Tell Us Something True by Dana Reinhardt

taco?”
    “No.”
    “Another soda?” I wasn’t ready for the night to be over.
    “No.”
    She reached behind her for her purse. “Come on. Let’s hit the bus stop. Your lesson starts now.”

I sat with Maggie and Will in the gym watching Luke’s basketball game, sizing up Evan Lockwood.
    “He does have magnificent thighs,” Maggie sighed. “But he doesn’t have nearly as much going for him overall as you do, River. For one thing, he’s not as cute.”
    “River is cute?” Will cocked his head at me.
    “Duh. Look at him. Cute in that sensitive, vulnerable, pretty boy sort of way.”
    “I’d trade any one of those for magnificent thighs,” I said.
    “Jesus,” Will said. “Stop saying
magnificent thighs.
”
    Maggie gave him a shove. “Oh my god! That should be your band name! Will Parker and the Magnificent Thighs. I’m calling the booker at Largo!”
    If you’d been watching me on those bleachers, smiling and laughing, you’d never have known that on the inside I was like those antismoking photos they show you in health class: charred and sickly. How could Penny consider going anywhere with Evan Lockwood? With anyone but me?
    “I’m sorry she dumped you, River,” Maggie said. “But I’d be lying if I said that sorry is the only thing I felt.”
    “I know you guys didn’t like her.”
    “It’s not that we didn’t like her, it’s that we didn’t like you with her.”
    “Yeah,” Will added. “You were kind of a pussy.”
    “Hey! I was just a good boyfriend.”
    “No, you were pretty much a major pussy.”
    Maggie smacked Will on the back of the head. “That word is demeaning and stupid. And you’re better than that.” She turned to me. “But, River, you did do whatever Penny told you to. And the truth, which Will can’t properly express because he’s a Neanderthal, is that we missed you.”
    Just then, Evan Lockwood scored a three-point shot. The gym went berserk.
    “Wow. I really bollixed everything up, didn’t I?”
    “Sorta,” Will said.
    “It’s too bad there isn’t some girl you could ask to the dance. And I’m not suggesting me, because I’m obviously a pity date and that just looks sad and desperate. How about…” Maggie scanned the crowd and then pointed across the gym. “Her?”
    “Rachel Pomeroy? Uh…no thank you.”
    “Why?”
    “She’s mean. And scary.”
    “So?”
    “Well, mean and scary aren’t qualities I look for in a mate.”
    “Nobody said anything about mating. We said you need a date for the dance so that Penny can see you’re moving on. It’s time to remake your image. You need somebody a little intimidating. Someone who might knock Penny’s sense of superiority down a notch.”
    That was when Daphne came to me. In Day-Glo. She was perfect. Intimidating and beautiful with the added bonus of being unknown.
    But how to explain Daphne to my friends? How could I know someone from Boyle Heights when I didn’t even drive? How had I struck up a friendship with a Mexican girl who was raising her siblings because her parents worked three jobs around the clock?
    A friendship with Daphne challenged every presumption of the life I’d been leading for seventeen years. Everyone I knew was a different variation on the same Westside theme. We all went to schools with nice gyms and impressive college matriculation records. Some of us were richer (Penny), some were poorer (me), some were whiter (Maggie could trace her family back to the
Mayflower
) and some less so (Luke’s mother was a doctor from Mexico City).
    Nobody I knew was like Daphne…Crap. I didn’t even know her last name.
    This was going to be a tough one.
    Luke’s team lost the game and we went to our usual diner for a consolation sundae. It felt good to be a quadrangle again.
    “So I met this girl…online,” I said.
    “You what?”
    “I met this girl.”
    “Online.”
    “Yes.”
    Maggie looked at Will and then at Luke. They both stared back blankly, like:
Don’t ask us, we’re