1

You let the snot drip from your nose onto your sleeves—that’s how we knew you were truly miserable. It was ridiculous, how far you’d let yourself go. All this over some girl. Some stupid girl.

“Jude.” You were blotchy and spotty and had a pile of tissues building up next to you, for when you actually bothered to wipe your damn nose. You were Julian and I was the only one who called you Jude, after the Beatle kid, and I was June and so it was extra fun because our names sounded sort of similar.



“Jude, you need to chill out.” That was the thing about Jude—he always let things like this get to him. He’d let the stupid girl into his head and made him all crazy and so he was all upset even though they’d only been out like twice.

The snot dripped from your nose again, looking so clear it was almost like water. That’s not how you expected crying snot to be. You expected something thick and disgusting and opaque. But it was almost like Jude had cried so much, would cry so much, had so many tears in him that they had to leak out through his nose as well as his eyes.

“I really liked that one, June,” you mumbled. Everyone thought that Jude was something of a player, something of a cad, because he dated all kinds of girls. But it was really that he could just never hold on to them, as much as he tried. And I think that Jude was something like lonely. He never could deal without having someone he felt he could care about as much as he wanted.

Like me, Jude. You always thought that if you spent too much time with me, called me too frequently, that you were being tiresome. If I had been your girlfriend (never, ever going to happen Julian McFly) you wouldn’t have been sorry about sending me emails and Facebook messages and texts and your love.

I handed you a tissue and you looked at it blankly. “Wipe,” I ordered. You obeyed blankly. “Listen”—sometimes commands were the only thing that could make you respond when you got like this. You were passive that way—“you cannot mope and cry over every bitch girl who treats you badly. Man up, my friend.”

You were such a pessimist. You sneezed and a gob of booger shot onto your shirt. You didn’t even bother to wipe it away.

But then again, you never were queasy, either. If someone fell and started bleeding all over the place, you were the one who bandaged up their wounds. If someone was puking, you’d hold their (my) hair out of the way to give them a clear shot at the toilet. If the baby needed a diaper change, you’d change it. Really, any girl would be lucky to have you. You were pretty damn handy.

If it were a matter of perks, I’d marry you, Julian. Then I’d never have to worry about how my computer always broke and how I barfed when I was drunk.