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It’s perfect weather all the way up the thruway. Partly cloudy, and the heat’s not supposed to kick in until late afternoon.

We stop outside Albany for a pee and snack break, and I talk Zora into topping off the fuel tank so I can pay for it with

my gas card. Otherwise known as Mom’s gas card, but I’ll probably definitely pay her back when my summer job starts.

“You know what we should do?” I buckle back into the front seat. “We should go rogue. Off the grid.”

Zora looks at me like I’ve sprouted antlers.

“I vote no aimless detour,” Nat says, yawning, “on the grounds of murder avoidance.”

I twist around. “Committing murder, or receiving it?”

She looks at me. “I don’t know if receiving ’s the word.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know. Because I’m not a murderer,” I inform her. “Also, did I say aimless? I don’t think I did. I have aims,

Natalandria. Natalioness—”

“Nope. Lioness. Nope.”

“Natalicia Natalaurica Natallica.”

She wrinkles her nose at me, smiling. It’s funny—I keep waiting for Nat to freak out about the breakup, but she hasn’t mentioned

Claire at all. Not even once.

Not saying I blame her. I, too, would be eager to move on from that shitshow. Of course, I wouldn’t have dated Claire in the first place, so what do I know?

Maybe I’m missing something. God knows I’m no relationship expert—me with my grand total of one ex-boyfriend. And that’s assuming

you even count those two months in eighth grade with Jordan “Devil’s Advocate” Cohen. Hebrew school valedictorian, and proud

owner of no fewer than nineteen fedoras. Wore Hawaiian shirts under blazers to every school dance. Never met an Instagram

comment he didn’t feel compelled to reply to. When I broke up with him, his face got blotchy and red, and he said he was just

about to break up with me anyway. Evidently, he’d “outgrown” me.

The truth is, none of us are playing in the professional leagues here. Mark’s completely useless around girls who aren’t us.

I’ve literally never seen him flirt. If you even say the word kissing around him, he shuts down. Nat’s had one other girlfriend besides Claire, and she was shitty too. Meanwhile, Jordan and I

didn’t even make it through the front half of his fedora collection. Zora and Edith seem like the real deal, but even that’s

a pretty unusual arrangement. They’ve only ever met in person once—and that was spring break of this year. So, like, a month

ago. Pretty wild, given how long they’ve dated.

They met on a Discord for queer teens—though they weren’t even teens at the time. Zora says she and Edith were the only two

seventh graders in the group.

There was so much I didn’t know about Zora back then. Like how weird and lonely that whole year was for her. I mean, it was

bar and bat mitzvah season in Westchester, New York. There’s simply no slowing down that ride once you’re on it.

And the twins and I were on it. Services and parties and Kiddush luncheons and memorizing five zillion blessings, syllable by syllable.

Spent so much time with the cantor, I started thinking in melodies.

I was reciting the Shehecheyanu in my dreams. And Mark and Natalie were in the exact same boat.

The same little bulrush basket. I’m sure we talked about it constantly.

In retrospect? Probably a supremely isolating time for Zora to be the group’s token gentile.

But then she met Edith. It’s funny, because you wouldn’t think they’d have found much common ground—our soft-spoken STEM nerd

and this small-town baby lesbian motormouth. But somehow it worked, like a key fitting into a lock. They’ve spent roughly

every waking moment texting and video chatting for the past half a decade.

It honestly makes my head spin. To be in love for that long without ever once sharing space. Without knowing what it feels

like to touch them. How is that even survivable?

Zora didn’t even tell us she was going out there to visit last month. Not until afterward, anyway. Just to take some of the

pressure off, she said. I think she thought we’d be mad. But how could we be? It made complete, perfect sense. I’d be terrified,

if it were me. Not about catfish scenarios. I guess I’d just wonder if love ever gets lost in translation.

I’d never say this out loud, but sometimes I wonder how they knew it was love. Romantic love, I mean. Because parsing it out

in person is hard enough—that thin, dotted line between best friend and girlfriend . Especially when you’re still pinning down the sexuality stuff too. Case in point: the fact that I made out with Talia Schecter

behind the boathouse at camp for twenty minutes and still came out of it thinking I was straight.

Maybe I’m a special case, though. Elite-level dumbass.

I lean back in my seat, tilting my head toward Zora. “I can’t believe we’re meeting Edith tomorrow.”

“I know!” She smiles. “Worlds colliding.”

“Are you just, like, completely flipping out right now?”

Zora shoots me a look. “Should I be? Are you gonna make it weird?”

“I’m never weird! I’m just saying, it’s a big milestone!”

“And it only took us six years to get here,” Natalie chimes in from the back.

You have to hand it to Nat—she may be a troll, but she takes music requests seriously. We’re still an hour from Aunt Jojo’s

house, and we’re already on our third Simon and Garfunkel song. “Kathy’s Song.” That one’s always been Natalie’s favorite.

I swivel to face Nat as soon as the first verse plays through. “I bet the shippers were awful to Kathy.”

“Shippers?” She lets out a startled laugh. “Like, Simon and Garfunkel shippers?”

“Come on, you know there were shippers. Probably still are.”

She makes a face. “First of all, Simon and Garfunkel hate each other—”

“Enemies to lovers!”

“No, like. They actually really, truly can’t stand each other.”

“I refuse to believe that.”

“I mean, it’s pretty well-documented.”

“But have you heard ‘The Sound of Silence’?” I ask. “You can’t harmonize like that with someone you hate.”

“Well, ‘The Sound of Silence’ isn’t exactly a love song,” she says.

But that’s the thing about Simon and Garfunkel.

Their songs all feel like love songs, no matter what the lyrics are.

It’s the kind of music that carves out space in your chest and makes your heart beat bigger to fill it.

I don’t even know what you call that. Full-body wistfulness.

“Kodachrome” feelings. Like someone dialed up the world’s saturation, then softened its filter.

Makes me want to fall in love with literally everyone.

Not even just in a regular bisexual way.

It’s like having a crush on the entire natural world.

Mark’s sleeping again, and from the way Nat’s tapping her phone screen, I’m guessing she’s playing a house design game—the

one I used to play, too, before I got too obsessed and had to delete it. But I like watching Natalie play. It kind of transports

me back to those few weeks spent buying digital furniture pieces with tiny fake diamonds. Kind of like how certain songs make

me think of ninth grade every time I hear them, because they were trending at the time. Or because someone blared it through

their phone speaker on our way to a field trip. Little DeLoreans.

Maybe decades from now, I’ll hear a song from Nat’s playlist, and it’ll spool me right back to this particular sun-filtered

moment.

I just want to know these three people forever. Natalie, Zora, and Mark. I want to sit on a park bench with them and say “remember

when” and talk about the terrible strangeness of being seventy.