THE SUMMER I WAS THIRTEEN, AMY’S PARENTS HAD TO go to Japan for work, and she came to stay with us. I came in that morning sweaty from a bike ride to find Aunt Anne and Amy and Amy’s suitcases scattered around the front hall. When I think about it now, I realize what a scene it must have been to everyone except me. Aunt Anne would have been brokenhearted at parting with Amy and anxious about handing her over to her sister-in-law, my mother, with whom she never got along, all to follow to another continent a marriage that would disintegrate altogether in two years. She and Amy had argued about which sneakers she had to bring, and Amy was still angry, even at the last moment. At the time, though, all I noticed was that my aunt stood up very straight near the door and gave directions in a clipped voice—what Amy should eat, rules about bedtime, the question of footwear— while my cousin held her hand dispassionately and looked as if they were talking about another child. The night before, my mother, who loathed Aunt Anne in kind but felt other people’s problems keenly, had out of nowhere squeezed my shoulders and said, “I don’t know what I’d do if I had to leave you here and go to Japan.” By morning, I’d forgotten about that; I thought Aunt Anne was pretty awful, and nothing she was saying mattered to me. I wanted them all to go away so Amy and I could be by ourselves. We were born in the same year, twin cousins. There were pictures of our mothers reluctantly standing back-to-back with their burgeoning stomachs pointed out, wearing t-shirts that looked like nightgowns. But no stranger would guess we were even related at all. Amy was compact, with glossy brown hair; I had a thick blonde braid my father called a horsetail, and I was growing so fast it gave me leg aches. They called me a chatterbox in my report card and Amy was reserved, but privately she could impersonate our mothers with provoking accuracy. Amy had recently kissed her first boy next to the rumbling furnace in her basement; I had done no such thing. She was three months older than I was, but it might as well have been three years, and we both acted like it. We made all kinds of preparations for Amy’s arrival. My mother scrubbed out the refrigerator, as if Amy would care, and asked me many times to clean my room, and bought another chair so we could both sit at my desk. Daddy made celebration steak the night she came, and salad with halved grapes, and cleared off the picnic table so we could eat outside, all niceties he usually reserved for birthdays or if he needed to make up to Mom. He gave me the salad to dress and after I brought it out and Amy followed with the bread and butter, we sat down in the auspicious evening air and Daddy nodded at me to say grace. “God is great,” I said, “God is good, let us thank Him for our food. By His grace we all are fed; give us now our daily bread. Amen.” Amy’s eyelashes rested shut against her face. Daddy clasped his hands over the table, inclined his head, and thanked God additionally for having brought Amy to stay with us and prevailed upon Him to give safe travel to Aunt Anne and Uncle Richard and a safe summer for us at home. He looked over at Mom, as he always did, to see if the prayer was satisfactory, and she gave an “Amen.” When she nodded it felt as though Jesus had looked right down to bless our steak and rice, and dinner could properly begin. I had made my preparations down at the creek, and as soon as dinner was over I took Amy there on our scooters. Riding with her was slow-going, but the sun was still hovering splendidly over the edge of the neighborhood, and the street smelled of grass and mosquito spray and other people’s barbeques. My neighborhood was the kind in which all the houses are made from the same mold, vaguely distinguished by placement of windows and garages, and we rattled by door after matching front door. In two years I would be disgusted by how tacky and unimaginative it all was, but that evening I was happy to glide past houses that were each a reflection of my own, down to the built-in kitchen spice cabinets housing identical jars of unused basil. It was my domain, and enjoying it I got ahead of Amy. “Joy Christina,” she called after me. “Wait up!” So I did. At the end of Birch Street, where we stopped and left the scooters, was the forest. It wasn’t actually a forest; it was a buffer strip of un-cleared land between the neighborhood and the highway, thin enough that you could see the light-up sign at the Mitsubishi dealership through the trees and hear frustrated cars in a traffic