Excerpt:

Blister was waiting for Jonah Morrison, her nose pressed against the living room window that overlooked the parking lot of the apartment where she lived with her mother and sometimes Dasiy G. Jonah was later.  Eight o’clock on the first day of seventh grade at Memorial Jr. High and he was already fifteen minutes late. 

“Good-bye yesterday, hello tomorrow,” she’d said to Jonah when they’d talked on the phone the night before and she knew by the tremor in his voice that he was nervous about jr. high too. 

“I don’t feel any older, do you?” Jonah had asked. 

“I look older, like you can tell I’m older than last year, but I don’t feel any different than I’ve always felt it that’s what you mean.  Just anxious.” 

There was a long pause at the other end of the phone. 

“Jonah? Are you still there?”

“I was thinking you do look different to me,” he said.

“It’s a nice look.”

“What does that mean?” Blister had asked. 

“Just that I notice things.  Nothing else.”

It was a funny thing for Jonah to say, as if something in their friendship was in the process of changing, some imperceptible shift of weather that Blister sensed from Jonah but she couldn’t put into words.

“So, I guess it’s good-bye childhood,” Blister had said.  “And hello…”

“Hello something else,” Jonah had said, fnishing her sentence as he sometimes did. 

 “