I wipe my face and cough to clear my throat. “Hey, you!”
“Hey, back!” Steffi shouts happily. Immediately, I am comforted.
Steffi has been the one exception to the endless proof that the world is unstable and unreliable. From the moment we met when we were fourteen, we have been partners in survival. For only three months, we lived in the same foster family with four other kids, but three months were all we needed to cement our friendship.
“How is California?” I ask.
“Stupidly sunny and gorgeous. Just like me.” Steffi lets out her gravelly laugh, and I can practically see her flip her long blond hair. “I was made for Los Angeles, you know that. And you are, too. You’ll see that once you graduate and get your ass out here.”
I smile. “That’s the plan.” I hear music fade in and out and the sound of hangers being pushed along a closet rod. “You going out?”
“You betcha. I’m putting you on speaker while I get dressed, ’kay? So, what’s going on with you? How’d drop-off with Daddy go?”
“Fine. You know...We had lunch.”
“Simon still as hot as ever?”
“Oh my God, Steffi! Don’t be gross!” But I can’t help laughing.
“He’s notmydaddy,” she says, making her voice all sexy and borderline creepy. “If I had my way, I could be Mrs.Simon Dennis. And be your mommy!”
“Shut up! That’s weird. And he’s gay,” I remind her. “You’re not exactly his type. Thank God.”
“There is that,” she says, sighing dramatically. “Dammit! Is he still wearing those adorable aviator glasses? Don’t answer that. Why is romance so unfair?”
I roll my eyes. “I think you’ll survive not capturing Simon’s heart.”
“It’s fine. I plan to drown my sorrows in a slew of vodka sodas and pick up the hottest piece of ass I can find. And you? Will you be getting some college-boy action yourself this fine evening?”
I refrain from snorting. “Classes start tomorrow. Just taking...it...easy tonight.” For some reason, I stumble over my words, and it’s the only thing Steffi needs to know something is off.
“What’s going on, Allison?” She’s gentle now.
“I’m okay.”
“You having a hard night?”
It’s useless to lie to her. “Yes. A little. I don’t know why.”
The music in the background stops. Like it or not, I have her full attention. “You want to run through it again?” she asks.
I can’t speak, but she knows me well enough to know that I’m nodding.
She begins to tell me what I already know—or what I should know, but what she must remind me of all too often. “We are not statistics. We beat the system. Nobody wanted us for all those years? Fine. So, we blew apart the system. We grew up alone, rejected, unwanted. But screw everybody. We graduated high school, and we’re both in college. We haven’t gone to jail. We don’t use drugs. We’ve never run away or been on the streets doing Lord knows what. We are not statistics,” she emphasizes again. “We lived with some rotten families. We lived with some cool ones. The details do not matter. Do you hear me? The detailsdo notmatter. I don’t want to live in the past. Neither do you. We’re not going back there. It’s over. We are not goddamn statistics. We will never be. We are the exception, and we are exceptional. Got it?”
I nod to myself again. “Right.” I had become a shell of a kid until Steffi showed up and rocked me into life. At least to a degree.
“So, what else?” she prompts. “What do we do? Each and every day?”
I roll onto my side and reach to turn off the small desk light that shines over me. “We focus on the future, and we don’t look back.”
“Big futures,” she corrects. “And why do we have big futures waiting for us?” she asks me.
“Because you made us study. Because you knew that our education was the most important thing. That it would save us.”
She’s not bragging when she makes me say this; she’s only pushing me to validate what we both did. She should take more credit, though, because Steffi threatened, cajoled, and bribed to get my contact information with each move. She was relentless in keeping us together even after we were apart. And Steffi is the only reason that I threw myself into school because she instilled in me how crucial this was to survival.
“And you got into college. A damn good one.”
