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her very white and newly straightened teeth at me, and headed over.
    She wore a knee-length charcoal coat that fit perfectly and sunglasses that dominated her face. She pushed them up onto the top of her head as she leaned down to hug me.
    “Darling,” she said, vaguely British. “How
are
you?” People didn’t find the accent odd or off-putting. Kaitlyn just happened to be an extremely sophisticated twenty-five-year-old British socialite stuck inside a sixteen-year-old body in Indianapolis. Everyone accepted it.
    “I’m good. How are you?”
    “I don’t even know anymore. Is that diet?” I nodded and handed it to her. She sipped through the straw. “I do wish you were at school these days. Some of the boys have become downright
edible
.”
    “Oh, yeah? Like who?” I asked. She proceeded to name five guys we’d attended elementary and middle school with, but I couldn’t picture any of them.
    “I’ve been dating Derek Wellington for a bit,” she said, “but I don’t think it will last. He’s such a
boy
. But enough about me. What is new in the Hazelverse?”
    “Nothing, really,” I said.
    “Health is good?”
    “The same, I guess?”
    “Phalanxifor!” she enthused, smiling. “So you could just live forever, right?”
    “Probably not forever,” I said.
    “But basically,” she said. “What else is new?”
    I thought of telling her that I was seeing a boy, too, or at least that I’d watched a movie with one, just because I knew it would surprise and amaze her that anyone as disheveled and awkward and stunted as me could even briefly win the affections of a boy. But I didn’t really have much to brag about, so I just shrugged.
    “What in heaven is
that
?” asked Kaitlyn, gesturing to the book.
    “Oh, it’s sci-fi. I’ve gotten kinda into it. It’s a series.”
    “I am alarmed. Shall we shop?”
     
    We went to this shoe store. As we were shopping, Kaitlyn kept picking out all these open-toed flats for me and saying, “These would look cute on
you
,” which reminded me that Kaitlyn never wore open-toed shoes on account of how she hated her feet because she felt her second toes were too long, as if the second toe was a window into the soul or something. So when I pointed out a pair of sandals that would suit her skin tone, she was like, “Yeah, but . . .” the but being
but they will expose my hideous second toes to the public
, and I said, “Kaitlyn, you’re the only person I’ve ever known to have toe-specific dysmorphia,” and she said, “What is that?”
    “You know, like when you look in the mirror and the thing you see is not the thing as it really is.”
    “Oh. Oh,” she said. “Do you like these?” She held up a pair of cute but unspectacular Mary Janes, and I nodded, and she found her size and tried them on, pacing up and down the aisle, watching her feet in the knee-high angled mirrors. Then she grabbed a pair of strappy hooker shoes and said, “Is it even possible to walk in these? I mean, I would just
die
—” and then stopped short, looking at me as if to say
I’m sorry
, as if it were a crime to mention death to the dying. “You should try them on,” Kaitlyn continued, trying to paper over the awkwardness.
    “I’d sooner die,” I assured her.
    I ended up just picking out some flip-flops so that I could have something to buy, and then I sat down on one of the benches opposite a bank of shoes and watched Kaitlyn snake her way through the aisles, shopping with the kind of intensity and focus that one usually associates with professional chess. I kind of wanted to take out
Midnight Dawns
and read for a while, but I knew that’d be rude, so I just watched Kaitlyn. Occasionally she’d circle back to me clutching some closed-toe prey and say, “This?” and I would try to make an intelligent comment about the shoe, and then finally she bought three pairs and I bought my flip-flops and then as we exited she said, “Anthropologie?”
    “I should head home