“Hey!” said Jordan.
“I am not getting arrested because you posted this on social media. That one picture could destroy my whole future.”
Jordan took her phone back. “Don’t you think you’re being a little dramatic?”
“I might want to go into politics. What if this is the thing that keeps me from getting elected president? Wouldn’t you feel terrible?”
“Don’t worry,” Jordan said. “They’ll still let you be president of the Justin Bieber fan club.”
“Ha ha,” said CJ.
“Relax, CJ,” said Ava. “We’re minors. Nothing you do as a minor counts.” Ava’s mom was a lawyer.
“Then let’s commit all the crimes while we still can,” Martha said.
“Agreed,” said Jordan. “Come on. I have the least amount of time left.” She enthusiastically linked arms with Martha and they broke into a skip.
“Assholes,” CJ said as she caught up to them.
Jordan stopped skipping when she noticed the broken window on the corner house. The area had changed so much since they were kids, shifting from “quaint” into “kinda scary” practically overnight. Martha lived only a few blocks away, and even though she pretended like it didn’t bother her, Jordan knew that she was sensitive when the other kids at school referred to the area as a shithole. Jordan didn’t have to imagine how much that must hurt, because whenever people saw them together, it wasn’t Martha who they assumed lived here. Being half black meant that people looked at Jordan and decided that she was the one who belonged in the neighborhood with the broken windows and the high crime.
Jordan’s phone made the ding sound that meant she had a new text. It was from Logan Diffenderfer. It wasn’t totally unusual for him to text her. She was the editor of the school paper and he was the photographer. So they had a lot of professional business to sort out. His messages would usually start with “Hey, boss,” and say things like “Sent you the photos so check your e-mail.” Her replies were equally professional: “Got it, thanks,” “Final layout approved,” or “If you send me another dick pic, you’re fired.” (They were never actually obscene pictures. They were pictures of guys named Dick, and Jordan always pretended like she didn’t think they were funny.) The message today was a little different.
Looking for you. You here yet?
She didn’t know why he was looking for her, and she didn’t like that the fact that he was made her heart beat just a little faster. It made it harder to pretend her feelings for him were gone. Jordan looked over at Ava and wondered if she’d seen the text. She hoped not. She didn’t want to have to try to explain it. Not that she would ever lie to her friend. Well, that wasn’t completely true. She’d lied once. When they were freshmen, she had told Ava that the reason she dumped Logan Diffenderfer was because she didn’t care about him anymore. That wasn’t true. She cared about him then, and she still cared about him now. The truth was, the reason Jordan dumped Logan was because of Ava. Because of what Ava had overheard him say. And how it had hurt her.
Next to her, Ava unzipped her cross-body bag and dug around for something. Jordan found herself watching Ava carefully the way she often did. Ava seemed good. She seemed happy. But with Ava, appearances could sometimes be deceiving. Only her closest friends knew about the pain that was locked away down there. Jordan smiled at her and Ava smiled back. Then she found the thing she’d been digging around for and pulled it out of her bag. It was a large chef’s knife.
Jordan jumped back. “Holy crap, Ava! What the hell?”
The blade glinted under the streetlight. “What?” Ava asked nonchalantly. “You said to bring something sharp. This is sharp.”
CJ took the knife. “This is a Wüsthof, Ava. This is your mom’s chef’s knife.”
“So?”
“So we can’t use this. Your mom will kill you.”
“I’ll put it back after we’re done.”
CJ turned the knife over in her hands. “You’re going to put it back destroyed.”
“She’ll never notice.”
“How could she not notice?”
“Uh, because she doesn’t cook. Like ever. I mean, have you met my mother?”
It was supposed to be a joke, but the truth was that even after twelve years of friendship, the other girls didn’t know Ava’s mom very well. She was always working. Jordan knew that when people heard that Ava was raised by a single mother, they always made assumptions. They’d look at the moody Latinx girl who hated speaking up in class and sometimes stayed home from school for cryptic reasons, and they would create a narrative of poverty. The reality was very different. Ava’s mom was a senior partner at one of the biggest law firms in the city.
“I cannot allow us to ruin a Wüsthof.” It’s not like CJ liked cooking, but she did like cooking shows. “And look at this thing. We’re liable to take a finger off.”
Ava took the knife back a bit defensively. “Then what are we supposed to do? You put me in charge of the knife. I brought a knife.”
Martha opened up her own backpack and produced something that she showed to CJ. It was a steak knife, old and dull with time and use. The tip of the blade was more of a nub than a point. “What about this?”
“That,” CJ said, “we can destroy.”
The knife felt strange in Martha’s hand. Her mother had given it to her earlier that afternoon after showing up unexpectedly at the movie theater where Martha worked.
Both of Martha’s parents were Cleveland lifers—class of 2003 at the same high school Martha now attended—and she’d always known that her parents had committed the same misdemeanor that Martha and her friends were about to. It wasn’t exactly a crime you could hide. She’d seen the evidence. Martha and her mom never really talked about it, though. Not that they really talked about anything. Martha lived with her dad, and her relationship with her mom ranged from difficult to nonexistent. They saw each other so infrequently that Martha barely even had a relationship with her half brothers. They were twins, and even though they weren’t identical, Martha still sometimes confused them. That part of her family didn’t feel like family. That’s why it had been such a surprise when her mom showed up with the knife. Her voice had caught when she handed it to Martha and told her that it was the very same one she had used when she was a senior.
The girls turned the corner and Martha saw the size of the crowd. It looked like every senior in their class was there. Martha liked to self-identify as cynical and had been pretty vocal about thinking this tradition was kinda dumb. But as she turned the knife over in her hand, it didn’t feel “kinda dumb.” It must have been a pretty big deal for her mom to keep this knife for almost two decades. Maybe tonight was going to matter a lot more than she thought.
“Here we go,” Jordan said.
“Time to add our names to history,” said Ava.
For more than fifty years, seniors at William McKinley High School had gathered at Memorial Park on the first Friday of the school year to carve their names into the old wooden jungle gym. Tonight Ava Morgan, CJ Jacobson, Jordan Schafer, and Martha Custis would add their names to the list along with the rest of the class of 2020.