Rules for Being a Girl

“You too,” I say, shutting the passenger door gently and lifting my hand in a dopey wave. I stand on the darkened lawn until the Jeep disappears out of sight.

Two

Emily’s party is two nights later, so Jacob picks me up in the Subaru his parents got him for his seventeenth birthday and we swing by Chloe’s house on the way.

“Hey,” I say, turning around in my seat as she settles herself in the back, unwinding her fuzzy scarf from around her neck.

Ancient Whitney Houston croons on the stereo, the air in the car heavy with the scent of the cologne Jacob swears he doesn’t spray on the heating vents.

“Where were you this afternoon? I thought we were going to do layout stuff.”

Chloe shakes her head. “Covered a shift at work,” she explains. “Rosie had a doctor’s appointment. Sorry, I meant to text you. It was super last-minute.”

Chloe’s parents own a Greek restaurant called Niko’s; we both started working there in eighth grade, first busing tables and now waiting them.

“Bex wasn’t there either,” I complain, pulling one leg up underneath me and reaching out to turn the heat down. “It was just me and Michael Cyr in there, which meant I had to listen to him talk for like a full hour about how he just discovered Breaking Bad and Walter White is his new hero.”

“Just you and Michael Cyr, huh?” Jacob asks, glancing over at me from the driver’s seat. “Should I be jealous?”

“Only if you feel threatened by a guy who met all his best friends on Reddit,” I say, reaching out to poke him in the rib cage.

Jacob grabs my finger and squeezes. Chloe rolls her eyes.

Emily’s house is a sprawling ranch in a midcentury development full of identical sprawling ranches, all of them painted in different pastel colors.

“Once, when I was in second grade, I got off the bus and walked right into the wrong one,” Emily says, leading us down the hallway and pulling a couple of beers out of an iceless cooler near the back door. “This old lady Gloria sat me down at her kitchen table and made me soda bread, and then she was my best friend for like three years until she died.”

Right away Jacob gets absorbed into a crowd of his lacrosse buddies—Joey and Ahmed, plus Gray Kendall and a few other dudes. The rumor is Gray got kicked out of his fancy prep school last year for throwing the kind of wild parties where people wind up in the hospital for eating Tide PODS. In barely two months at Bridgewater he’s fooled around with what seems like basically every girl at school, an unending parade of hopeful-looking underclassmen hanging around outside the locker room on game days. It’s deeply embarrassing for everyone, although I can admit he’s ridiculously cute.

Chloe and I make ourselves comfortable on the staircase that leads to the second floor, listening to Cardi B rapping tinnily from the Bluetooth speaker on the coffee table. A couple of awkward-looking freshman guys cluster around a video on somebody’s cell phone. Slutty Deanna Montalto lounges on the sofa next to Trina Meng.

“Did you hear the thing about Deanna and Tyler Ramos in the auditorium?” Chloe asks quietly, running her thumb around the mouth of her beer bottle. “I feel like she’s basically the whole reason behind the new dress-code memo.”

“Oh my god, the no-more-knee-socks thing?” Emily asks, plunking down on the stair below us with a can of spiked seltzer in one hand. “So dumb.”

“So dumb,” I agree. “Like, explain to me how these delicate, precious boys are supposedly going to be too distracted by our knees of all things to get any work done.” I stand up and grab Jacob’s arm over the banister, pulling him partway out of the scrum of lacrosse bros. “Can I ask you a question?” I say, lacing our fingers together. “How exactly is us wearing tights instead of knee socks going to help you idiots learn better?”

“It’s not,” Jacob says immediately, his grin wide and wicked. “What it is going to interfere with is Charlie Rinaldi’s robust side hustle of taking pictures up your skirts in the cafeteria and selling them online.”

Joey and Ahmed bust up laughing. Even Chloe cracks a grin.

“You’re disgusting,” I inform Jacob, smacking him gently on the elbow, but I can’t help but let out a laugh of my own.

The only one who isn’t laughing is Gray, who’s leaning his lanky body against the post at the bottom of the staircase. “Anybody need a beer?” he asks, holding up his empty bottle. He tips it at us in a salute before he turns and walks away.

“That dude is the fucking weirdest,” Jacob says once he’s gone, slinging a heavy arm around my shoulders. I watch Gray’s broad back disappear into the crowd.

The party breaks up early—turns out Emily Cerato’s parents didn’t know she was having one to begin with and weren’t super thrilled when they came home from dinner and a show down in the Theater District and found two dozen teenagers sprawled all over their furniture.

“How the hell did Emily not realize they were seeing a one-act play?” Chloe asks as we dash across the lawn to Jacob’s car, her scarf flapping behind her in the sharp autumn wind.

“Maybe we should have tried to convince them they were at the wrong house,” I shoot back. That cracks her up, which cracks me up; by the time we manage to get our seat belts buckled Jacob looks about ready to leave us both on the side of the road altogether. “Take a little pity on your sober driver, here.”

“Sorry, sorry,” I assure him, still giggling; I’m pretty sure he finds Chloe and me kind of annoying together, though he’s too nice to say so. “Let’s go.”

Turns out all three of us are starving, so we swing through the twenty-four-hour McDonald’s for fries and milk shakes before heading over to Chloe’s to drop her off.

“See you at work tomorrow?” I ask, turning around in the passenger seat to look at her. Usually the two of us are on the same Saturday schedule, but tonight she shakes her head.