True to Huckabee form, Sycamore Street Tattoos doesn’t bother with carding, which was why Kiera and about half our classmates have gotten their first tattoos long before their eighteenth birthdays. Like we were going to this past February.
“Come on, Em!” she had said. “Let’s do something bad for once. Like we—”
Like we used to. She stopped herself before she said it, but I could still feel the burn.
I remember Kiera spinning the binder around to face me after flipping through only two pages and pointing to the rose. “Arm or rib cage?”
I said arm, but she went for rib cage.
I chickened out a few minutes later at the sight of the needle, wondering when they’d last been cleaned, as the statistics I’d read on infections circled around and around inside my brain. I could tell Kiera was disappointed, but she still faithfully went through with hers, squeezing my hand so tight, I had entirely lost feeling in my fingers by the end of it.
Which had absolutely affirmed my decision not to get one.
Until now. If I can stop chickening out.
My phone starts vibrating in my hand, and Kiera’s name flashes up on the screen in white letters. Our first call since she left. She gets thirty minutes of phone time every Sunday night, and a chunk of it usually goes to Nina, so I don’t want to waste a second.
If she’s calling me first, it means she has some news.
I sit bolt upright and tap the green accept button for her FaceTime.
“Kiera! Hi! How are you?”
“Em, are you trying to give me a cavity?” Kiera’s voice pours through the speaker of my phone, her box braids and smiling face slowly coming into view, as blurry as it always is when she’s away at Misty Oasis. The service is so bad up at camp, most of the calls are glitches and frozen screens. She holds up the three shiny packs of Bubble Yum Cotton Candy Bubble Gum. “You know once I open a pack, I have to finish it.”
Even through the screen I can tell her nails are freshly painted, one of the nail polishes I sent her being put to use. Homesick box success!
“Give some to your campers! It’ll be a welcome relief from the cardboard and water they usually get.”
She rolls her eyes, but the corners of her mouth turn up. From what I remember from my traumatic week there, Misty Oasis made the sketchy buffet by the Goodwill look like a gourmet meal.
“How’s it going so far?” I ask.
“Pretty good! I got a weird rash on my leg a few days ago on our nature hike, but other than that I’m doing great.”
I grimace as she flicks the camera down to show me a lumpy red patch just above her ankle. Of course this is the moment the quality shoots straight from pixelated to ultra HD.
“Ew. That’s gross as hell.”
I still don’t fully understand how the same girl who cried over breaking a nail at our freshman formal two years ago transforms into a mountain man each summer. It’s like two versions of Kiera simultaneously exist in one body.
She laughs and the camera moves back up to her face. “Could be worse. One of the campers had to be sent home a few days ago after they got poison ivy on their eyelid.” Her eyes widen slightly, the horror still palpable. “Now, that was gross.”
“I don’t even want to begin to picture that,” I say, glancing over at my alarm clock, the bright red numbers blaring out 7:43.
I jolt, realizing how close it is to eight. My dad will be home from work soon. And I know for a fact he hasn’t eaten since pancakes this morning. I push myself up and head down the hallway, giving Kiera a wry smile as I tuck my long brown hair behind my ear.
“So. How’s ‘Nice Arms’ Todd doing?” I ask, eager to get the latest Misty Oasis gossip. Kiera has been nursing a crush on Todd Thomas since he came back to camp two summers ago redefining the words “glow up.”
“Emily. His nice arms got even nicer. I swear they quadrupled in size over the course of the school year. It is unreal how good he looks. And”—she glances behind her to make sure the coast is clear, her voice excited—“I found out his girlfriend broke up with him a month ago because she’s going to UCLA this fall.”
“No way.”
“Yes!”
“That’s amazing!” I say, stopping to quickly backtrack to the place where sympathy should’ve been instead of celebration. “I mean, like, poor Todd.”
“Oh, yeah, I mean… total dick move. Major bummer,” Kiera says, nodding in agreement as we both offer up a moment of silence.
“So…?” I say, grinning since I’ve clearly found the reason behind the phone call.
“So…,” Kiera says, smiling around the word. “We maybe made out after the bonfire last night!”
We both squeal, and I do a little excited dance as I make it to the kitchen. This has been two whole summers in the making.
“I can’t believe you actually kissed him!”
“Oh my gosh, I know,” Kiera says, swooning a little bit. “And let me tell you, it was WORTH the wait.”
I put the phone down on the counter just for a second, reaching up on my tippy-toes to grab a box of pasta out of the pantry.
I’m about to ask for more details when I hear her say, “So is there any—”
She cuts out, the image freezing suddenly, her voice coming out in garbled spurts.
“Kiera?” I say, watching as her face finally starts to move again, the glitching fading as the connection returns.
“Sorry,” she says with an eye roll. “I asked if there was any news on the Matt front.”
I groan internally. I was really hoping we’d get cut off before we got to this.
“No,” I say, shaking my head as I slam the pasta box onto the