jam. In a few years I would realize this, too, how small and not like a forest it was, but then it might as well have been the Amazon. There was a dirt path down to the creek covered by wood planks in the really muddy stretches, and I had taken it upon myself to fix up the bad parts before Amy arrived, holding nails in my mouth like they did in the movies. I walked first over my handiwork, and I saw as I never had before the slippery leaves, the trees twined with furry vines, and the cloudy curtain of the sky covering it and us. The air was thicker and damper here than in the neighborhood proper, and when I breathed it I felt taller and quieter. I had been worried that Amy wouldn’t get it, but when I turned to look I saw that she did. “Don’t hold onto that, it’s poison ivy,” I said, no longer self-conscious. When she was down the bank I scrambled after her. We stood by the creek, which, though the forest might have been a flimsy sliver, was full and vital, polishing its stones and bearing along the occasional fish with briskly running water. “This is perfect,” she said, her sandals softly crunching the silt by the water’s edge. “It’s like—it’s like a house, outside.” “Yeah,” I said. To me it was a hunting ground for bugs and good trash and a laboratory for slingshots, but it could be a house if she wanted. Amy bent and rested her hand on the largest rock. “This will be our table,” she said with decision. “We can have picnics here.” I sat on the newly-minted table and searched the ground for a nice stone, something good to throw. After a while I found it, a little purple disk, and I wiped the clay off and flicked it into the creek. Three skips. When you’re thirteen and your body is renovating itself and betraying you at every second, so much goes wrong between intent and result. But if you’re a good thrower, which I was, the stone goes where you tell it, and its clean sweep through the dusk felt every time like the best thing in the world. “Can you teach me how to do that?” asked Amy. “Sure, tomorrow.” She sat beside me so our shirtsleeves touched. The Mitsubishi sign glinted through the trees like a moon and stars and we stayed there for a while, until it got too dark to see the water bugs skimming over the creek and we got on our scooters and went home.

MY PARENTS TOOK THE EIGHT O’CLOCK COMMUTER RAIL into the city, which left us with half an hour before camp. Amy got up first and nudged me out of bed after she’d already dressed, as seeing each other naked, no matter how close we were, was completely outside the realm of possibility. My mother would come in and kiss us goodbye, smelling of work perfume, as we brushed our teeth, and then we made our own breakfast. It was cereal mostly, which we ate standing at the kitchen counter in our garish gym shorts. The windows were open to air out the house and the sunlight came in quiet and gentle. At eight, Matthew’s mother pulled up in her too-clean minivan, and we would troop out and lock the door as instructed and be on our way. Matthew, by virtue of living only three houses away and liking all the same things as me, was my summer friend. From the day school let out we spent our afternoons by the creek, dangling in the water fishing rods baited with slices of hot dog, trying to set fires, picking fights. Then in September I would remember how awful boys were and he would realize how embarrassing it was to have been running around with a girl all summer, and we would avoid each other assiduously for the school year. It was an arrangement that seemed perfectly logical until recently, when it had started to weigh on me that while I occasionally broke the rules and smiled at him in the hall, he never seemed to care one way or the other. He had a habit of telling me when I did something praiseworthy, “You’re just like a boy,” which lately seemed less complimentary than it used to. Once after he said that I looked in the mirror and realized I might as well be a boy with my hair pulled back so tight. I undid the horsetail and pulled it over my shoulders and raised my eyebrows into the mirror; but it looked so wild, so obviously not how hair was supposed to look, that I did the braid right back up again. Then Amy arrived and ferreted me out instantly. “It’s called, you have a crush on him,” she said, the way my math teacher said, “You have to carry the tens when you add” to the worst kids in the class. But unlike those kids who never learned to carry the tens it came rushing over me that she was right, that I did have a crush on him, and that it all had the makings of a catastrophe. She