Rosebush by Michele Jaffe

work on an extra-credit project. I was surprised because I was enough of a geek to do that, but I didn’t think she was. Nicky di Savoia was cool in a way that went beyond popularity. Her dad was a famous music producer and her mother was a former supermodel and the whole di Savoia family was always showing up in the copies of Gotham and Vanity Fair my mother had lying around the kitchen.
    The di Savoia house was invisible from the street, hidden behind thick hedges and a tall wall. Inside was a stone castle—complete with a moat.
    “You have your own drawbridge?” I asked incredulously.
    “Yeah. We need it, there’s an alligator in the water.”
    “No way.”
    “It’s a miniature one. Okay, it’s an invisible one. But just pretending it’s there has had a great effect on the twins’ obedience.”
    The twins were Nicky’s five-year-old brothers, Marc Antonio and Gian Luca. Like Nicky, they’d been adopted from an orphanage for refugee children, only Nicky came from Brazil and her brothers were from Vietnam. They ran up to greet her as soon as we stepped from the garage into the massive Tudor-style kitchen, and if I’d been surprised by Nicky wanting to do extra credit, I was even more surprised seeing her with her brothers.
    “What was your favorite thing at school today?” she asked Marc Antonio first.
    “I caught a ladybug.”
    “Tell what you did with it,” Gian Luca said, smug.
    “I ate it. Tastes just like chicken.”
    “Marc Antonio is the chef in the family,” Nicky explained. “He’ll eat anything once.”
    She was amazing with them, asking them questions about their friends and teachers and getting them a snack and cleaning off their faces and examining with great solemnity a scraped knee and an invisible splinter. Watching them together made me make a resolution to pay more attention to Annie. Or really any attention.
    Mr. and Mrs. di Savoia came into the kitchen “to see what all the laughing is about,” and I couldn’t help it, I stared at them. Not because they were both exotically gorgeous—he was Native American and Italian and she was Somali American—or because her dad had tattoos over every visible inch of skin.
    I stared at them because they were barefoot and holding hands.
    I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen my mother barefoot except getting out of the shower, and even then she usually stepped right into slippers. And parents holding hands? Never.
    They got into an intense discussion with the twins about what to cook for dinner that night while Nicky and I went up to her room. That was a surprise too because it was filled not with music posters like I would have expected but with American Girl dolls. “I can’t help it, I love them,” she said.
    I went to touch one and saw her flinch a little.
    “Sorry. It’s just I don’t usually, you know, handle them without gloves.” She looked sheepish. “Oh my God, I’m acting like such a geek I’m embarrassed for myself.”
    “Not at all,” I said. “My mother still has the clothes her Barbies wore in special dress bags she made for them.”
    “Wow. I’m going to remember that next time David makes fun of me for being so anal. He makes me close the dolls’ eyes if we’re making out up here.”
    David was her boyfriend then and they were the coolest couple at Livingston High, so the thought of them making out surrounded by dolls—even dolls with their eyes closed—was really funny. “How long have you been going out?”
    “David and I? Seven months, five days and”—she checked her clock—“sixteen hours. We met in line for a midnight showing of Casablanca .”
    “That’s so cute,” I said. “He must be the best boyfriend ever.”
    She rubbed her wrist. “He is. For sure.”
    I had dinner with the di Savoia family and afterward we played a game of miniature golf on the indoor course they’d just installed in the basement, complete with a steam-spitting volcano. “I’d rather have my boys