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hold it in any longer, and I started laughing.
    “Uh, what’s so funny?” Still being the guy, she rubbed the tip of her nose. “Hey, uh, Delia, I think you’ve got something stuck …” She bared her own teeth and tapped one. “Right between your two front …”
    “Stop it! Stop it!” I bent double, hiding my face. My hysterical choking laughter finally made her break character and she started laughing, too. It was so stupid, there was no reason for it, but laughing was like a cold flood, a release, the same as that day in the art room. We laughed and couldn’t stop; we stamped our feet and muffled the sounds of our voices by pushing our faces into the plastic-covered choir robes, although I’d heard you could suffocate yourself doing something like that.

PART TWO

W E STARTED PERFORMING SKITS all the time after that, usually at lunch or spring fitness or after school. It saved our friendship, I guess. Or maybe it was the friendship. The skits were weird, fun weird, and the fun was a private kind of fun. Amandine always set them up—she had a better imagination for them. The rules were that one person would act the part of herself and the other would be the character of someone unpredictable. Then Amandine would create a situation.
    At first, I could only play myself. Amandine didn’t seem to mind.
    “You be you, and I’ll be moron Mark Ingersell,” she would start. (Mark was in our grade; he was gorgeous and failing all his classes.) “And we’re lab partners, and you try to get me to go out on a date with you.”
    “You be you, and I’m Samantha Blitz and you have to ask me for a tampon.”
    “You be you, and I’m Mr. Serra and you have to tell me that my fly is undone.”
    Amandine was so good; her face could reflect the smallest tic—Samantha’s open-mouthed listening, Mr. Serra’s reflexive habit of clearing his throat, Mark Ingersell’s slight stammer. Eventually, she could make me believe that part of her really was that person, and that’s when she’d throw in the wrench.
    “Honey,” she would say, clearing her throat as Mr. Serra, “you can’t go pointing to a principal’s pants like that. Now I know I’m, ahem, a foxy guy. Ahem. So if you promise not to tell your parents, I think we could arrange a little, ahem.” She’d start winking, coughing, leering, but by then I would be unstrung in laughing hysterics.
    “There go the giggle girls,” teachers would say as we snickered and whispered down the halls, deep into our skit right up until we had to pull apart at different doors. Sometimes I risked lateness, and Mrs. Gogglio’s wrath, and we sneaked in a music room skit after school. The room was almost always deserted, but I never stopped being scared that we would be discovered. And then one day, we were.
    We were doing a skit where I accidentally go into the boys’ room. Amandine was pretending to be a strange, silent kid in our class named Dylan Humes. Amandine had her legs in Dylan’s awkward duck-waddle stance as she stood at the standup organ, which she pretended was the urinal. The wrench Amandine had thrown in was that Dylan liked me watching him. “Come a little closer,” Amandine-Dylan was saying in Dylan’s nasal whine. “Don’t be scared.” I was trying not to laugh, to keep “in character,” when the louvered door burst open.
    “What are you girls doing in here?” Brett Lokler and Rudy Patrice stood in the door, smugly confronting us. They were in our grade, but cool enough to have perfected the sneer of upperclassmen, especially when they hung out together.
    Shame burned through me. I stood silent, glued in place.
    “We’re studying,” said Amandine, turning slowly to face the guys. Her hands moved to her hips. She looked bored and bothered.
    “Oh, yeah?” Rudy sneered. “Sounds veddy in-ter-est-ing from outside the door.”
    Amandine shrugged. “If trying to memorize Antony and Cleopatra is interesting.”
    “If you’re doing work, then