was sitting on our bed very calmly but she was talking about things I didn’t even like to think about and I was somehow sure Matthew and everyone else in the world could hear her persistent little voice. I flushed. “I do not,” I said. “I don’t like anyone. He’s just good to hang out with.” “Yes you do, yes you do!” Amy bounced on the bed. “Does he like you? Has he said anything?” “He doesn’t even say hi at school,” I said, grabbing my braid. I suddenly felt like crying, but Amy sat back down. She touched my shoulder. “No,” she grinned. “I know you’re not very good at this, but I have a plan. We just have to fix your hair.” Amy’s plan was mostly to say things to us like, “Let’s go eat lunch over here in the shade,” and then run away to the bathroom for an unbelievably long time. Later she would quiz me. “What did you talk about? Did he say anything about your hair?” She’d convinced me to braid it in an entirely new way. Actually, Matthew said nothing about my hair and we spent a lot of time dismantling anthills, but this didn’t bother Amy, who said she needed something to think about. My parents sent us to the catch-all summer camp run by the township that promised to entertain kids for cheap and consisted of long mornings of flag football and relay races, exactly the kind of thing I loved and Amy despised. She was terrible at sports, tired out from running after thirty seconds. She never seemed to have enough water and she said she couldn’t breathe from the heat. Every day she convinced a counselor that she was about to faint and needed to go inside and sit down. During that reprieve she would adjust her gym shorts and judiciously apply grape Chapstick in the bathroom mirror and then rest her forehead on the cool tiled wall until someone told her she had to come on out. When she emerged she looked so bedraggled and resigned at the thought of having to put on a baseball glove that even the big boys who were really committed to winning would pick her for their team and send her to the outfield, where she would limply raise her hand in what she thought was a catching position every time I pitched. When we were at last liberated, again by Matthew’s mother, we’d put on our bathing suits and go down to the creek, where Matthew and I would do as we always did and Amy would float on her back in the water. The day after she came we moved some rocks as stools around the bigger one she’d named the table, and we had afternoon meals of crackers and pre-sliced cheese. One day I was sitting with Matthew, untangling fishing line, and while he wound up the thread he mumbled to me, “Your legs are nice.” I looked at him and then we both looked at my legs, outstretched in the sand, which suddenly did seem nice. “Thanks,” I said, and we fixed our eyes anywhere else as we finished the line. After Matthew went home Amy and I sat at the rock table and I told her what he’d said. Amy whooped as if she’d made a goal. “Yes!” she said. “I told you, about your hair.” She paced the creek, imagining out loud conversations we would have, thinking of good things for me to say—mostly lines from her favorite movies—and Matthew’s most likely responses. I worshipped her for the effort. It was really as good as anything he could say or do, to have her grinning and coaching me for all possibilities across the table. I was very glad she’d come for the summer.

AMY TRIED TO SKIP A STONE BUT IT SANK RIGHT DOWN TO THE bottom, so she lay back in the creek until the water closed over her pale stomach. “I don’t think you’re ever going to be good at that,” I said. “Well, who cares? It’s just rocks.” Above us a flock of crows startled and scattered screeching; we watched them as they settled into different trees. Something bit my stomach and I slapped it away. The day was too hot; the fields at the camp shimmered. Someone had pegged Amy with a football and she was still sulking about it. At lunch she’d told me loudly that my face was red, and Matthew and the other boys laughed. I prodded her arm with my toes and she pinched my foot. I splashed her. She shrieked. “Why don’t you try wrestling? I bet you suck at it.” I slid in to sit in the shallow part of the water. Amy said no, long and round and lazy, but I pushed forward until she edged back into the deeper part of the stream and started splashing me back. Stirred up, the water was dusky with sediment; the dirt hit me in the eyes, and while I rubbed at them Amy gained on me, making waves of water with her outstretched hands. “Hey, I’m not so bad at this,” she said, smiling her glittering smile. A small rock