Different Kinds of Fruit

ISBN-13: 9780593111185

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group

Publication Date: 04-12-2022

Pages: 320

Product Dimensions: 5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.30(d)

Age Range: 10 - 14 Years

Kyle Lukoff is the author of many books for young readers. His debut middle-grade novel, Too Bright To See, received a Newbery honor, the Stonewall award, and was a National Book Award finalist. His picture book When Aidan Became A Brother also won the Stonewall. He has forthcoming books about mermaids, babies, apologies, and lots of other topics. While becoming a writer he worked as a bookseller for ten years, and then nine more years as a school librarian.

Read an Excerpt

chapter 1

Okay, I know that the sunset is majestic and timeless and awe-inspiring and everything, but also there was some ice cream dripping onto my hand and it was extremely important that I tend to that at once.

And yes, the light did spread out over the water like sparkly popcorn, and yes, itwas cool the way the sun hovered trembling above the horizon. However, I also had a big scoop of Nutella ice cream, which is my absolute favorite, in a waffle cone, which is also my absolute favorite, and my ice cream was melting fast in the hottest August on record. The sun would set again tomorrow but my hand might be sticky and gross for the whole ride home because my dad, unlike my mom, doesn’t carry a purse filled with wet wipes.

“Told you to get it in a cup,” Dad said. He was taking leisurely bites of his mint chocolate chip, gazing out at the Pacific. Little bites, like he had all the time in the world, which I guess he did because even if his ice cream melted into soup (which is great, I love ice cream soup in an appropriate container), he wouldn’t have the whole sticky-hands problem that I was currently struggling to prevent. Not to mention that I was wearing one of my cutest dresses, cream-colored with a halter top and a swishy skirt, and I did not want it to have a sticky brown splotch forever. Even if I was about to outgrow it.

I grumbled at him, working my tongue into that space between my ring finger and pinky.

“What’d you say?” he asked.

“I said, grumble grumble grumble!”

“A compelling point,” said Dad, and turned his attention back to the sunset. I turned back too, and noticed that the railing came up to his belly, and it hit me right above mine. I was almost as tall as my dad now. When did that happen?

Dad came up with this tradition when I was seven. He would pick a last day of summer, when it would stay warm and bright for hours and hours. Drive the two of us down to “the city,” also known as Seattle, but my parents always called it “the city” like they were describing a bodily function that’s perfectly natural but also embarrassing to do in public. We’d get dinner at a restaurant that doesn’t exist in our town, usually something I’ve never had before (this time it was fancy ramen, which would be my first choice for a cold winter night but maybe not my first choice for a hot summer day). Then we’d wander around the little tourist shops, find some cool street performers and give them dollars, and end by watching the sun set over the Sound.

Dad always called this “father-daughter bonding,” but I wished he wouldn’t. Calling it “bonding” made me worry that I was doing something wrong, like instead of scouring novelty stores for those smashed-penny machines we should be having intense heart-to-hearts about how fast I’m growing up and how glad he was that I’m his daughter. I wished he’d say “Hey Bananabelle”—(yes, that’s what he calls me sometimes—) “have you ever had tandoori? You should try it, it’s delicious” or “There’s a new exhibit on raptors at the natural history museum! I love raptors, want to go with me?” That way we could do the same fun stuff, eat dinner, have a good time, and not feel like we were doing something meaningful to cement our father-daughter relationship. He’s my dad, I’m his kid, I didn’t get why he wanted to make it into such a thing.

Anyway, so we were watching the sunset, or at least he was watching the sunset and I was sneaking peeks of it while avoiding an ice cream catastrophe. He was probably thinking deep thoughts about the universe and how fast I was growing up and how the sun is eventually going to explode, which will kill us all, if climate change doesn’t get us first. I was thinking about all those things and also how I should have gotten a cupand a cone. That would have been genius.

I glanced up at the sun again. Ouch. “Shouldn’t we be wearing sunglasses or something?” I asked. “Don’t you care about my eyes?”

“You’ll be fine,” Dad grunted. “Strengthens your retinas.”

