As Long As We're Together Read online

  “Is that pop quiz still going to count?” Denise demanded.

  “Are there more cookies?” Cyrus wondered.

  But the principal just held up his hands defensively and started to back away. “Later. In writing,” he said, making a beeline for the door. Before he made it all the way out of the cafeteria, though, he smiled and added, “And we need people to clean up. I choose…all of you!”

  Realizing they were no longer divided, everyone started to laugh—especially Buffy and Andi, who gave each other a hug, and Jonah and Cyrus, who each wrapped an arm around the other. It felt good to be back on the same side again. Really good.

  After school, Andi and Jonah were at the tables in front of the school, getting their wristbands cut off. As Jonah went to toss his away, Andi grabbed it.

  “These aren’t trash,” she told him, setting her backpack down on the table and opening it up so she could put the wristband inside. She smiled sheepishly at the questioning look on his face and explained, “They’re a carbon-neutral crafts project waiting to happen!”

  Andi started picking up more of the discarded wristbands, which were sitting on the table, and Jonah grabbed her bag and held it open—the gentlemanly thing to do—so she could put them inside.

  “So what are you gonna make?” Jonah asked, almost like he was interviewing a celebrity whose work he’d always admired.

  “Not sure.” Andi shrugged and grabbed more wristbands. “Sometimes I go in without a plan, feel it out, and improvise. Like jazz—but way less boring…and with more washi tape.” Noticing that Jonah was smiling at her, Andi smiled back and asked, “What?”

  “You’re so creative, and you’re so smart,” Jonah replied softly as they both swung their backpacks onto their shoulders. “I can’t believe you figured out Metcalf’s code.”

  “That was by accident,” Andi pointed out, ever the picture of humility.

  “Ah! You’re even smart by accident!” Jonah grinned and bit down on his lower lip, then stared into Andi’s eyes for what seemed like hours.

  A little nervous laugh escaped Andi’s lips. Then, before she could even comprehend what was happening, Jonah reached for her hand. The second they made contact, it felt like there were a million tiny electrical currents buzzing through her fingertips.

  Andi couldn’t believe it. Jonah was holding her hand—and she was holding his! It had happened. It had finally happened!

  “Sorry, sometimes my palms get sweaty,” Jonah said, his cheeks flushing bright red as they continued to walk.

  Andi giggled again. Should she tell him about hyperhidrosis? Nah. She didn’t want to ruin the moment. And what a moment it was.

  When Andi got home, she was still walking on air, blissful to the point of being loopy.

  “Heeeeeyyy,” she said when she walked into the apartment and discovered Bex and Bowie sitting in the living room.

  “Hey!” Bex and Bowie replied in unison, smiling at each other.

  “How was your day?” Bex added, her nerves beginning to kick in when she realized that Andi was in an especially good mood.

  At least she had Bowie there for moral support. He had promised he would help Bex break the awful news to Andi, and she could not have been more grateful to him for that.

  “Goooood.” Andi started wriggling, almost dancing, and Bex’s heart sank even deeper.

  “Want to tell us what was so good about it?” Bex sucked in her breath, hoping Bowie was realizing the same thing she was—that Andi was beyond happy, and that there was no way they could tell her anything that might ruin what had clearly been a perfect day.

  “Noooooooo.” Andi shook her head and marched straight for her bedroom, but Bowie grabbed her arm to stop her.

  Bex knew he was only trying to help, but she still cringed. Did they really have to tell her then? Like, right then?

  “Andi, sit down for a sec,” Bowie said, guiding her toward the couch and sinking down onto the coffee table as Bex stood up. “We have something to tell you.”

  Andi glided over and plopped down on the sofa, then finally noticed the worried looks on Bex’s and Bowie’s faces. She didn’t want to ask, but she knew she had to. “What’s…going on?”

  Bowie hesitated and mashed his lips together. He glanced back at Bex and stood up, placing an arm gently around her shoulders. Bex looked up at him with nervous eyes, but Bowie whispered that she should just rip off the bandage—and at that point, she really didn’t have a choice. So she swallowed hard and looked down at Andi.