hit me in the shoulder and my eyes stung and I dove under and groped at her ankle enough to pull her down. This was what Matthew’s older brother had done to us until we learned to jump out of the way and grab him from behind before he caught us. But Amy had never learned this and she tumbled right under; I caught her around the waist and she writhed like the first fish I ever caught, when I held it flapping out of the water to examine it. Amy came back up, spitting. “Joy Christina, I hate you—“ It was funny, how her hair was plastered all around her face and her fingers furiously rubbing dirt out of her eyes. She was wrong, she was terrible at wrestling, but this was how you learned. “Watch your eyes,” I said, and ducked her back under. I had her by the neck and back and rally she just had to turn enough to get me by the legs, but she was too dumb to realize it, and I could keep her under the water as easily as she could paint perfect swathes of makeup across her eyelids. Thinking this strange thought I held her almost absentmindedly, although I’d meant to let her up. But at last she rallied on her own: she didn’t get my legs, but she drove a fist into my stomach, and I let go of her, surprised. She sputtered to the surface looking worse than ridiculous, terrible. She was covered in silt and her hands trying to rearrange her hair were shaking, and when I went to give her a hand—she kept slipping like someone drunk on TV—she stumbled away from me. Leaning over, she spat up water—way too much water. I saw that I should not have held her under so long. When she was done spitting she stood up and looked at me with blue lips. “Were you trying to kill me?” she asked in a rasping voice I did not like to hear. I cleared my throat. “I was just trying to teach you how to wrestle,” I said, although we both knew this was not what I had done. “I thought I was going to die.” She was crying. “I thought you were going to kill me.” “What? Of course I wasn’t—what’re you—I didn’t mean it like that!” “No,” said Amy, struggling out of the water on her coltish legs. “You did. Anyway, I don’t care.” I got out too, more easily. I wanted to hug her— I had never done anything that couldn’t be fixed by a handshake or a slap on the back—but I knew Amy wouldn’t let me. She picked up her flip-flops from the table where she’d left them neatly. They were pink, and they matched her toenails perfectly. “I’m going home,” she said finally. “Don’t come with me.” I knew I could not, so I sat on the bank for a good while looking at my own stomach and the dirt smeared there. I was tired and suddenly, although everything had seemed so clear and obvious when I was wrestling Amy, my head felt as heavy and sluggish as my legs after softball practice. How many times had I been shoved under the water? But none of these times had been so terribly wrong until today. Around me everything settled, down to the silt at the bottom of the creek and the water bugs bustling across it. Not a horn sounded from the road or a light blinked from the car dealership. For the first time, the quiet was uncomfortable. So I gathered my own shoes and took a long, damp walk before I went home.

I THOUGHT I WOULD WALK IN THE DOOR TO A scolding and a time-out and no dessert, but my mother, just home from work, said that Amy felt sick and was reading in bed, and I shouldn’t make too much noise. Quietly, I peeked in our room and found she actually was. “Amy, I’m really sorry.” She looked up blandly. She’d cleaned herself up, and her hair was in a slick braid. “Look, it’s fine,” she said in a perfunctory way that meant it was really not fine. “I just want to be by myself for the afternoon.” “Okay,” I said, and like a roly-poly bug prodded by a kid and then abandoned, she curled back around the book and I went out into the hallway. But I couldn’t find any way to fill the time before dinner. I sat on the couch and got up, I wandered through the living room and looked through my mother’s makeup drawer and got a glass of lemonade and opened the window and closed it again. I could not remember ever having felt so guilty. Daddy said grace over the chicken and Mom nodded approval, but it didn’t feel so satisfying as it always had. I felt as though I had left the world in which Jesus presided over family dinners. Afterwards, Amy said she would go for a walk and gave me such an empty look that I didn’t try to follow. “Joy Christina, is everything alright?” my mother asked, face drawn in. I thought about telling her so I could be chastised and absolved but instead I said we were fine and went to bed.

