Good as Gone by Amy Gentry Page B

trees. Everything gleamed, even the street signs, which were mounted on giant chrome arcs.
    “Can you believe how much the Galleria has changed?”
    She caught the small dip in Jane’s voice and immediately felt a prickling on the back of her neck, alerting her to a shared memory she was in no position to ignore.
    “Yeah, I know,” she said.
    “Do you remember that time Mom dropped us off at the Galleria to do our Christmas shopping?”
    “That’s what I was thinking about too.”
    “I thought we were so cool,” Jane went on, her eyes on the taillights ahead of them. The traffic light had changed and they were inching sluggishly forward, but they weren’t going to make it past the danger zone on this green. “It felt like we were so grown up. You must have been in, what, sixth or seventh grade? Because—” She broke off. “And I would have been in fourth or fifth. We bought lunch at that one fancy food-court place with the crepes. Do you remember splitting up for an hour to buy each other’s presents? That was my favorite part. We, like, synchronized our watches and met at the bakery afterward.” She laughed. “I even doubled back and hid which direction I was coming from so you wouldn’t guess where I bought your present. I think it was Claire’s or something.”
    Jane’s voice tugged at her ear, but Julie was distracted by a boy of around twelve or thirteen in a T-shirt and saggy, wide-legged blue jeans weighed down with a heavy wallet chain who was striding through the still-sidewalk-less guts of the drainage ditch parallel to the road. His tangled hair was long and brown and very deliberately shielding his face as he marched, hands in pockets, visibly sweating. He reached the base of one of the chrome arcs, which proved to be a formidable obstacle at ground level. Trapped between an evergreen shrub and the curved chrome, he hiked up his billowing, half-shredded pants leg with one hand and stepped over it, like a cartoon lady pulling up her skirts to step over a puddle.
    “Julie?” Jane’s voice came back to her, and she realized she’d missed a question. The music was quieter; Jane must have just turned it down. “Do you remember? What you did that time when we split up?”
    “Tried on prom dresses,” she said. “Pretended I was a princess.”
    “Oh,” Jane said, and laughed. “Well, that definitely explains why I ended up getting a gift certificate from Waldenbooks that year.”
    She knew better than to let this moment pass because of some stupid kid. “I thought you loved reading!”
    “You could have picked out a book, though.” Impossibly, Jane sounded hurt, although she was still laughing. “You know, I don’t think I ever used the gift certificate. I mean, after everything happened.”
    The light changed, and they barely made it through the intersection this time, moving at a snail’s pace. She watched the boy swim through the weeds by the side of the road until they gained on him, pulled ahead, and finally passed him. In the rearview mirror he looked almost motionless.
    She turned back to Jane. “Look, pull the car over. Do you want me to get you the newest Baby-Sitters Club book? They’re probably on number ten thousand by now.”
    It worked. Jane laughed and turned the music up.
     
    In Montrose, they parked the car outside a hair salon that had a tattoo parlor upstairs. They got out, and Jane took a deep breath. This must be where Jane went to feel like Houston was her city, not just some place she accidentally wound up because her parents lived there. The sad part was Jane’s pride in her insider knowledge, as if it were hard-won. As if anyone couldn’t walk into any city and find the artists and gays and addicts and tattoo parlors within half an hour by bumming a couple of cigarettes and picking up the free papers on the street corner.
    The salon was full of clients, but the woman behind the counter eyed Julie and said she could get her color started and then cut her