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Hope gulped loudly. “I think…” She paused to pull a pile of hair off her shoulders with the twist of an elastic band. “I think that this is so Marcus.”

And on that point we were in total agreement.

twenty

After Hope left for the Chateau Briand Country Club and Gardens (“Where Only the Bride and Groom Outshine Our Spectacularly Opulent Ambiance”), I dedicated the rest of the day to unpacking those boxes. That was my plan, anyway. It seemed like a constructive, productive thing to do on an otherwise eventless Sunday. Boxes would be removed, floor space would be discovered, and quantifiable progress would be made. I had taken over far more than 50 percent of the square footage of Claire and Chloe’s pastel playland and it was time to even things out. I would carefully cut the Cupcake in half, making sure Hope got her fair share of closet room and floor space, vanilla batter and butter-cream frosting. Oh, how I looked forward to Hope’s evening return and hearing her marvel over my finger-licking equanimity.

Only I didn’t get very far.

According to my useless labeling system, the first box blocking my path purported to contain MOM AND DAD. Hmm. I was fairly certain that they were still alive and well in Pineville, and that I had not dismembered them in a sick reenactment of a CSI episode titled “In Loco Parentis,” guest-starring that angelic actress from The Gilmore Girls going against type as the homicidal daughter. I carved open the cardboard with Hope’s X-Acto knife, if only so I could find out what I might have meant by that mysterious, possibly murderous label. I pulled back the flayed cardboard and winced at my hasty, X-Acto–wielding handiwork: I had ruined the mosaic Hope gave me on the day she moved to Tennessee nearly seven years ago, just before my sixteenth birthday.

Hope had meticulously pasted together innumerable confetti scraps to reconstruct our favorite snapshot, an arm’s-length view of two thirteen-year-old best friends, our teeth gleaming and eyes blazing with manic energy after staying up all night to watch the sunrise.

Hope would surely be embarrassed by this mosaic now, deriding it as untrained and immature. But her youthful lack of pretension distinguished this work of art from her other, more accomplished pieces. I’ve always thought it was the best thing she’s ever made.

And I ruined it. I’d sliced it right down the middle. Not in a way that separated Hope from me as if we were conjoined twins surgically transformed into our whole, independent selves. No, I had sliced the page horizontally, slitting our throats, separating our minds from our bodies. Or our heads from our hearts.

I sunk into the bottom bunk and cried when I realized what I had done.

twenty-one

Try to imagine us as the girls captured in that self-portrait, two thirteen-year-olds whiling away the stagnant, swampy summer in New Jersey. Hope was too tall for all the boys, with wild orange tresses. Her complexion was as delicate as an eggshell and almost as pale, and she always sought refuge from the relentless sun under the leafy protection of an oak tree. I had muddy hair and dark eyes that were ever-ready for a sardonic roll in the sockets. I was shorter and skinny to the point of scrawny, and I defiantly subjected myself to the UV rays in pursuit of the perfect tan even though my melanin never deepened beyond the shade of a bruised persimmon.

It was the summer before the start of eighth grade, and Hope and I had invented a game of hypotheticals called Would You Rather?

Would you rather have Manda’s impressive rack OR Bridget’s perfect ass?

It was an escapist coping mechanism, in which we inserted our boring, Brainiac selves into fantasy scenarios often involving the Pineville Middle School hoi polloi. Eventually the game evolved (or devolved) into a series of pseudo-philosophical inquiries that probed the shallow depths of our adolescent psyches.

Read minds OR have X-ray vision?

We believed that we had elevated conspicuous