THE NEXT MORNING WAS SATURDAY, SO I SLEPT until the sun woke me up and I saw a note in Amy’s precise writing on her pillow. Meet me by the creek at 10. Don’t worry about yesterday. It was 9:15, so I brushed my teeth and braided my hair and had a bowl of cereal, and then I made two ham sandwiches and put them in my lunchbox with a bottle of lemonade. I would bring her a picnic lunch. She’d like that. I walked lightly over the planks to the creek, recognizing every warp and dip of the path. The forest was starting to resume its old, calming aspect and I cheered up somewhat. I’d done something stupid, but Amy couldn’t be mad at me forever. The day before yesterday she’d said I was the best friend she ever had. While I waited for her to come I skipped rocks one after another into the creek. Three skips. Four. A bad throw sank to the bottom. When my watch read 10:11 I heard Amy coming down the path. Following her was Matthew. “Hi,” I said. “I made a picnic.” “Okay,” said Amy, smiling. “But first Matthew has something to say.” My chest thickened the way it always did when it seemed like Matthew might say something important. “What?” Matthew looked at Amy, who nodded. “Amy says you attacked her yesterday.” “What? That was a mistake—I said sorry—Amy, you didn’t—“ “She said you did it because you like me and you’re jealous that I like Amy and not you.” Matthew’s cheeks got red like a doll’s when he was nervous or hardpressed, and they colored now with the admission. He was embarrassed, maybe, that it had come to this and he had to speak of these things to me, with whom he had spent so many afternoons talking about baseball and birdcalls and never who liked whom. But once the thing was said, he braced himself. There was no taking it back now, and he tilted his chin up as if to say how utterly certain and contemptuous he was. It had never occurred to me that Matthew might like Amy and not me. She was my crusader, she had thrown herself into obtaining him for me. But Amy was good at making you see what she wanted. I looked at her hip cocked calmly in her gym shorts and thought that he must worship her. She was magnificent. I needed to make some vehement denial, to say very loudly that he was gross, but I knew if I tried to speak I would probably cry. “But you can’t—“ he stopped, and started again. “You can’t make me not like Amy. She’s prettier than you and I never want to talk to you again since you hurt her.” He looked at Amy and she nodded again, in confirmation, and if I weren’t so blind to subtleties I would’ve realized how rehearsed his speech was. Instead, I thought it was the most perfect and heartfelt declaration of love and hate I’d ever seen, and I think I did cry. Amy told me later that when she’d gone on her walk after dinner she marched over to Matthew’s, and said she wanted to talk to him. Under the pink evening sky outside his house she confessed she knew he liked her, informing him of this so firmly he realized at once that he did, and after that she spooled out the story of how I’d pounced in jealousy. She told him she’d kiss him if he said what she needed him to say. They did kiss, she admitted, after I’d stormed off, sitting on the stones we’d dragged around the table. It’s long after the fact now, but I still feel sorry for myself when I think of how I looked at them with my picnic lunch in hand; when I think of Amy looking after me as I fled, and then leaning in so the love of my thirteenth year could kiss her on her small mouth. But then, thinking of my sunburned arms as I pushed her under the water, not so much.

I SWORE ETERNAL ENMITY IN MY ROOM ALL AFternoon and only stopped crying for dinner when I had to face my parents and Amy, who looked less victorious than she should’ve. But by the next morning I wasn’t furious, only limply sad, and lonely at having run out of friends, and mad at myself, because notwithstanding everything, I just wanted to go play at the creek with Amy. Instead, I sat there all day by myself while she pretended to be sick again and ate toast and jelly in bed. I had no plans of revenge; I couldn’t have thought of anything to compare to the day before even if I wanted to. But as it turned out, a lot can be accomplished through sulking. The routine of plain days, we both realized, was more satisfying than the most decisive of victories, and there could be no routine—no setting the table together, no giggling lunches at camp—while I was hiding on the other side of the bed or the far corners of the backyard. Lots of things changed over the years, but I always had my routines with Amy, who was my closest friend for a long time after that summer. Between us there were no frosty dinners, as with our mothers, and when I finally had real boyfriends I found myself introducing her without compunction, only a faint ruefulness. As strange as it seems, I think we loved each other more after we learned how to inflict harm. Some days after that Saturday, when my mother was starting to ask what was wrong, and did I think Amy was homesick, I was fixing my hair before dinner when Amy’s small face appeared behind me in the mirror. She put my arms down by my sides and undid everything, so that blonde strands ballooned into her face, and I felt as loose and unfettered as in that moment when I took off my training bra and let my hair free before bed. We stood there for a moment, and then she gathered it all up and patiently wove it into the most beautiful braid I’d ever seen.