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survive’ … but there’s nothing that explains what she was about to do. What could be so secret that she needs to keep it from the one person she tells all her secrets to?”
    “Sex,” Adriane said. “It’s always sex.” She lay flat on the white shag rug, then smoothly rolled herself into a yoga pose, legs stretched over her head, toes touching the floor.
    I shook my head. “It’s not a guy. It has something to do with their father, and she keeps talking about this book , which I’m sure is the same one that—”
    “Nora. Seriously. No one cares about your dead-girl letters.” Adriane lifted herself into a handstand, legs ruler-straight. “Especially if they’re not about sex.”
    “So what you’re looking for is some dead-girl-letter porn? That’s what you’re telling me?”
    “You have to admit it would be more interesting.”
    “You say that like you were actually listening.”
    “You didn’t tell me I was supposed to listen .”
    “Implied consent,” I told her. “You know what Mr. Stewart said, about how every time you set foot into an airport, you give the government your implied consent to search you? Every time you invite me over here, you give me your implied consent to bore you with the details of my mundane little life.”
    Adriane hand-walked her way over to the wall, then pressed her bare feet against the vintage wallpaper and walked them down to the floor. She held her body in a reverse U, head dangling backward, hair pooling on the rug. “A, it’s not your life, it’s her life. B, maybe your life would be fractionally less mundane if you spent less time obsessing about your homework and more time actually living it. And C, consent rescinded.”
    “Maybe your advice would seem more incisive if I were upside down, too.”
    Her body flowed back into an upright position, as if gravity had been temporarily suspended on her side of the room. “And that’s another thing,” she said. “It wouldn’t hurt you to hit the gym once in a while. We’re not fifteen anymore, and all those milk shakes—”
    “One more word, and I’m reading you another dead-girl letter,” I warned her, brandishing the notebook that held my translations. “Word for word. Slowly .”
    “Enough said.”
    Back when I was still a visitor in the World According to Adriane, rather than a permanent resident, I’d assumed that the constant stretching had been for the benefit of those members of the opposite sex who were frequently in the vicinity when she got one of her sudden urges for half lotus or downward-facing dog. It could and did happen anywhere—waiting in line for a movie, studying for a chem test, decorating for a homecoming rally. You’d turn to say something, and Adriane would be on the ground, skyscraper legs stretched into a split or arcing over her head with calves taut and toes pointed. It took a few months to realize she wasn’t doing it for the attention—although she wasn’t oblivious to the perk. It was just her body’s automatic pilot mode, like complaining about my eating habits and less-than-adventurous social life was her mouth’s.
    She folded herself gracefully into the large blue beanbag chair shoved into the corner of the room, twisting her legs into a pretzel beneath her. The thick rug at her feet was scattered with discarded books. A natural-born speed-reader possessed of a disgustingly good memory, Adriane was a literary magpie, skimming through the Russians one week and the postmodernists the next, with sporadic breaks for cutting-edge tech journals and the latest NoraRoberts. She eschewed history and politics—“You know what they say, make love, not treaties”—but anything else was fair game. Fortunately for her attention span, her credit card had a nearly inexhaustible limit that was barely tested by the weekly Amazon binges; fortunately for her treasured social status, she excelled at playing the shallow slacker too cool for anything relating to school. The