Erlan handed me the tweezers, and I looked for the best bone to remove. The Adam’s apple or the charley horse or the butterflies in the stomach. “I don’t think I’ll ever go out with anyone,” I told Erlan. “It sounds awful.”
He rolled his eyes. “You don’t even know. Yesterday Ainyr spent two hours deleting all the photos of him off her phone. Two hours! You know how many photos that is? They only went out a week!”
“I’m gonna punch you, Erlan!” Ainyr screamed.
“No you won’t!” Erlan shouted back. “Because you’d have to come out here to do it, and then I’d get my fort back!”
Ainyr didn’t leave the fort the whole time I was there. Erlan and I played four games of Operation, and she just cried the whole time.
• • •
“Do you still have pictures of Gus on your phone?” I asked Calista the next day after school.
She seemed surprised when I asked her that. But sort of happy too. “Sure!” she said. She pulled her phone out of her pocket. “You want to see them?” She started to thumb through to the photos.
I shook my head. “No, thanks,” I said. “Can we go visit Hugo and get my donut now?”
Calista frowned, but she put her phone back in her pocket. “Yeah, okay,” she told me.
That’s how I figured out that Calista still had a boyfriend.
tetherball.
Now that I was cool, I ate lunch with Darren and the other cool kids and played tetherball with them too. I was all right at tetherball, even if I did flinch once when I thought the ball was going to whack me in the head, and Candace Sims laughed at me. At lunchtime, all us cool kids would eat our lunches super-duper fast so we could go outside to meet Sage Moore at the tetherball courts. Sage was Darren’s best friend, but he couldn’t eat at our same table because he had to eat at the “egg-free” one with the allergy kids.
I didn’t mind not having to eat with Sage Moore so much.
“Do you like Carrot Squash?” Sage asked me on Friday when the two of us were next to each other in line waiting for our turn to play tetherball. The way he asked me about it, I felt like I was taking a test. Like there was only one right answer to the question, and he already knew I was going to get it wrong.
“I don’t know,” I said slowly. I didn’t want to get the answer wrong, but I didn’t want to lie either. “I’ve never had it.”
Sage laughed so hard when I said that that he started to choke on his own spit. “Oh, my God!” he said between chokes. “You’ve never had it!”
Candace reached around me in line and pounded on Sage’s back. To stop the choking, I guess. I hadn’t even thought to do that, to pound on Sage’s back to help him stop choking.
Then again, I didn’t really care if Sage Moore choked so much. (That was not a very nice thing to think, maybe.)
(But it was true.)
“Carrot Squash isn’t a food,” Darren told me. Darren was so good at tetherball that he could play and talk at the same time. “It’s a video game,” he said, and he whacked the ball. Whack! Nasim Johnson whacked it back. Whack! “It’s really cool.” Whack! “You’d like it.” Whack! “You’re a rabbit”—whack!—“and you go around killing talking carrots”—whack!—“that commit crimes.” Whack! “When they die, all their carrot juice splatters everywhere.” The rope wrapped around the pole too high for Nasim to get it, and Darren beat her. She went to the end of the line. Lizzy was next.