I was almost sure he was joking about that. I knew you weren’t supposed to look directly into the sun, but also I couldn’t tell what kind of mood he was in. Sometimes he liked to joke around, would tease me and I would tease him back and it was great. Sometimes he got prickly, and grimaced every time I tried to say something funny. He had started out the day in a good mood but had gotten quieter and quieter, and I knew better than to try to bring him back. It was almost time to go home anyway. Phew.

Finally I looked up from my Nutella-stained hands, just in time to catch the sun slipping below the water like magic, and I really did get why the sunset was such a miraculous thing. Even though it happened every day. We turned away from the railing without speaking and started the long trek towards the car.

As we walked, I tried to soak up the last few minutes of being in the city. My parents always acted so freaked out by it for no good reason. Seattle isamazing. Before dinner we had found a store selling nothing but fancy olive oils and olive oil–related products. And we got to pick between a million restaurants with a million different kinds of food, as opposed to our boring suburb of Tahoma Falls, which had a McDonald’s, a Taco Time, an okay diner, and a Red Robin for the nights we wanted something fancy. The light posts on every corner were always thickly papered over with advertisements for parties, music, shows, and benefits for extremely cool people.

In fact, there was an interesting flyer pasted onto a pole right above eye level. I stared at it as Dad and I waited to cross the street. It showed a woman with eye-popping makeup in a bright zigzag-striped dress, surrounded by shirtless boys. The rainbow text was yelling at me to go to a “Pre-Pride Drag Brunch,” and even though I didn’t know what any of those words meant, it was a very convincing advertisement.

Well, okay, I did know what all of those words meant, but not necessarily in that order. “Pre” means before, and “pride” means, like, feeling good about yourself. I knew what brunch is, we got it sometimes on Sundays at the diner. It’s breakfast but later. And “drag” means to pull something behind you. Or something hard and bad, but that’s mostly old-fashioned slang, like “don’t be a drag, man.” So that meant “pre-pride drag brunch” was a late breakfast you kind of pulled yourself into before you felt good about yourself. That maybe made sense? But I wondered if there was some context I was missing. My teacher last year always talked about using context clues to improve your reading, so I decided to ask my dad. Literacy is important.

“Dad? What’s a ‘Pre-Pride Drag Brunch’?”

I already knew his mood had gone from good to . . . something else, so it wasn’t a surprise to see his jaw tighten. He glanced at the poster and widened his eyes, his nostrils flaring slightly. “Pre-pride brunch is why we don’t come into the city much,” he said. Then the walk signal changed from a red hand to a walking man and he bolted across the street, his not-very-long legs pounding his dismay on the crosswalk.

I skipped to keep up. I knew it would be useless to ask any follow-up questions, but I couldn’t help myself. “What does ‘pre-pride’ mean? I know what ‘pride’ is, but I’ve seen that word all over the place lately. Is everyone constantly overjoyed to be a Seattleite?”

I liked that word, Seattleite. I wanted to be a Seattleite someday. Much better than being stuck as a Tahomaite forever, and people from our town didn’t even call themselves that. Which made sense; “Tahomaite” sounds like a disease.

Dad pinched a little bit of beard between his fingers and tugged on it. He always did that when I asked him a tough question, or when he was unsure of something. After a minute he released the poor tortured hairs and said, “Well. You know what ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ are. Right?”

Oh. Yeah. Pride pride. How had I missed that?

“Right,” I agreed. I didn’t really need him to explain any more, but I hoped he would. I was curious what he would say. My parents didn’t talk about stuff like this much.

“Pride is for them,” he continued. “For those kinds of people. A parade. It celebrates an important day in their history. It happens in June, so all these posters and signs are out of date. They should get someone to take them down.”

That seemed like all he was going to say. Brief, and correct, and not nearly enough information, which was about right for my father when he didn’t want to talk. But there were still some parts I wasn’t sure about, so I risked a few other question.

“So, is ‘drag brunch’ brunch with drag queens? I’ve seen drag queens on TV, are they also waitresses? That’s cool, I want a drag queen to bring me pancakes, can we do that sometime?”

