My Running Mate
The thing about Simone Park is that I have known her since sixth grade and I still don't think I've figured her out. She plays cello. She is very good at cello in the same private, stubborn way she does everything else, which means she wins competitions in Houston twice a year and then doesn't talk about them. Her father is an engineer who works at a plant I've never seen. Her mother, the pharmacist, has a laugh like glass breaking — rare, and when it happens, you stop what you're doing. Simone looks most like her mother when she's annoyed. She has long hands. She is taller than me by three inches and gets taller, I swear, every time I turn around.
We weren't friends in sixth grade, exactly. We were next to each other alphabetically, and in the way middle school works, that is a friendship, it just doesn't know it yet. Park, Alvarez — we sat near each other in homeroom, in PE, in choir, in art. By seventh grade she was eating lunch with me. By eighth grade she was eating lunch at my house on Fridays. My mother started buying the expensive kind of juice because Simone drank it, which was a thing my mother did not do for anyone, not even my aunt.
I say all of this because when you declare somebody your running mate, you have to know why. I know why.
We file our candidacy forms on a Thursday after seventh period, in the hallway outside the activities office. The activities