The Ninth Grade Rebellion

Tessa and I have been friends since the third grade, which is a sentence that is starting to mean something different than it used to. We were the kind of friends where you don't have to ask. You just go. After school I was at her house or she was at mine. Her mom knew the password to my mom's Netflix. My little brothers called her Aunt Tessa for a confused year in kindergarten and she has never let me forget it. She is a gymnast, the serious kind, and her body is all compact muscle and bruises she never explains, and she has, since we were nine, been the person I text when something weird happens at school. So when she stops texting me back, for two days, on the week the Saturday email goes out, I notice. I notice the way you notice a lamp has gone off in a room — not dramatic, just the light level is different. On the Tuesday after the email, I find her at our usual spot in the courtyard, the concrete bench by the drain. She's eating a granola bar. Her phone is face down. "Hey," I say. "Hey." "You get my text." "Yeah." "Both of them." "Yeah." I sit down. I am holding my own lunch in its brown bag because my mother still makes me lunch in a brown bag, which is a thing I used to be embarrassed about and am now, weirdly, fond of. I take out the sandwich. I do not unwrap it. "Tessa." "Hm." "You good." She looks at her granola bar. She looks at the tips of her shoes,