  After a few deep breaths, Bex finally said the words she had been hoping she would never have to say out loud: “Pops and CeCe are selling the house.”

  Andi’s face froze, except for her mouth, which uttered the words “What?” “Why?” and “Where are they going?”

  “Someplace smaller,” Bowie interjected, doing his best to shrug it off, to make it seem like no big deal. “They don’t need all the space.”

  “But…what about Andi Shack?” Andi leapt up from the couch, searching her parents’ faces for something, anything, that would indicate they had a plan for saving her favorite place on the entire planet—that they knew how much it mattered to her. “What happens to Andi Shack?”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll find room for your craft supplies,” Bex said before realizing she sounded like an even more evil version of CeCe, if such a creature actually existed.

  “Andi Shack is not just the place that I keep my glue gun!” Andi’s voice was desperate, determined, angry—exactly how Bex’s had sounded when she’d made a similar argument to CeCe earlier that day.

  “We know that,” Bowie told her, still trying to keep up the everything’s cool act.

  “No, you don’t! You guys just showed up! Andi Shack has been there for my whole life!” Andi could feel tears beginning to sting her eyes now, and she didn’t even care that she was saying hurtful things she might regret later. All she knew was that she could barely breathe, that she was on the verge of suffocating, and that it felt like her entire world was crumbling beneath her feet.

  “We’ll figure something else out,” Bowie said, but this time he sounded a bit more worried…desperate, even. This wasn’t going nearly as well as he had hoped. Bex had been right. Andi was already crushed, and he wasn’t so sure he could protect her after all.

  “No, we won’t! There’s nothing else like it!” Then, without even realizing what she was saying, Andi glared at Bex and added, “I wish we’d never left home!”

  It was exactly as Bex had feared. Andi blamed her—of course she blamed her. Worse still, there was a good chance that she might never forgive her.

  Moments later, Andi was out on the sidewalk, running back to her old house, leaving Bowie and Bex to stare at each other, completely defeated. With her cheeks now wet with tears, Andi leapt over the shrubs in front of the house and headed straight for Andi Shack. Once inside, she spun around to look at the walls, taking in her supplies and all the things she’d made. It had always been the one place that made her feel better no matter how crazy life got. But where would she go to feel better after CeCe and Pops sold the house?

  As Andi collapsed onto the floor, her thoughts drifted back to how happy she’d been less than an hour before—when Jonah had told her how creative and smart she was, and finally held her hand. But none of that mattered now. None of it was enough to stop the aching in her chest. Andi had just collected all those wristbands, planned on making something amazing with them. But what could she possibly make if she had no place to create? How could she be happy about anything ever again if she didn’t have Andi Shack?

  Suddenly, the best afternoon of her life had turned into the worst. And she couldn’t help feeling like Bex was at least partly—if not entirely—to blame.

  The world as Andi knew it was coming to an end. Oh, it had nothing to do with CeCe and Pops selling the house and her losing Andi Shack in that potentially devastating real estate deal. As it turned out, Andi had saved the world—or, at least, her wor
ld—by simply proposing that she spend a lot more time back at the old house. It was a solution that made CeCe, Pops, and Andi happier than any of them could have imagined.

  But in the weeks since, something else had pulled the rug out from beneath Andi’s very existence: Buffy’s mom, who was in the military, had been assigned to work in Phoenix—so, exactly as the fortune teller at Cyrus’s Bar Mitzvah had predicted, Buffy would soon be leaving town. For good.

  In spite of all of Andi’s best efforts to find a way to keep Buffy in Shadyside, including having her move into Andi’s old bedroom at CeCe and Pops’s house, nothing had worked. The simple reality was that as much as Buffy’s mom understood her daughter’s reasons for wanting to stay put—a kid her age needed some stability, especially when it came to school and friends—she also couldn’t bear the thought of missing more of Buffy’s life than she already had during so many previous deployments.

  As it turned out, Buffy felt the same way. She loved her friends and dreaded the thought of leaving them, and she shuddered to think how the basketball team would survive without her…or, really, how the entire academic foundation of Jefferson Middle School might collapse without her there. But she wanted to be with her mom more than anything, and who could blame her? Definitely not Andi. So now, with just seven days left to be together, Andi, Buffy, and Cyrus were desperate to squeeze a little bit of friendship magic out of every last remaining second.

