And Then I Found Out the Truth by Jennifer Sturman

dinner w/ WW
absolutely legit reasons — really!
go w/Monkeys after school
take taxi home — make sure driver sees u inside
have I mentioned please don’t hate me?
    Charley sometimes called Patience the Wicked Witch of the Upper East Side. She also referred to Gwyneth and Grey as the Flying Monkeys. Of Jeremy, Patience’s husband, Charley just said, “They’re perfect for each other. Which should tell you a lot.”
    I’d completely forgotten we were supposed to have dinner at Patience’s apartment. This had probably been willful self-delusion on my part — family fun at the Truesdale-Babbitt household wasn’t high on the list of things I wanted to do that evening, or ever for that matter. It also didn’t help that I’d already had enough quality time with Gwyneth to last for the next several decades, but it looked like I was in for more, and Charley wouldn’t be there as a buffer.
    I was about to write back asking for details on the “absolutely legit reasons” — Patience would be sure to ask — when my phone buzzed with another new text.
    This one wasn’t from Quinn, either, though I was starting to wonder if skipping heartbeats so frequently added up to a workout of sorts. It was just an afterthought from Charley:
p.s. — might want to avoid bus shelters
    Which, even for Charley, made no sense. She’d told me in her first text to take a taxi. So I was about to write back to that when she beat me to it again:
p.p.s. — also ice cream trucks
    Which made even less sense. She knew perfectly well I preferred my ice cream in pint form — the soft-serve cones and Good Humor bars the trucks sold were only for when things got desperate and there wasn’t a grocery store or deli nearby with a decent freezer section —
    “What’re you doing?”
    Gwyneth’s voice at my shoulder was so unexpected I almost dropped the phone, and my heart skipped yet another beat, this time because I was startled and not due to a jolt of hopeful anticipation. I’d liked the hopeful anticipation better.
    “Texting Charley,” I said. “She can’t make dinner.”
    “My mom will flip. But I was asking about the old people,” she said, tapping the printout on the table before me.
    “Oh. That. It’s just some research. For a project.”
    “What kind of project?” she asked.
    “For, uh —” I tried to think of a class Gwyneth would know nothing about. “It’s for Latin.” “Latin?”
    “Sure,” I said, trying to sound like a list of oil company executives was precisely the sort of thing a person would need to research for Latin class. Mostly I was wondering why Gwyneth had chosen this moment of all moments to discover her curiosity.
    She peered down at the paper. “Does EAROFO mean something in Latin?”
    Not that I was aware of, but if that’s what she wanted to think, it was fine with me. “It means, uh —”
    But before I could think of a suitable lie, the bell rang to signal the end of the school day, and it also seemed to shut down Gwyneth’s interest. She hoisted her Prada bag over her shoulder and turned toward the door. “Ready?” she asked.
    I moved to follow her, too relieved that she’d dropped the subject of EAROFO to process the way she’d said “ready.” Like there was no question of us not leaving together, and, even scarier, like that’s how it would always be.
    A chill went through me. I had no idea what the new black might be, but one thing was becoming all too clear: Delia was the new Grey.

Thirteen
    Patience and her family lived only a few blocks from Prescott, so Gwyneth and I walked to their apartment after school. At least, I walked. Gwyneth sort of ambled. But those few short blocks were all it took for Charley’s last two texts to get a lot less cryptic.
    Because first we passed the shelter at a bus stop, and Charley and I were splashed across the side. At this point, I was starting to feel numb to the whole thing — I mean, bus shelters were a logical progression for Dieter as