For Keeps by Natasha Friend

one is coming out and saying it.
    In French, Jamie wants to know if I’m going to the party. It’s the hundredth time she’s asked, and I have yet to provide a straight answer.
    “I might be washing my hair,” I tell her.
    Jamie rolls her eyes and nudges Peter Hersh, as if to say, Do you believe this loser?
    Peter looks up from his French-English dictionary. “You should go.”
    I say nothing, leaving Jamie to poke me in the ribs with her pen. “ Hello . Peter wants you to go.”
    Peter shakes his head. “I don’t care if she goes.”
    “Thanks a lot,” I say.
    “Someone else might, though.”
    Jamie squeals beside me. She’s a squealer. “Oh my God , Peter, who wants Josie to—”
    I reach out my hand to shut her up, but Madame Plouchette beats me to it. “S’il vous plaît,” she says, rapping Jamie’s desk with her ruler. “Conjugez le verbe ‘offusquer’ en passé composé.”
    Jamie looks confused. “Pardonnez-moi? ”
    “Pare doan ay muhwa?” Madame gives a pitch-perfect imitation of Jamie’s horrendous accent.
    Everyone laughs, but Jamie isn’t even fazed. She just stands up, tosses her hair, and proceeds to butcher the verb “to annoy.”

    Someone wants me to go to the party.
    Someone. Wants me . To go to the party.
    The mind boggles.
    How is a person supposed to focus on trigonometry?

    At the end of soccer practice on Friday, we get the Big Warning from Coach: Just because you have a bye this weekend doesn’t mean you can stay out all night raising Cain, blah, blah, blah.
    I guarantee the boys’ team is getting the same lecture. Unlike Wendy Geruntino’s purity pledge, the signing of the EHS Athletic Association’s Drug and Alcohol Policy is not optional. Thou Shalt Not Do Jell-O Shots During the Soccer Season is the point. Zero tolerance.
    Coach looks at us through squinty eyes, preparing to lecture some more, but then his mouth twitches at the corner, like he’s remembering that he, too, was a teenager once. “All right, ladies,” he says. “Bring it in. ‘Team,’ on three.”

    Friday nights my mom doesn’t have to work. This means two things: movies and junk food. We slide Grandpa Gardner’s old leather wing chairs together, kick up our feet on the mosaic coffee table, and pretend we’re at the Multiplex. Sometimes Liv joins us, but tonight she’s staying home to work on her MyPage. Liv is obsessed with MyPage. She has about five hundred cyber friends, and she’s constantly posting new pictures of herself doing weird things: shaving her legs in the rain, juggling kiwis.
    So tonight it’s just me and my mom, and the movie is St. Elmo’s Fire —one of the many cheesy ’80s movies she has in her collection. We love St. Elmo’s . It’s full of bad hair and heartache, of faithless lovers and secret crushes, of sweaty saxophone players rockin’ it out on top of the bar, of cocaine-snorting best friends locking themselves in freezing-cold rooms and having breakdowns, of bitter-sweet endings and fresh beginnings.
    There are certain scenes we can quote verbatim. Like the one where Jules and Billy are in the Jeep and she’s trying to talk seriously to him, but all he’s doing is trying to unzip her pants. “You break my heart,” she says. “Then again, you break everyone’s heart.” And the camera pans from the Jeep to the house, where Billy’s wife is standing on the stoop, holding their baby.
    I know a lot of my friends wouldn’t be caught dead hanging with their mothers on a Friday night. Some of them, like Schuyler, barely even acknowledge their mom’s existence, except to ask for money. Or else they’re constantly fighting, like Melanie Jaffin and her mother. I was in the car with them once, and they were having this argument about curfew, and Mel called her mom a bitch. Right to her face. “You. Are such. A bitch.”
    I can’t imagine doing that. Ever. I can honestly say that my mom is my best friend, and even though she gets on my nerves sometimes, she