"Don't look, but there's a guy behind you that's definitely giving you his full attention," Kara said. Of course, Diana and Leo turned around.
The cafe was busy like it always was on Saturdays. All the students from the local college would come out and mix with kids from the high school like Diana and her friends.
"I said don't look!" Kara said, but it was too late. The boy, who had been looking at Diana, turned away quickly. Leo and Diana made eye contact, then they simultaneously rolled their eyes.
"I guess he's into you," Leo said.
Diana nodded and sipped from her cup of tea. "I guess."
Kara frowned over her overpriced mug of hot chocolate, something Diana was nearly positive she could have made at home for pennies, along with Diana's tea. "Why do you sound so disappointed?"
"I'm not!" Diana said. Her voice cracked, though, and she winced.
Kara raised an eyebrow. "Okay, well, you don't look pleased."
"Why do I need to look pleased?"
Kara sighed loudly and sat back in her chair. "You've been so weird lately. Are you nervous?"
Leo made the universal gesture of the three wise monkeys, covering first his eyes and then his ears with his hands.
"What would I be nervous about?" Diana asked.
"You— Oh my God!" Kara shouted, drawing the attention of a few students and businesspeople working overtime that clearly had gone to the cafe for peace and quiet.
Diana knew she was being testy. She had been for a while now, and made a pretty nasty comment every time Kara mentioned any boy— or girl— that happened to notice Diana. But Diana made a point of showing any interest. She turned again to the boy, who was still staring down at an empty plate, his face red.
"Maybe he's trying to figure out if I'm a girl or a boy," Diana said.
"With googly-eyes like that? I don't think so," Kara said. She sighed. "D, you look like a girl, you sound like a girl, you act like a girl, you are a girl. No one wonders if you're a girl or not."
"Is that so? Because I see a lot of people giving me a second glance. If I went over to that boy and introduced myself, he would ask me what's in my pants."
"He would not!"
"Leo," Diana said, and Leo looked like a deer about to be hit by a truck. "If I were to go up to you and start flirting, would you ask me what's in my pants?"
Leo looked like he wanted to duck under the table to hide. "Uh..."
"Okay, okay, fine, I was just pointing him out." Kara looked down at the pieces of paper in front of her. "So the birthday cake is going to be fifty dollars, and the heart cake is going to be thirty dollars."
"My mom can bake a cake," Diana complained.
"D, I love your mom, but I don't trust her on something as important as this."
"It's a cake!"
"It's the cake that will celebrate the rest of your life," Kara said, taking an annoyingly long slurp from her mug, something she knew Diana hated.
"You are so dramatic."
"And you're an airhead."
"So eighty dollars on cake. How much is the venue, again?"
Kara smiled, knowing she had won that argument. Their mindless prattle continued, with Kara being much more invested in Diana's birthday/surgery/graduation party than Diana was. Every once in a while, Diana glanced back at the mysterious shy boy behind them. Occasionally, their eyes would meet and he would look away again. He was cute, she thought, or at least as cute as Diana could find in the area. One time, when their eyes met, she gave him a little smile. His ears turned red.
"Does your Mom want to make something?" Kara was saying when Diana turned her head back. "Maybe she could make cookies."
If Diana was being completely honest, she had been joking when she had said her mom could bake a cake for the party. Diana knew her mom loved her and accepted her— she had been forced to listen to "Born This Way" by Lady Gaga enough times over the past three years to know that, and while Diana never talked about it with her dad, she could see he only wanted for her to be happy. But Diana could see deeper down and knew they were silently hoping she wouldn't go through with the surgery. They wanted her to become happy with the body she was born with and adapt to it. There were lots of people out there like Diana who kept the body they were born with. There was a reality television show about husbands being pregnant, for God's sake.
But Diana couldn't do that. She wanted the body she was born to have, not the one she was born with. She wanted the surgery, as expensive and painful as it was going to be. She hoped that when it was all said and done, her family would see that the post-surgery version of her would be the best version possible. She would be more confident, she supposed: she was going to be bespoke, after all. Diana was going to be perfect. And then she was going to go to college, and then she was going to move on with the rest of her life. It was a good plan, a solid plan. As long as she could stay out of trouble, she would be fine.
A loud screeching sound rang through the cafe, and most people were startled. A few ducked under their tables. A toddler began crying. Everyone looked around trying to find what the source of the noise was. Leo slowly stood up, so Diana did as well.
Diana groaned. "Hernadez," she said through gritted teeth.
Hernandez was the silent embarrassment of the neighborhood in the way that people looked away when he entered a room. He never did anything really illegal, so the police never kept him for long. Still, he would go onto buses and pay with coins that definitely weren't bus tokens, got into brawls with men who just wanted to go home after work, and yelled loudly in places like the cafe. Right now, Hernandez was standing at the bar in the cafe and had just dragged a fork across the glass countertop. The barista had her back pressed up to the wall behind her, her hands clutched to her chest. Her eyes were darting around. She was looking for someone to help her. Diana felt her heart thudding in her chest. Her mouth went dry. She took a step forward, but someone sticky and warm grabbed her hand. A white-hot flash of anger flooded Diana's body. She spun around to see Kara clutching her hand.
"Let go!" Diana hissed.
Kara's eyes were pleading. "Don't," she mouthed.
Diana almost yanked her hand away. But someone in Kara's face made her stop. Kara's hand, the fingers delicate and small and the nails clipped short with a magenta pink, seemed so weak compared to Diana's hand, the fingers strong and the nails long and thickened with gel.