  “Come on, guys, think!” Andi shot a pleading look at Buffy and Cyrus, who were sitting on the olive-green velvet sofa in Bex and Andi’s apartment. “We only have a week left with each other.”

  “I know.” Buffy sighed and hugged an embroidered pink pillow to her chest. “I don’t want to think about it.”

  “It’s the world’s saddest countdown…and at the end, we launch Buffy,” Cyrus said softly. Unlike Buffy, who sat cross-legged, he was stretched out with his stripy-socked feet on the coffee table, and his dark wavy hair wasn’t nearly as styled as usual. In fact, it was almost messy, like he’d rolled out of bed and headed over to Andi and Bex’s apartment without even looking in the mirror. Which was a completely un-Cyrus-like move. Wasn’t he the one who had dubbed the three of them the “Good Hair Crew” a few months earlier?

  Truth be told, though, Andi could understand why Cyrus was having a bad hair day. She hadn’t felt much like dealing with personal hygiene, either—let alone anything else—since finding out that Buffy was moving away. Still, she had somehow managed to shower and run a bit of product through her dark pixie cut before her friends came over that morning. She’d even put on one of her favorite new shirts—at first, it looked like a plain white tee with a few little red accents, but it was actually designed to look like a three-of-hearts playing card. Maybe she was being weirdly sentimental, but the moment Andi saw it, she decided that the three of hearts symbolized her, Buffy, and Cyrus.

  But if they were going to have to be separated, Andi was determined to make every last day before that happened epic—a fact that she pointed out to Buffy and Cyrus as she leaned forward in her chair. “We don’t want to waste the little time we have left just doing the same thing we always do,” Andi continued.

  She knew she didn’t need to spell it out for her friends, and if she was being completely honest, “the same thing we always do” was one of the many things Andi was going to miss most after Buffy left. But just in case they didn’t know what she meant, she rolled her eyes and drove her point home: “Sitting at The Spoon and having baby taters.”

  Buffy nodded and hugged the pillow tighter as she readjusted her position on the couch. “But it’s hard to think of an epic day,” she lamented. “The best days we’ve ever spent together have just kind of happened by accident.”

  Andi’s eyes grew wide, and she stood up. “That’s it!”

  “What is?” Buffy glanced at Cyrus, wondering if he knew what Andi was talking about. Of course, he didn’t—but that was fine. Buffy could see that Andi was about to go on one of her hyper-enthusiastic rolls. When the girl had an idea, she really had an idea, and she committed to it 110 percent. It was one of about a million things that Buffy loved, and would miss, about her best friend.

  “You can’t just create an epic day out of thin air,” Andi explained, getting more excited by the second. “So let’s re-create one we already had. Our Perfect Day!”

  “Great idea!” Cyrus sat up, almost as excited as Andi, but then sank back into the couch cushions, more confused than enthused. “What day was that again?”

  Buffy laughed as she watched Andi rack her brain, trying to remember the best day they’d ever had together. Then…in three, two, one…it finally came to her.

  “Oh!” Andi’s mouth dropped open. “Remember when we went on that bike ride a few years ago? It was the day we discovered the Alpine Slide.”

  “Ohhh, the Alpine Slide!” Buffy nodded, a giant smile spreading across her face.

  Cyrus got a blissed-out, faraway look in his eyes as he climbed aboard the memory train—or, rather, memory slide. “And on the way, we found that place with the hot apple cider and the pumpkin donuts!” he reminded them.

  “The pumpkin donuts!” Buffy gurgled. She was practically drooling, like she could already taste them.

  “Let’s do it again! Today!” Andi proposed.

  “Yes!” Buffy agreed as Bex walked into the living room with a plate of pizza pockets.

  “Do what again?” Bex asked, waving the plate over their heads.

  Buffy and Andi reached for the pizza pockets, but Bex quickly shifted the plate out of their reach and set it down on the coffee table. “Wait a second before you eat these,” Bex said. “They’re either still very hot or still need to thaw.”

