Prologue
Creeksville Elementary was always loudest during indoor recess. The scent of damp coats and floor wax filled the third-grade wing, and the air was thick with the shrieks of kids playing tag in the narrow space between desks.
I had found the one sanctuary left: a small corner behind the rolling bookshelf in the library nook. I was hunched over a sheet of gray construction paper, my tongue caught between my teeth, trying to get the proportions of a golden retriever right. I had the head, but the body kept looking like a loaf of bread.
A shadow fell across my paper. I froze, expecting a teacher to tell me to go join the “group activity.”
“You’re missing the goldenrod,” a voice said.
I looked up. Raina was a whirlwind in a denim jumper. She was the kind of girl who seemed to have sunshine permanently tangled in her hair and a smear of dirt on her chin that stayed there regardless of how many times she was told to wash up. She wasn’t shy like me; Raina was the one who led the line to the cafeteria and always had a neon-colored band-aid on her knee from some playground adventure.
She held out a crayon—the specific, slightly-blunted yellow-orange that I had been searching for in my own meager 24-pack.
“I’m Raina,” she said, sitting down cross-legged on the floor without being invited. “And that dog needs a tail that wags. Right now it looks like he’s sitting on a rock.”
I didn’t say much that day, but I took the crayon. For the next thirty minutes, we didn’t talk about school or toys. We just drew. Raina added a clumsy but enthusiastic sun in the corner of my paper, and for the first time, I didn’t mind someone else touching my work.
By fifth grade, we were a permanent fixture. If you found one of us, the other was usually within arm’s reach. We developed a shorthand—a series of looks and taps that meant ‘get me out of here’ or ‘did you see that?’
I remember the day of the Great Fifth Grade Blizzard—or what we called it, since it was really just three inches of slush. We spent the afternoon huddled under a shared umbrella behind the gym, our breath blooming in white clouds. Raina had shared her Oreos, always giving me the ones with the most cream, her fingers stained blue from some art project we’d finished earlier.
“When we get to the middle school,” she’d said, her eyes bright with the kind of confidence I could only dream of, “we’re going to run the place. You’ll paint the murals, and I’ll... I don’t know, be the president of everything.”
In seventh grade, that promise felt tested. I had been too terrified to go on stage for the Art Showcase. My hands were shaking so hard I thought I’d drop my palette. Raina, who was supposed to be backstage for her gymnastics routine, gave up her warm-up time just to sit with me in the wings. She dragged two folding chairs into the shadows and narrated the entire show in ridiculous, over-the-top accents until I was laughing so hard my nerves simply vanished.
“We’re a team, Jo,” she’d said, her arm heavy and warm over my shoulder. “You’re the eyes, I’m the mouth. Nothing happens to one of us without the other.”
I believed her. I believed it with every sketch I drew and every secret we whispered into the dark of our Friday night sleepovers. I thought the script was set in stone—and without a doubt we'd be friends for life.
