This one is 30, six years older than Leni, with the same gray eyes sitting in the window seat like she'd always been there. Eleanor, now 36, smiles and nods. "Nora?"

The new one nods back. "That works. Thanks for the party."

"Welcome!" Ellie says, reaching up to touch her shaggy bobbed hair. "I remember this hair. You said you wanted to be Joan Jett."

"Patti Smith," corrects Lenore. "We looked more like Patti Smith."

"Oh. Yeah-yeah," says Ellie, blue for a moment before remembering the cupcakes. "There's punch and Lenore strung up the lights and there's a present for you. And we got pizza of course."

"I really thought it'd be pajamas for this one," Lenore says lighting a cigarette.

Plopping the small package on her lap, Noni looks her over. "Um, she's sitting right here. Rude."

"It's ok," Nora says, inventorying the place and the girls. Stopping at Lenore she frowns. "I thought we quit."

"Not me," Lenore puffs.

"I guess we never change," says Nora pushing herself up from the window and heading to the mirror on the coat closet’s door. Turning left then right, twelve eyes follow studying a museum piece. She leans closer to Eleanor. "We moved? Is this Ottarstedt?"

Popping in between them, the littlest squeezes Nora's hand. "We're home again! Don't you recognize it?"

She reaches down to pet Ellie’s hair, squinting out the window and back to Eleanor. "Which home?"

"Ellie's. She found it when I moved back to Melitown. Maaaagically the landlord couldn't seem to keep people in... four leases broken before she convinced me to look at it. He was so frustrated it wasn’t that hard to convince him to sell it to me. Got a good deal."

Noni smirks and Ellie giggles.

Nora nodded. “Wow. We’re like … stable.”

"Someone painted over the polka dots and the stripes but the stars are still in the kitchen!" Ellie reported with her widest jack-o-lantern smile. “Doesn’t it feel like home?”

"It seems so much smaller."

"Nah, yer bigger. It's the same, just different colors," Ellie assures her.

"And more crowded."  Lenore exhales out of the window away from herselves.

Perhaps it is strange having a six-year-old for a best friend for nearly thirty years, but stranger still to have been six for longer than six years, Eleanor thinks watching her youngest self intently absorbing a Margaret Atwood novel having abandoned her party cleanup tasks. One of Nora’s—it was a newer Atwood. The Handmaid’s Tale is Lenore’s. She looks over at the bookcases, noticing Ellie had already shifted everything to split off the books Nora had missed into their own shelves. In six years they’d probably expand down the hall as she’d stopped trading books in at the used bookstore when Leni unknowingly re-purchased a stack of Lenore’s books. 

“You know, it might not happen again,” Ellie says, closing the book and folding her hands over it in her lap. Sometimes it seems like she was grown up too. 

Eleanor slides down into the couch next to her. “How’dya figure?” 

“Well, you’re not so different from Leni and even less from Nora. And there isn’t even anything new to call you. It’s like it’s stopping.”

“Maybe we’ll just keep filling the house until I am squished to death by all my duplicates, like a copier running out of control.”

“You’ve thought about that too?” she asks, and then quietly, “Do we disappear when you’re gone?”