Free The Goodbye Time by Celeste Conway Page B

really grateful—that your mom helped find the dress, I mean. She wasn’t insulted like I said.”
    “You didn’t say that.”
    “I sort of did. Anyway, it wasn’t true.” I probably should have figured that out. I mean, Katy’s mom is more than nice. I remember kind of thinking that when she gave Sam’s room to Bug Eye instead of keeping it for herself.
    “It’s okay. It’s not your fault.”
    “Or your fault either,” Katy said.
    “Maybe it isn’t anyone’s fault.”
    She smiled at me. “Anyway, the dress looks really beautiful. I bet it’s nicer than Kendra’s dress.” Both of us turned to look at it.
    “Remember the day we bought it?” she said. “You were Aunt Mimi and I was Clarissa shopping for a prom dress.”
    I smiled. “Yeah. We were talking with our accents and my mom started talking that way too.”
    Katy laughed. “She had no idea what was going on.”
    “It was funny,” I said. “And the people in Macy’s thought we were from England.”
    “I missed you a lot,” Katy whispered suddenly. “I’m sorry I was so mean to you.”
    “It’s okay,” I told her.
    “No, it’s not. And it isn’t true that you couldn’t understand things. You understand a lot.”
    “But I didn’t realize how big it was—Sam going away to Fern Brook—till I thought about Tom going away to college. And it isn’t even the same with Tom. We can write and talk and send each other e-mail.”
    “But still and all, he’s going away. He isn’t going to live at home.”
    For a second we were quiet; then I said, “So you want to be friends with me again?”
    “I always wanted that,” she said. “I can’t explain why I did what I did.” She kept looking at me, not moving her eyes. Then she said in a very soft voice: “There’s just one thing—I can’t play anymore. I don’t know why, but I know I can’t.” I let the words sink in.
    “It’s okay. I don’t think I can either.”
    “Really, Anna?”
    “Yeah. It’s like something happened inside of me. Or maybe it’s a lot of things. Sam and you. Graduation. Michael’s father’s dying. My brother going away to school.”
    “Everything’s changing, isn’t it?”
    “Everything but us. I mean us as friends. Promise that won’t ever change.”
    “I promise,” said Katy. “Cross my heart.” At the same exact second, both of us moved and tumbled into each other’s arms. It happened so fast that we bumped our heads together, and it hurt so much we started to laugh, and we laughed so much we started to cry—and Katy and I were friends again.

    It’s August now, and middle school begins in a week. Michael Trefaro moved to New Jersey right after graduation. He wrote me a letter and I wrote back to his new house on Willow Avenue. But after that he never wrote back.
    When Katy and I made up, I told her, of course, about the kiss.
    “Wow,” she said. “So what was it like?” The way Katy asked me was different from the way Yolanda and Tyesha asked. I mean, it wasn’t like she was asking for herself—so she could imagine herself getting kissed—but like she really wanted to know how it was for
me.
How
I
felt and if
I
liked it and would ever want to do it again. Then she said it was weird to think of me doing something she hadn’t done yet, but she was happy for me anyway. I told her I would feel the same. I mean, if something happened to her that hadn’t happened to me. And then we decided that we won’t get our periods until it’s time for both of us to get them. That we’ll get them on the very same day. We made a pact, the Period Pact. We told ourselves if we really put our minds to it, we can make it happen, we really can.
    Graduation was fun, and we had a party afterward in Kendra’s big apartment. She made sure we all went to her room and didn’t see any Barbie dolls, even in the closet, which she’d left wide open so everyone could look inside.
    Two weeks ago Tom went off to Harvard. We drove him there and stayed for