She shows up at my house soaking wet.

It’s not entirely surprising, since she’s got no car and has to bike everywhere—but it is pouring down rain, so all I can say when I open the door is, “Are you insane?”

“Move, I’m cold!” Mel pushes past me and heads straight for the stairs. “I’m gonna take a shower,” she announces, kicking off her sneakers as she goes.

I shake my head and shut the door. “You can borrow some of my clothes till yours dry,” I call up to her. She calls back that she was going to, anyway.

Back in the living room, where I’ve basically been living for the last two days while Dad’s out of town, I silently thank God she didn’t notice the porn on the big screen. I muted it when I got up to answer the door, figuring it was our neighbor. His dog tends to go missing during thunderstorms, hiding out under people’s porches.

I put on MTV. Mel’s going to change it to that anyway, so I might as well.

“God, that feels so much better,” she sighs when she comes back. “Cozy.” She falls onto the couch with me, our feet tangling together under the blanket. “Thanks for the clothes,” she says, kicking me gently.

“Why did you bike here? I could have picked you up.”

Mel shrugs and picks some lint off my sweatshirt, which is huge on her. It’s actually pretty big on me, too: I’m lanky and tall, the kid everyone calls a beanpole. Dad said he bulked up his senior year of high school, but I’ve yet to see much change, even with high school an entire month behind us.

“Just thought it would be nice,” Mel says, already sucked into whatever crap is on TV. “You know, biking in the rain. It sounds like such a good idea until you actually do it.”

“Like crack,” I add.

“Sky-diving.”

“Sixty-nining.” She laughs really hard at that one, kicking me again.

We’re both full of it, of course, which makes it even funnier. We’ve never tried a drug stronger than weed, never jumped out of planes or off bridges, or done anything particularly daring in our lives.

We’re both total virgins, too. At least, I am. Mel dated her prom date for a few weeks afterwards, but I’m not sure if anything really happened with them. I do know they made out a lot, because I had to watch that shit at my graduation party and pretend I didn’t care.

“So,” she says, tucking her feet under my butt, “how’s it been? Having the house to yourself, I mean.”

“Boring,” I tell her. It’s the truth. I thought a weekend alone would be full of awesome, cool stuff: takeout every night, giant bowls of cereal whenever I deigned to wake, late nights of video games and porn right here in the living room.

Okay, it’s actually been kind of cool. But it’s also been lonely, not much different than when my dad is here. I realize I’ve missed Mel more than I let myself admit.

“When’s he get back?” she asks.

“Tomorrow night.”

“Cool. Can I stay over?”

I nod. The rain isn’t supposed to let up until tomorrow, anyway, so unless I feel like driving her home in a tsunami, it just makes sense for her to crash here.

The other factor: I never say no to Mel spending the night. She’s been doing it—and lying to her folks about where she really is—since middle school. Nothing ever happens, even when she sleeps in my bed beside me, but I like the opportunity. Too bad I’m always too chicken to take it.

“We should get drunk,” she whispers, wiggling her toes under me. She doesn’t even realize what she’s doing to me, shifting around like that.

“Nah. Dad noticed the Bacardi missing last time and made me weed the whole backyard by hand.”

“Well, look, I’ll pick something he hasn’t even opened yet, and then I’ll get my brother to replace it before he gets back, okay?” She doesn’t wait for me to answer. She usually doesn’t.

I listen to her clanking in the kitchen, raiding Dad’s bar cart while I try to tame my erection. It’s gone when she comes back and sets two shot glasses on the coffee table, but seeing her in my clothes gets it going again.

“You pour.”

I pull the blanket with me and lean forward, pouring the tequila into our glasses. We toast, tap them to the table, and drink.

“Fuck,” she croaks, eyes watering. “That’s rough.”

I feel like coughing up a lung, but Dad always says this stuff has a good bite, so I say it too. I’m hoping to impress her, which is stupid, because Mel’s known me practically my entire life and never thinks I’m smooth, even when I am.

She gives me a look like I’m crazy. At least I didn’t bike two miles through a thunderstorm.

Blake and I met when we were four, the day he got lost in the mall and ran up to my mom, brother, and me, crying his eyes out.

