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broke up with that girl in New Leonard. He’s available.”
    “He’s making glubbing noises,” I pointed out.
    “How about Bill Peck?”
    “He’s wearing a hat with fins, Trish. He has a straw hanging out of his nostril.”
    Trish sighed. “Let’s consider the basketball players—a key dating source, A.J., since you are almost five nine…”
    I shook my head. I was in love with Peter Terris; she
knew
this. Every other male dripped mediocrity.
    “There are lots of nice guys out there, A.J., who don’t have chiseled jaws and who aren’t going out with Death Incarnate. Let’s not do the Todd Kovich number again!”
    I set my jaw. Okay, so Todd and I had crashed and burned. It was inevitable. I was artsy. He was preppie. I cared too much. He didn’t care at all. One of the many things wrong with Todd and me as a couple was that whenever we were together I wanted to be prettier, more popular, someone he would stay with. I knew all along he wouldn’t stay.
    Trish was moving in for her next big hit. “You are a wonderful person, A.J., an attractive person, and you fall for a guy’s image without knowing the person behind it.”
    I said I hadn’t asked to be born a perfectionist. I was just attracted to gorgeous.
    “Are you going to slump around, A.J., waiting for another impossible guy?”
    “Probably.”
    Trish bent over our veggie pizza and muffled a Drama Guild scream. She is going to be a psychologist and is always looking for someone to practice on. We’ll be sitting at Duck’s, our favorite junkie cheap food joint. I’ll be about to bite into hot-dog heaven when Trish raps the prefab table with her plastic fork and says, “Now, A.J., about your wounded inner child…” I tell her that my inner child is swell, thanks, and would she please pass the mustard? Trish says I am an intriguing candidate for psychotherapy owing to my manifold resistance and intense denial system.
    We became best friends at her eleventh birthday party when we got stuck at the top of a Ferris wheel together. Trish kept me from screaming—you could see the therapist in her even back then. She said to talk and not look down. We talked about never getting invited to Melissa Pageant’s parties. We talked about who we had crushes on. We talked about how much we loved toice skate and how someday we would star in the Ice Capades.
    We still love to skate. Trish can twirl, but I’m faster. We skate on Pilling Pond early in the morning before the little kids take over, going round and round, surrounded by evergreens and holly, yakking away. Then Trish breaks off and goes into the center to twirl; I blast around the pond, feeling the miracle of ice and speed. When Robbie Oldsberg dumped me last February we went skating together and Trish didn’t twirl once.
    A squeal rose from the back of the Pizza Pavilion. Lisa Shooty, Head Cheerleader, was wiggling out of a booth, trying to get away from Al Costanzo, Star Running Back, who was waving a slice of pepperoni pizza at her full, sensuous mouth. All the popular students at the back tables roared, while the rest of us smiled thinly, wondering what was so funny, and why we so wanted to be in on it.
    I studied the overflowing booths of popular students lining the back wall. There they were, the movers and shakers of Benjamin Franklin High—the sports stars, the cheerleaders, the good, the great, the gorgeous—bent over their pizzas.
    Trish sensed my angst and said, “My mother says girls like Lisa Shooty get the ultimate curse known to man.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Too much too soon.”
    I looked at poor, cursed Lisa, who had been sprayed with sex appeal at birth. She had gleaming teeth and long, raven-black curls. She threw back her head and laughed with diamond-studded joy.
    “When do you think the curse takes effect?” I asked.
    “Not in our lifetime,” Trish answered.
    We contemplated this sickening truth as the cholesterol congealed on our Veggie Supremo. Then the front door of