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would ever be the same again. For her it was the moment that the vision of her life and what she thought she would become transformed into an unrecognizable image.
    I cocked my head a little and looked her up and down in her tight blue jeans, her low-cut shirt and high-heeled boots. I remembered our shitty house with the stained carpet and the worn-out couch waiting for us on the other side of town, and I realized I’d spent most of my childhood being angry at her for making us live like that, for not having enough money for us to rent a nicer home, and for refusing to pick a place to settle down in. I looked at Stella’s face, the wrinkles and tired eyes camouflaged by the darkness of the room, and I wondered if she would go back if she could, wondered what she would change and how things would go the second time around if she had a chance to fix the choices she regretted.
    And before we left I found out that I would be having a baby the first week of July. Just like that. A person unlike all the other people who had drifted in and out of my life with my mother. A person who would stay. A child who would be bound to me in the same way I was bound to Stella.

W E GOT OUT OF SCHOOL EARLY the day before Thanksgiving, so Emmy and I sat on the porch at my house, enjoying the freedom of our mothers being stuck at work. Stella was at Simon’s studio taking calls and organizing his portfolio, while Emmy’s mom served coffee at a diner near the mall. We complained about the weather turning too cold too fast and about finals just around the corner and about our mothers and the way they still treated us like children.
    “I miss my dad,” Emmy said as she fingered her four-leaf-clover necklace. “Mom never paid as much attention to me and Margie before he left. It’s like she’s worried if she’s not careful, we’ll up and disappear too.”
    She was smoking, and I was watching the road in front of our house where the neighborhood kids played: two brothers on dirt bikes in matching black sweatshirts, a little sister whocouldn’t keep up on her red and white scooter as her brothers sped out of view. On the other side of the street a woman in slippers walked to her mailbox and yelled for her dog, a honey-colored mutt that had jetted next door to rummage through a pile of trash bags tossed on the lawn.
    “I swear if she asks me one more time if Dylan and I are having sex, I’m going to say yes.” Emmy flicked her butt over the railing and pulled her hands into the sleeves of her shirt, shivering. “I can’t imagine why she keeps asking.”
    “Because your best friend’s knocked up and she wants to make sure I’m not rubbing off on you,” I told her. “Hello.”
    She nodded, reached into her purse, and lit another cigarette as we talked about our trip, picking the departure and return dates as if everything was planned even though neither of us had bought a ticket and neither of us had told our mothers yet. The semester started the second week of January, so if we left two days after Christmas, we’d have ten days out of town, which sounded like a lifetime as we sat on the porch.
    She said, “Let’s go west,” and I said, “Obviously.”
    “I hear Lake Michigan’s pretty badass,” she told me.
    “In the winter? Way too cold,” I said, shaking my head. “Plus, I want to see the Mississippi River.”
    “Fair enough. What about those big heads?” she asked. “I think they’re in Nevada?”
    But I was pretty sure they were carved in a mountainside somewhere in South Dakota, and besides, even though I hadn’t told Emmy yet, I was hoping we’d head all the way to California.
    “We should pick a day, a time that we both have to tell our mothers by, a deadline,” she suggested, since we still hadn’t figured out how to talk Stella and her mom into letting us go.
    “It doesn’t matter when I tell her,” I said. “Stella will have a shit fit. She’ll try to stop us. I want to tell her when Simon’s