Mom has a voice like simple syrup being poured into tea. Thick but easy, the kind of voice and touch on your arm that makes you fold into her like a trust fall. I remember when Blake sputtered, “I—I’m lost and m-my dad always says to f-find a mom with k-kids,” only he didn’t really finish the last word, because he looked at me and my brother and just burst into a wail that echoed down the mall.

Then Mom touched his arm and got to his level, the way she talked to us all the time, and said in her syrupy voice, “It’s all right, sweetheart. Let’s go find him.”

I don’t remember how the play dates started. I think my parents felt bad for Blake and his dad. Blake’s mom had just died of cancer. He needed a friend.

At first, they tried forcing my brother to hang out with him, because they were boys and it just made sense. Boys like trucks. Boys like dirt.

Blake didn’t like trucks, though, or getting dirty, or baseball. He was three years younger than Josh, but the same age as me. We both liked art and scary stories and small, quiet spaces, like coat closets with flashlights. We were used to people jumping when we walked up beside them. “Oh, honey, you scared the daylights out of me! I didn’t even see you.”

So then, we were friends. We got teased in school all the time for it; boys and girls can’t be best friends. Just wait till puberty, old ladies clucked at my mom in church, their painted-on eyebrows furrowing with disapproval as Blake and I played Rock, Paper, Scissors and scuffed the backs of the pews with our feet.

I’m actually thinking about Rock, Paper, Scissors right now, because both our hands are clenched in fists after the second shot of tequila. Double-rock. A tie.

“Remember the last time we got drunk?” I ask, sucking in a sharp breath of air to cool my throat. “Really drunk, I mean?”

He laughs. “God, I wish I didn’t. That was a long night.”

I laugh, too. “That party out at Elliot Gull’s house,” I say, even though we both remember, and I don’t have to say it. “They had that dented-up keg of shitty beer. Never again.”

“It wasn’t the beer.” He nudges me with his foot. “It was because we drank that moonshine Gull’s brother made before the—”

“It was the beer,” I interrupt, my voice way louder than his, our norm. We argue about this a lot. He’s probably right—in fact, I’m positive he’s right—but it was my idea to drink the moonshine that night, sipping it straight from the jars and catching the fruit on our tongues. I had blackberry. Blake had strawberry. When we threw up together behind the Gulls’ carport later, it looked like pancake toppings and smelled like cough medicine.

“Never again,” we both said afterwards. We chewed a pack of gum and slept on Elliot’s sofa in the basement until dawn. Blake drove us home while I puked into the Target bag he handed me.

There’s a part we don’t talk about, ever, even in our blow-by-blow retellings to each other, out of our parents’ earshot. Behind the carport, when I knelt down in the gravel and felt it digging into my knees as I coughed up all that sugar and alcohol, Blake knelt behind me and held my hair back.

It could have been nothing, just a best-friend gesture: I’d have done the same for him, wouldn’t I? If his hair was long, or if he were a girl. Point is, it wasn’t a big deal.

But there was something about his touch that made it different from what a friend would do. His fingertips lingered on my neck. When I finally stopped, he hooked his chin over my shoulder and slurred, “It’s okay, Mellie. That’s it, you’re okay.”

I looked at him. We were in a dirty pool of light from the floodlight on the carport, like thieves crouching against their next mark.

And I was sure he was about to kiss me. I’m still sure. Even though I’d just thrown up twenty-four hours’ worth of food and drink, he was leaning into me, his eyes closing.

Then it hit him. He shot to his feet and stumbled to the other side of the carport. I heard his puke splash onto the siding.

We don’t talk about it, but I think about it a lot. Did he mean to do it? Was he just wasted? Does he even remember, or is he embarrassed?

Would I have let him do it?

I mean, aside from the totally disgusting factor of having just been sick, it’s not like the thought of kissing Blake repulses me. But there’s a line we don’t cross, pacing the friend zone where we belong, where we’ve always been.

I’ve never looked at him that way. He’s just...Blake. My best friend.

“It wasn’t the beer,” he says again, shifting on the couch like he can’t get comfortable. I shake my head and throw a paperclip at him, while we channel-surf and listen to the storm flail against the house.

Out loud, that’s the end of the story. We don’t say the rest. Maybe I’m the only one of us that even remembers. Who knows?