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think I could have forgiven Mom, that’s how much Joan annoyed me.
    But to be honest, the main thing that stopped me was: My friends were here. Shakes and Chris and Kevin. I couldn’t make friends like that anywhere else. It would be sort of like starting my whole life over from scratch.
    I can’t remember a time before the four of us were friends. I’ve known them practically since I was born. To be exact, I’ve known them since preschool. In fact, our preschool was called Little Friends. And that was what we became.
    When we were toddlers, nobody thought it was the tiniest bit strange that my three best friends were boys. And by the time we got to grade school, we’d already been friends for so long that it seemed perfectly normal. I was friends with them before I figured out, from watching the kids around us, that girls were supposed to play with girls, and boys were supposed to hang out with boys. But by then, I wasn’t going to drop my bestfriends and find appropriate new female friends.
    Chris and Kevin and Shakes were the kids I had play-dates with on weekends and hung out with after school. They were the first ones I invited to my birthday parties, the ones I wanted to sit next to in class. And from kindergarten on, we were on the same bus route.
    First I got on the bus, then Shakes, then Kevin, then Chris. We saved seats for each other, and our seats moved steadily back through the bus until we grabbed the last row. We knew that when we started ninth grade, we would be demoted and exiled all the way to the front of the bus again and have to slowly work our way back until we were seniors. By which point, we’d be able to drive, so it wouldn’t matter.
    Mostly, on the weekends, we walked to the town park and played games that involved a lot of running around and yelling and pushing each other. I never felt that my friends went easy on me because I was a girl. I was as strong and tough as they were, I ran as fast and yelled as loud. In the summer we swam at the town pool and played basketball. In the winter we watched DVDs, usually in Shakes’s basement, and played video games.No one at school seemed to think I was strange. No one even called me a tomboy.
    I just liked being around them. It was easy, it was fun. They’d known me before my mom and dad’s divorce, so I never had to explain the difficult and personal parts of my life. I never had to give them all the background information that would bring them up to date.
    In every bunch of friends, I guess, people get assigned certain roles they play in the group—and then they become that person. Kevin was the goofy one who could always make us laugh. Chris was the sweet one who smoothed things over if we got on each other’s nerves, which hardly ever happened. And Shakes was…well, he was just amazing. I never stopped being impressed that someone with so many physical problems could figure out how to get around his disabilities and hold his own, even if we were playing basketball or video games that required major hand-eye coordination.
    I used to love to watch Shakes meet new people. “I’m Shakes,” he’d say. You couldn’t help but appreciate the fact that a kid with some weird kind of palsy, even a mild case like Shakes’s, would make you callhim that, and dare you to react.
    I admired Shakes for being so tough and cool. Even when something was hard for him, he never whined or complained, he never even seemed discouraged. He’d just laugh that funny crooked laugh, and find his own way to do whatever he wanted. There was something really special about him, as if his having been born a little messed up had taught him a different and better way of being a human being. He was always nice to the kids whom the other kids picked on.
    Even when he was little, you could see him stopping and thinking before he said anything, maybe because it was harder for him to talk. And he’d say these totally poetic things. Once when we were at Chris’s house,