Free The Household Spirit by Tod Wodicka

on the horizon—a girl experimenting with Hot Topic goth, suddenly, and directly in the confused face of her Old Navy BFF…Emily knew best friend-hood was coming, must be, like losing her virginity, graduating from high school, learning to drive. Have a little faith. Everyone gets a best friend. Emily wasn’t shy. People liked her. Her wavy anti-seriousness drew people in, but it was becoming clear that Emily was attractive to other girls in the same way that the poisonous, toothy things are the most attractive things at an aquarium or zoo. It was like they knew what happened to her at night, like she was contagious. Knew without knowing. Press your palms to the glass, get close, but not best friend forever close. You best-friend one of those fish, girl, and you’re done for.
    It was different with the guys. The skaters, burgeoning potheads, and the sarcastic, unhappy brainiacs. Emily didn’t like the jocks as much, but even some of them, the cute ones, whatever, they could be fun to hang with too. They had a bovine niceness that could be hypnotizing. But boys didn’t count. That kind of buddyhood was way too easy: all braying loud surfaces, body humor,
dude
. Dude, check this out. Emily needed someone to hold on to through the storm of puberty—though, of course, that wasn’t at all how she thought about it back then.
    Basically, middle school sucked. That’s when the second-best-friend thing started. That
sobriquet
, as Peppy would say. Seven girls over a period of three, four years. Oh, it was like they
knew
. Like they wanted to rub her face in it. Because, seriously,
second-best friend
? Who said that?
    Jess Yarsevich for starters.
    They’d met during the Adirondack Children’s Troupe rehearsals for
Free to Be…You and Me
. Jess Yarsevich was fourteen, two years older than Emily. She had recently moved from Tucson with a mother and a prematurely balding older brother, Jared, whom Emily had once mistaken for Jess’s father. “Naw, Dad’s back in New Mexico. I’m gonna spend the summer with him.” Her words twanged. She complained about not having enough winter clothes, though obviously she liked wearing the crap out of her revealing southwestern skirts and tops under the puff of her new upstate New York jacket, always asking if you’d heard of things that she knew you couldn’t possibly have ever heard of. Cool Tucson things, people and websites for bands her older brother knew of before they were lame. Jess was membership only. In her club, you were either in or out and you knew immediately, before you’d even had a chance to apply. Most of the kids in the troupe were out.
Free to Be…You and Me
? Kind of dorky. But Jess liked Emily; right off the bat they’d made not-too-needy eyeball contact, an eyebrow up, a thing with their lips, and: membership considered. Their eyebrows fit. What are you doing here? Their smiles fit. Then their laughter. Membership accepted!
    It was magic.
    They’d make demonstrably tortured faces across the room at each other during “It’s All Right to Cry.” They snuck out to get coffee at the nearby Stewart’s gas station. Jess insisted that girls at the University of Arizona in Tucson drank coffee. So they did too and they’d talk about how awesome Tucson was.
    Once, afterward, Emily told Jess about her and Peppy’s garden. The garden was her favorite thing. The furry, green wholeness of her Route 29 backyard was like a pet or a family member: the flowers waking up in the morning, vines all done up in vegetable ornaments, the berries and the roots, the kind, useless plants that didn’t produce food or beauty but existed all the same, and the scent of soil, mulch, and how insects, if you listened right, sang better than birds. They weeded because they had to, to save the others frombeing strangled to death, but they also had a patch—at Emily’s seven-year-old insistence—that they left specifically for weeds, a sanctuary out near the creek. Emily and Peppy