Diana looked back to the scared barista and Hernandez. A heartbeat passed, two. Then someone stood, and Diana could immediately tell from his stance that he was a cop, or at least someone capable like a cop.
"Okay, sir," the man said, his voice commanding, and everyone in the cafe took a collective sigh of relief. "Time to go."
Hernandez yelled and fought and prayed as the man pulled him out of the cafe. A few awkward seconds later, quiet conversations continued and people looked back at their laptops. Diana jerked out of Kara's grip, and she and Leo sat down. Kara was frowning. She looked down at the papers, then sighed and collected them and put them in a dollar-store purple folder with the words "Diana's Party!!!" written with a Sharpie on the cover.
"Let's go," she said.
Leo and Diana followed Kara out of the cafe. No words passed between them. It was always like that when Kara was angry since she wasn't angry often. Diana briefly wondered if she should be angry, too. She wanted to stand up for the girl. It was her right, Diana supposed, to get into an ugly fight.
Kara spun around as soon as they were out of eyesight of the people in the cafe. She was pissed, that was easy enough to tell. "What part of 'stay out of trouble' was unclear to you?!" she whisper-yelled.
"She needed help!" Diana said. Another flicker of anger rose up in her. She swallowed it down like a bitter pill.
"Guys, stop," Leo said.
"You don't need to play the hero every single time someone's in trouble!" Kara said. "Other people can help!"
"And what happens if I don't help and nobody else does?" Diana said, her face heating up.
For a second, Diana was sure Kara was going to slap her. "That is not your responsibility," Kara hissed through clenched teeth.
"Guys!" Leo said.
"Just because you—"
"Guys!" Leo shouted.
"What?!" Kara and Diana shouted together, turning to Leo. He paled, then gathered his courage.
"Let's go home," he said. "Both of you need to take a breather. You're stressed."
Diana blinked, then blinked again. Her throat was dry and her heart was pounding. She swallowed, tasting the remnants of her tea on her tongue.
Calm down, she instructed herself. She let in a deep breath, feeling the fresh spring air move through her lungs. Kara let her jaw unclench. Diana heard shouting from behind them, and she turned. Hernandez and the man were there, Hernandez yelling up at the blue sky as the man shoved him away from the cafe and the scared barista.
"Let's go," Diana said, and the three of them began walking.
The path to their houses wasn't really direct. They could walk down West Avenue and take a left and there would be Kara's house, but they only did that when it started to rain. When it was beautiful out, like it was that day, the path winded through the park, down dirt paths covered in stones and woodchips, and on sidewalks covered in colorful chalk. They waved at the old men who played chess together outside the restaurant on Main and played a quick round of hopscotch with the DeLillo kids, a little boy and a little girl who looked so identical, none of them knew which one was the girl and which was the boy. Privately, Diana wondered if they were like her. She never said this to anyone, and she definitely didn't say it that day when the three weren't talking to each other.
Their long, winding path led them to Diana's house first. The house was a beautiful little thing. Someone in Diana's class had described it as "quaint" once, and Diana thought that fit. The house was painted her grandmother's favorite shade of blue, and the lawn was always trimmed and weedless.
"D," Kara said as Diana undid the latch on the white gate. Diana turned to face her. "I'm sorry."
Diana smiled and opened her arms. Kara grinned and hugged Diana, pressing her face into Diana's shoulder. "I'm sorry, too," Diana said, and Kara hugged her tighter.
"You know I love you, right?"
"I know," Diana said. "I love you." She pressed a kiss to the side of Kara's head. Her hair smelled like the strawberry shampoo she used, one of her birthday presents from last year. When they let go of each other, Kara and Leo both gave her a smile and continued down the road. Diana sighed. She always hated fighting with her friends. Her heeled boots made her walk unevenly on the cobblestone entry walk. The key entered the lock easily and the deadbolt went with the loud, satisfying clank.
Diana would later find it strange why she remembered so many details from that day. The stories always said that when someone went through a loss, it all happened in a blur. But it didn't. Diana remembered shouting into the house if anyone was home. No one was. She remembered putting her keys in the bowl by the door. She remembered Lady, the family dog, trotting slowly with her arthritic old legs. She remembered the dog's sandpapery tongue as she lovingly licked Diana's legs and how her tail wagged as Diana stroked her ears.
She looked at herself in the decorative mirror. She was a beautiful girl, really. Her thick black hair was at her shoulders now, curling every now and then. Her makeup was thick and colorful. Diana enjoyed her newfound ability to wear makeup and made a point of wearing it as much as she could. She had two piercings in each ear and wore a new combination of earrings every day.
The call came that night when Diana and her mother were in the living room watching television. Jeopardy! was on, and the two of them were shouting out the answers. Diana was getting most of them wrong, but she couldn't bring herself to care.
Diana's phone rang with the default ringtone. She picked it up and saw it was Kara. The picture for Kara was a ridiculous one. They had been at a concert in the middle of summer, and they were both covered in sweat, glitter, and someone had dumped a can of beer on them. A piece of confetti had been stuck to Kara's face, and Diana had literally held her down to get a picture.
Diana frowned. In the entire time she had owned that phone, they had never talked, only texted. Diana swiped to answer. "Hey?"
The person on the other end of the phone breathed heavily.
"Hello?" said louder, feeling her throat tighten. Diana's mom frowned and paused the show.
"Diana?" a woman's voice said. Diana recognized the voice of Kara's mother: a frail, spindly woman who had spent the better part of her youth in a psychiatric ward before finally being prescribed Chlorpromazine and finding peace just in time to get married. "Something's happened to Kara."