“Meghan told me.”
“Oh.”
“I’m really sorry for your loss,” Nora said. Because that’s the thing to say at funerals, I guess.
We stood there for a few moments in silence. “How’s your summer been?” she finally asked me.
“Pretty good. Aside from the death,” I said. “How’s yours?”
“Did I tell you I met a guy?”
“You haven’t been speaking to me,” I reminded her.
Nora blushed. “I met a guy.”
Oh.
That’s why she wasn’t so mad at me anymore.
It wasn’t that she missed me so much she decided to forgive me.
She had stopped liking Noel.
“I met him at Sunny Meadows,” Nora went on.
Sunny Meadows was a day camp connected to Nora’s church. She was a sports leader for them that summer, until August, when her parents would take her to Decatur Island.
“That’s great,” I said.
“He goes to Lakeside,” she said. “His name is—don’t laugh.”
“What?”
“Say you won’t laugh.”
“I won’t laugh.”
“His name is Happy. Happy Mackenzie.”
I had heard of Happy Mackenzie, actually. He was stroke for the Lakeside heavy eight, and Jackson, who was a rower, had been at some kind of crew team sports intensive with him. It’s not the kind of name people forget.
“And is it a thing thing?” I asked.
“We went out twice last week,” Nora said. “And I see him every day at Sunny Meadows. So yeah.”
“A thing thing.”
“Pretty much so.” She grinned.
Nora has never had a boyfriend her whole entire life. Not that she isn’t attractive—she’s got gorgeous curls and huge boobs and she understands basketball, plus she can bake—but somehow she’s never gone out with anyone. “That’s really great,” I said.
This was like, the most generic thing anyone could say in such a situation, but Nora and I had been angry at each other for so long I didn’t feel like I could just dive in and interrogate her about Happy’s kissing ability or his giant crew muscles or any of the things I would normally want to know about.
“Did you read about the gay male penguins at the Chinese zoo?” I asked.
Nora looked at me funny. “No.”
“Yeah, well, there are gay penguins. That’s a documented fact. But these particular gay penguins kept trying to steal eggs from the straight penguins.”
Nora looked at me like: where was I going with this?
“They would steal an egg and leave behind a rock as substitute,” I continued. “To try and trick the biological parents. Then the gay ones would adopt the egg. Zookeepers kept taking away the egg and giving it back to the bio parents, and they kept stealing another one, again and again.”
Nora shook her head in disbelief.
“It’s true,” I said. “Finally the gay couple had to be segregated from the other penguins with a little picket fence, because they wouldn’t stop trying to get a baby of their own.”
“Okay. What’s the point?”
“The point is, they shouldn’t have done what they were doing, and even though they were penguins, they probably knew it; I mean, they were doing the worst, meanest possible thing to their friends and neighbors—but they just couldn’t stop, because they wanted a baby so, so desperately.”
“What happened?” asked Nora.
“Well, for a while they were ostracized, but finally zookeepers gave them an egg to take care of, from a straight penguin couple that had rejected one. And the gay penguins were so happy! They turned out to be excellent dads.”
“Cool.” Nora shifted from side to side.
“I mean, penguins in general are excellent dads. The dads hatch the eggs, pretty much. But my point is these guys weren’t sociopaths or crazy penguins or anything. They just couldn’t behave like normal people when they wanted a baby more than anything in the world. It was like the intense wanting made them psycho.”
“Ruby.”
“What?”