  But Andi had no interest in discussing what was very likely still-frozen food. She turned to Bex and sucked in her breath before making her big announcement. “Get this: we are going to re-create our Perfect Day!”

  “Oh.” Bex leaned awkwardly against the sofa, unable to muster the slightest bit of enthusiasm.

  “Oh? That’s all my brilliant idea gets is ‘oh’?” Andi scowled at Bex, who looked almost as scruffy as Cyrus in her old plaid flannel shirt and ripped jeans, with her dark hair piled messily on top of her head. The just-rolled-out-of-bed thing was one of her classic looks, and somehow, she always managed to make it work. She always looked so cool—and, more than that, she was so cool. She’d been on so many incredible adventures. So of course Andi had been hoping that Bex would hear her plan for the day and confirm that Andi was equally cool—that the Andi apple hadn’t fallen far from the Bex tree.

  Alas, Bex looked apologetically from Andi to Buffy to Cyrus before trying to explain, as gently as possible: “Well…in my experience, you can’t re-create the perfect day.”

  Andi wasn’t sure she wanted Bex to answer, but against her better judgment, she asked why not.

  “I guess it’s just never as good as the memory,” Bex offered, still sort of developing the theory as she spoke. “It’s like…bringing home leftovers. You’re never going to love it as much as you did at the restaurant. It’s always just going to be…reheated meat.”

  Andi scowled, because first of all, ew—“reheated meat” sounded positively disgusting—and second of all, there was no way she and her friends could ever be disappointed by the Alpine Slide or those insanely delicious pumpkin donuts.

  “No!” Andi insisted, leaping to her feet and staring Bex down. “You’re wrong. You have to be. We have not had our last great day together.” Andi turned to Buffy and Cyrus, snapping back into motivational speaker mode. “Come on, guys, we can do this! Today will not be reheated meat!”

  Andi watched as Cyrus and Buffy exchanged smiles.

  “It’s a weird rallying cry,” Cyrus said, before getting up from the couch—and Andi had to confess, he was totally right. “But…I’m on board!”

  “Me too!” Buffy grinned and leapt up from the couch as well.

  So just like that, they had a
plan. Now all they had to do was grab their bikes and make it happen!

  Later that morning, after an agonizing hour or two of digging their childhood bikes out of their families’ garages, Andi and her friends met up and headed down Main Street, accompanied by the grating sound of squeaking tires and clunking metal.

  Andi glanced at Cyrus’s black BMX bike and then at Buffy’s hot-pink five-speed and realized that even though Cyrus’s front tire was hanging from the handlebars and Buffy’s ride was covered in dust and cobwebs, Andi’s was easily the oldest of them all—a lime-green dinosaur bike with a banana seat and a wicker basket. But that was because it had never been Andi’s bike to begin with; it had belonged to Bex.

  As the three of them creaked to a stop beneath the striped canopy of Red Rooster Records, they regarded each other’s bikes and Andi acknowledged what they were all thinking, while still trying to remain upbeat: “Okay, so our plan has a hiccup. Three…very old…rusty hiccups.”

  Buffy nodded, her dark eyes full of an uncharacteristic amount of concern. “I haven’t ridden my bike in years,” she admitted with a gulp.

  “Me neither,” Cyrus said, glancing over at Andi’s bike. “But at least mine didn’t have to time-travel here from the sixties.”

  “I’m using Bex’s old bike because I sold mine,” Andi pointed out defensively. Surely Buffy and Cyrus hadn’t forgotten—trading in her ten-speed, along with forking over at least a years’ worth of cat-sitting money, to get a shiny yellow electric scooter had been part of her big plan to become more adventurous and rebellious when she’d turned thirteen. “But it’s still totally rideable.”

  Andi tried to ring the rusty old bell, but the moment she touched it, it fell off the handlebar and clunked sadly on the sidewalk, breaking into at least a dozen pieces. Andi looked back at her friends, trying to appear less uneasy than she felt. They had to find a way to make her plan work—but how were they going to do that if their bikes weren’t even in riding condition?