t been knocked up in high school.
“Kelly!” I managed a not-too-awkward smile. “Hey!”
Oh gods. She was coming in for a hug, even though my hands were full. I bent to circle her shoulders with my arm
s, trying not to spill my drink or bump her belly.
She laughed at the awkwardness. “It’s so good to see you.”
I gave her a rueful smile. “It’s good to see you, too.”
“You look fantastic!” she said as her green eyes appraised me. “Jenny and Jess both told me you’d finally grown into a Summers girl, but I had to see it with my own eyes.”
Somehow, what should have been a dig felt like a compliment from her. Kelly was always the nicest of Jess’s friends, with her sweet smile and non-judgmental attitude. It was hard not to like her, even if we’d never been BFFs.
She was, however, a little too generous with the flattery.
“You look beautiful,” I said, trying to take the focus off me. She was wearing a light green dress that flowed over her baby belly, and the color complemented her blonde hair and fair, freckled skin. “And congratulations!” I said, gesturing to her sizable bump. “When are you due?”
She rubbed her belly, smiling down at her spawn. “End of July. I can’t believe how the time has flown! This is our first one,” she explained.
I nodded, about to ask her more questions, when she suddenly seized my arm.
“Don’t get pregnant, Krista. Everyone who tells you that pregnancy is wonderful is lying to your fucking face. I feel like an alien has taken over my body.”
I let out a surprised chuckle. “You sound like my sister Lindsay.”
She sighed, as though relieved she wasn’t the only one with mixed feelings about pregnancy.
“I saw her at the drugstore earlier today, but I didn’t get a chance to say hello,” she added. “She’s on her fourth kid now?”
“Fifth, but I guess this is her fourth pregnancy. She had twins last time.”
“Oh, wow! I’m so glad I’m not having twins. Just this one will be a big enough challenge.” She pulled a face. “God, listen to me, I sound like I’m dreading this. I’m really happy that I get to be a mom.” She took a shaky breath. “I am,” she repeated in a stronger voice. “And in some ways it’s amazing, having a little person growing inside you. It’s just a big change, you know?” Her eyes began to fill with tears. “I’m so scared that I won’t know what I’m doing.”