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Sharla said. “When it’s a special occasion.”
    “Well, this certainly qualifies,” Jasmine said, and filled each cup. Then, holding hers up, “Here’s to new beginnings.”
    We sat on either side of her at our cardboard table, and lifted our cups to tap against one another. They were fancy flowered things, the kind of dishes my mother used at Thanksgiving and Christmas and would not let us carry unless it was one at a time. But Jasmine handled them as casually as though they were plastic bathroom cups. I noticed Sharla’s little finger was lifted ever so slightly; I did the same.
    “So,” Sharla said. “Do you have any kids?”
    Jasmine shook her head. “No, I’m not married.”
    My eyes widened.
    “You mean you’re going to live here all alone?” Sharla asked. My question exactly, though it would have taken a while for me to get around to asking it.
    Jasmine smiled. “Well, I won’t be lonely. I’ll have you two for friends, right?”
    “Right,” I said quickly.
    “Miss?” one of the movers called. “Coats. Where do you want them?”
    “Which ones?” Jasmine asked.
    The man read the writing on the box. “‘Winter,’ it says. ‘Minks.’ And … looks like … ‘P. lamb’?”
    “Oh, right,” she said. “In the basement, I guess.”
    Minks?
Minks???
? The things I had to talk to Sharla about were beginning to make my teeth ache. She felt the same; I could see it in the wildness of her eyes. As soon as Jasmine agreed to come to our house that night for dinner, we fled to our bedroom—this after we told our mother that the guest list numbered one, due to the factthat the new neighbor was not married. “Is that right?” my mother said. She cleared her throat, stared past us. Then she headed for her cookbook shelf.
    Sharla flopped on her bed, put her pillow over her stomach. I lay down, too, stuck my hand inside the waistband of my shorts, sighed in happy anticipation of the juicy talk we were about to have.
    “Quit!” Sharla said suddenly, nastily.
    “What?”
    “Get your hand out of your pants, you retard.”
    “I don’t have my hand in my pants.”
    She stared hard at the vicinity in question, shook her head rapidly from side to side to emphasize the fact that she
was
staring hard. It looked like her eyeballs were jiggling. I laughed.
    She sat up, angry. “You think that’s funny? To pick at your butt?”
    “I’m
not!
” I said, angry myself now. “My shorts are too tight! I just put my hand here to relax my waist!”
    “Well, that’s not how it looks.” Sharla lay back down, stared at the ceiling. “It looks like a retard. I hope you don’t do that in school.”
    “I’m sure.”
    We waited together for silence to restore our moods. Finally, “I dreamed I was a bachelor in my Maidenform bra,” I ventured.
    Sharla raised one leg into the air, turned her ankle this way and that. She kept threatening to get an ankle bracelet, even though my mother disallowed them, calling them cheap-looking. “Bachelor
ette,
” she said. “Huh. We have
never
had one of
those
on this street.”
    “Ha!” I said. “We have never had one in this
neigh
borhood. Probably not in this whole town!”
    “How do you know?”
    “Name one time you ever heard of one.”
    Sharla thought. “There
could
be one in the
town,
” she said finally. She began picking at the edges of her pillow. I liked how she did this; it made the pillow seem more than it was. I felt the urge to do it myself, but suppressed it. Then Sharla said, “But probably not, this is not the town for bachelorettes.”
    “What is?”
    “They like New York City and gay Paree.”
    “Did you hear what that moving man said? She has a mink coat!”
    “I know!” Sharla said. “And she was soooooo casual about it, like oh yawn, how boring, fur coats.”
    “Well, that is the sign of a truly rich person,” I said. “They are always casual about things like that.”
    “How do you know? What do you know about rich