She was sitting alone outside class. She hasn’t been directly ignoring me. Only acting cold to me. She still talked to me whenever the gang was together. But she stopped goofing around with me. And we didn’t talk when it was just us.

I wound the ballerina on a music box, which I bought yesterday, and put it on top her desk. It started playing Canon by Pachelbel.

“You still angry at me?” I asked tentatively, wary of being punched again.

“What is this?” She was still angry, I could tell.

“A bribe?” I smiled at her. “I seem to recall you saying you’ve looked for one of these things all your life.” This was the days before Amazon and the internet, when finding quaint souvenirs were harder than getting weed. I had to pay an arm and a leg for this particular music box. The music boxes in our town had no ballerina on it, and didn’t play Canon by Pachelbel.

A smile started to creep on her lips. She lifted the music box and wound it again, then set it down and let it play.

“So, am I forgiven?”

“You don’t even know what you’re asking forgiveness for,” she replied sullenly.

I paused. I do know, but I didn’t want to go down that line of conversation. “No,” I said. “But it doesn’t matter. I can’t bear you being angry at me,” I paused. “All the time.”

“Please Emma,” I mean Rosie. “Would you talk to me again? Like back to normal talking?”

She looked up at me. She punched me lightly in the arm.

“I hate being angry with you, you know that?”

I smiled. “I feel the same way about you.”

“You’ve never been angry with me,” she remarked. Her eyebrows furrowed. “Or have you?”

“Exactly,” I laughed.