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“Rae baby! Wait!” I slow down and wait for Sarah to catch up to us. She walks beside me, blue eyes dancing as usual.
Sarah is my sister, but she wasn’t always. Not long after we met her, she started spending a lot of time with us. Then something else happened, and her mom couldn’t take care of her, so she moved in with us. But earlier this year my parents adopted her, and now she’s my sister forever. And I have to be honest, I’m pretty excited about that. Aaron might be my person, but Sarah is… well, I think she’s always been my sister, even before it was official.
“Joel says he’s gonna be a captain!” Miles Hyun-Hansen says, coming to walk next to Aaron. He sweeps some of his floppy black hair off his face, revealing his bright green eyes. Miles was the sixth of us. He moved in across the street from me when we were six. We brought his family cookies. Joel asked if he liked baseball, and we’ve all been best friends ever since.
“Well, I wanna be a captain too!” I say.
I’m good at kickball. Like,really good.
The teacher agrees that Joel and I can be team captains, and I get to choose first. I choose Aaron, which makes Joel angry and makes me laugh. I pick Sarah too, and he picks Miles and Mackie. We pick a bunch of other classmates and start playing.
Joel thinks he’s good at every sport ever. He’s okay at some of them. Really good at baseball and basketball, but I am a kickball legend. I probably got so good at it by practicing on the shins of all the people who pick on me.
I got sent to the principal for that, but my dad laughed and said the other kids shouldn’t have said mean things if they couldn’t handle what I gave back. The principal didn’t think it was so funny.
Since it’s almost the end of the school year, we get extra time to play outside, which is fun, even if it is sticky-hot already in Ida, New York, where we live. The teacher tells us the buses will be here soon. Since the score is tied, someone better score if we want to win.
Luckily, I’m up. Aaron is on third base and picking on Joel about it.
One of our teachers rolls out the ball, and I kick it hard. It’s a kickball grand slam. As I run past second base, I stick my tongue out at Joel, but he smiles and shakes his head at me. He’s proud of me. All the way home, he tells all the kids on the bus what his best friend did.
Mackie and Sarah kinda roll their eyes. Like, they already know I’m good at kickball. Miles doesn’t care anymore. And Aaron is still looking at me like he did under the slide. Only now he knows he’s going to marry a kickball master.
When we get off the bus, my mom is waiting. She watches everybody after school.
In the backyard, I run over and poke Aaron.
“Still gonna marry me?” I ask.
“Yep,” he says.
“You’ll have to tell me I’m pretty every single day.”
“Still a deal,” he says with a smile.
“Okay then,” I say. I’m about to skip over to Sarah and Mackenzie when I notice how big he’s smiling.
“You better mean it,” I say.
“Oh,I do,” he says. Then he reaches out and grabs my hand and a tingly feeling shoots through me, just like the first time he ever held my hand. I feel the same way I did that day—like I’ve always known him and like I’ll know him forever.
I smile back at him and scamper away, convinced that I’ll never need to find a prince to fall in love with or some boy to save me. Mostly because I don’t need to be saved, but also because I already found my person.
