She opened her mouth as if to say more, then thought better of it. She turned toward the den. “Brenda! Heather’s here.”
I tapped my feet while I waited, drumming a nervous flam on my hips. Brenda appeared at the door moments later. She’d braided her hair, glued sequins to her cheeks, and was wearing the full-length Gunne Sax peasant dress she’d scored at Goodwill.
“What’s up?” I asked, astonished by her appearance.
She glanced behind her as she stepped outside, pushing me away from the door. “Quiet,” she said in a lowered voice. “I told them I was going to the movies with you and Claude. That’s the only way they’d un-ground me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
We’d covered for each other before. Not often because we did most everything together and so it was rarely necessary, but every now and again. It only worked if we kept one another in the loop, though.
“It was a last-minute thing. I tried calling, but the line’s on fire. I couldn’t get through.”
My glance flew to her hair, her makeup. Her deciding to lie might have been recent, but her plans were not. “Where are you going?”
“Date,” she said, looking down.
“With who?”
She began fiddling with her braid, refusing to meet my eyes. “What are you doing here?”
“They found a girl at the quarries.”
She paled, her hand flying to her mouth. “Is it Mo?”
“I don’t know. I’m biking over there right now. Do you want to come with?”
“Yeah,” she said, already moving toward the door. “Of course.”
She didn’t change her clothes. There wasn’t time, and she knew it. She hollered to her parents that we were heading out, tied her skirt near her knees, flicked at the sequins as she raced to her bike, and we took off. We kept to the side roads, cutting through empty fields, grasshoppers pinging off our legs, sweat slicking down our spines.
Her hair was still in its partial braid. She looked young from behind, like the Brenda who brought her Tinker Bell night-light to sleepovers until fourth grade.
Like the girl who’d pierced my ears.
We’d all done each other’s three summers ago. We’d been at Maureen’s house, the place we always went to do things we knew could get us in trouble. Our bedroom doors were sacred—none of our parents would enter without permission short of the house being on fire—but it always seemed easier to push against the rules at Maureen’s.
Maureen soaked five safety pins in rubbing alcohol, its glass-edged scent filling the room. She also prepared a bowl of ice cubes. We’d drawn straws: I was piercing Maureen, Maureen was piercing Brenda, and Brenda was piercing me. （One ear so half the work! she’d joked.）
Maureen demanded that her ears be pierced first, and as usual, Brenda and I were happy to let her lead. I dotted a marker speck on each of Maureen’s spongy, peachy lobes, my hands surprisingly steady.
“Look good?” I’d asked.
She flipped the hand mirror to face her, pushed her hair back, angled her head. “Perfect.”
I grinned. What we were about to do was forever. Wherever we went in this world, whoever we met and whatever we became, we would always have this, a permanent connection to each other. I pressed an ice cube on each side of Maureen’s ear, numbing it.
“Liquid courage,” Brenda said, offering Maureen the bottle of crème de menthe she’d pinched from her parents’ liquor cabinet.
Maureen took a swig, keeping her head as still as possible. “Tastes like toothpaste,” she said, her mouth puckering.
We laughed at this, nervous laughter, way out of scale. We were going to stick safety pins into each other’s ears.
“Ready?” I asked, my fingertips growing numb from the cold.
“Yup,” Maureen said, still holding the hand mirror. She was going to watch it happen. That was just how Maureen was. She wasn’t going to miss a thing in this life.
“All right.” I dropped the melting cubes into the bowl. The marker spot on her ear had become a thin black rivulet, but I could tell where it’d started.
“Needle,” I said to Brenda.
She pulled a pin out of the alcohol and solemnly handed it to me. Its sharp scent stung my nose. I pulled Maureen’s lobe taut and swallowed past a wave of queasiness. “Count backward from ten,” I told her.
When she got to three, I punched it.
Her eyes grew large and her hand flew to her ear, feeling gently at the edges of the pin, its tail facing forward, its sharp end all the way through. “You did it!”