His life is quite tragic at the moment, so he appreciates your support
My phone starts vibrating, and I nearly drop it. Alyssa’s responding to my text with a full-blown FaceTime call. I take a deep breath and run a hand through my stick-straight brown hair, doing nothing to fix the lack of volume, and accept the call.
“Please show me this sweet boy’s face,” Alyssa says as soon as her face fills my screen.
I hold my phone up to get a good angle, tilting it so that she can’t see the massive pimple on my cheek.
“I don’t know what you speak of, there are no sweet boys here. Only tiny demons who finished the last of my chocolate cake and had to be rushed to the pet hospital in the middle of the night.”
That was a week ago, and Mom still brings it up every time Smush crosses her path.
Alyssa laughs, and my stomach tightens. It truly is the prettiest sound in the world.
“Show me this sweet boy with excellent taste in dessert.”
I hop off the couch, crossing to the kitchen where Smush lies. He looks up at me hopefully, as though I’m here to share more of my cereal, but instead I switch the video so that Alyssa can get a full shot of his tragic expression.
“Hi, sweet boy,” she coos. “I heard your mom doesn’t want to share her chocolate with you.”
I flip the camera back. “Hey. Whose side are you on here?”
“Oh, Smush’s,” she says immediately. “Always.”
I shake my head at her. “Traitor.”
She grins back at me, sparking the same warmth in my chest she always does in bio. But there, we’re mandated by the Marinwood Public School District to hang out for forty-five minutes a day. Mr. Ray is there to fill lulls in the conversation with his lecturing. His nonsensical lab instructions are always there to fuel more conversations as we try to decipher how he wants us to handle the microscope.
Here, the brief lull feels like an endless silence. It’s just us, on our phone screens, with nothing to distract from the fact that neither of us is talking. She fidgets on my screen for a moment, her bright eyes darting to the side. Say something, I plead with myself, but every thought that flashes through my brain feels horribly stupid, unbearably cringey.
If I stay on the call too long, she’ll realize I’m not as funny as the TikTok video Eve made for me. My personality is about as great as my first attempt at a video, which is to say it should be deleted as quickly as possible before anyone sees that it only got four likes.
“I have to go,” I say quickly. “I, um, I have to help my mom with dinner.”
“Oh, yeah,” Alyssa says. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to call and disrupt your day. I—”
“No, no, I’m glad you got to see firsthand what a bad dog Smush is,” I say, my shoulders curling inward as I say goodbye and hang up the call, awkwardness seeping out of my pores. I shudder as my screen goes dark. Why am I like this?
I pocket my phone and spin on my heel. “Eve!”
She bursts out of her bedroom, almost tripping down the stairs as she runs in her socks to me. “What’s wrong? Oh god, did Smush eat the chocolate chips? I knew he’d figure out how to jump on the counter eventually. I’ll call the poison control hotline, don’t worry, it’ll be fine, you get his travel bag so we can take him to the vet.”
“No, no,” I say, but I pick up the bag of chocolate chips and stow them safely back in the pantry. She has a point. “It’s not him. Alyssa called.”
She stares at me. “Good lord, Harp, the amount of pain in your voice. I thought at the very least, the house was on fire.”
She drops into one of the stools that line the kitchen island, breathing hard. I grimace.
“Sorry. But my metaphorical house is burned to the ground.”
She gives me a look that would be sympathetic if it didn’t make it clear she was annoyed. “What happened?”
I slink onto the stool next to her, scooping up Smush on my way. He wriggles into a comfy position on my lap and goes back to his nap.
“She wanted to see Smush, and then I didn’t know what to say.”
Eve twists her hair into a braid as she squints at me. She got lucky, in that she got Mom’s hair—blond and wavy and always shiny even though she barely uses conditioner half the time. “You could’ve said anything. If she called you, she obviously wants to talk to you.”
“Only because she thinks I’m the mastermind of the TikTok video,” I say.
“Well, if she called you and you ended the conversation, the ball’s in your court now,” Eve says.
I grit my teeth. “No thank you, I don’t want it.”
Eve shakes her head at me with a teasing smile, but it drops off her face when she sees the puppy-dog eyes I’m making at her.
“No,” she says before I can get the words out.
“Please,” I say, widening my eyes as much as I can. I probably look more like a bug-eyed ogre than a puppy at this point, but I’m desperate. “You have to help me talk to her. Please. Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease.”
Eve gives a long-suffering sigh. “Give me your phone.”
I give a whoop of victory and thumb the touchpad to unlock it before handing it over. Eve swipes to my texts and types quickly. She turns the phone back over to me and lets me read the message she’s put together.
Smush wanted me to tell you that he thinks you’re cute too, even if you did not bring him any snack offerings
I yelp and snatch the phone out of her hand before she can hit send.
“You can’t say that,” I screech as I