He shrugged, which was probably a “no” to that last question and an unsatisfying answer to the others. I wanted to run back to the flyer, not for the shirtless boys but because I realized that the woman in the bright dress and amazing makeup was a drag queen and I wanted to examine her more thoroughly, but we were already a block away and there was no way he’d let me go back. Oh well. Someday I’d come down to the city on my own and no one could stop me from doing whatever I wanted.

I had other questions, but I could tell he had said all he was going to. If Mom were here I would have asked them; she always gave me much more helpful answers. Like when I asked where babies came from, Dad stuttered and turned red and played with his beard while Mom told me everything about sperms and eggs and uteruses and all that. People always say I look exactly like my dad, but I have my mom’s sense of humor and love of bright clothes and accessories, so being a mixture of both parents made sense to me. But if I asked Mom to tell me more about Pride, she might tell Dad. And then they’d wonder why I was so curious about the topic. So I had to be satisfied with that tiny bit of information.

I said a silent goodbye to “the city.” It’s about a forty-minute drive from Seattle to Tahoma Falls. An hour and a half if traffic is bad. But it would feel ten million hours long if Dad insisted on listening to his sad-girl-with-guitar music or talk radio the whole way, and that would be intolerable while I was buzzing from ice cream and the city and the poster and maybe some nerves about the first day of school. “Father-daughter bonding time” was his idea, so he would have to deal with the fact that I could not be quiet and introspective the entire ride home. I waited for us to get in his pickup truck (hot as an oven inside, I yelped when my thighs touched the fake leather of the seat), and started talking once Dad got onto the freeway heading north.

“I can’t believe it’s my last year at the Lab!” I began. My school was called the Tahoma Falls Collaborative School, but we called it the Lab for short. “I remember when I was a kindergartner and the sixth graders looked so huge. Like, basically grown-ups. And now I’m going to be one of those basically-grown-ups, but I feel like exactly the same person that I was in kindergarten! And everyone in my class seems the same too. It’s so weird. And now I’m like, ‘Wow, middle school students are so big and old,’ but I bet that once I get to middle school I’ll have the soul of that same kindergartner. Does that ever go away? Will I get to college and still eat my broccoli pretending that I’m a dinosaur eating trees? Or is there some magic point where you become an adult and stop feeling like a kid inside?”

I on purpose left that as both a question and a comment to see if Dad would take the bait and start talking, and if not I could keep going without making it awkward. He let out a “mm,” so I decided to keep going. I didn’t think it was a mad “mm,” maybe an I-don’t-know “mm.” Or even an I-do-know-but-I’m-not-going-to-tell-you “mm.”

“Although I guess I did start feeling older last year,” I continued. “Because you know how we mostly stay in our classroom but we also move around for, like, P.E. and music and library? We started calling those ‘first period’ and ‘second period,’ it even says that on our schedule. That did make school different, saying ‘What do we have for second period’ like high schoolers do on TV. Even though the boys laughed at first because we were talking about periods. Do they ever get more mature about that, also?”

That was definitely a question that he could and should respond to, being a boy and all, but it was maybe unfair because Dad got embarrassed talking about those kinds of girl things. Like when Mom bought me my first training bra a few months ago, we were at the mall and she told him why we had to stop by the Target. He stopped dead in his tracks, saying that he had to go to the hardware store and would meet us at the car.

And sure enough he tugged on his beard, cleared his throat, and said, “Not as far as I can tell. Sometimes guys get comfortable talking about that kind of thing, but that won’t happen for a while. And plenty never get there at all. Sorry about it.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “And actually I can see this being a good thing? If there’s ever a guy bothering me and I want him to go away, I can say ‘Oh man I got my period yesterday, so funny how it’s blood but also doesn’t hurt, you know?’ and then he’ll run away like a scared little bunny. Ooh, this could be a lot of fun, what if I started doing that? Not even i they’re bothering me, just to make them uncomfortable? No, that’s mean. Oh well.”

Dad hadn’t stopped tugging on his beard, and I felt a little bad. He was obviously one of those guys who would have run away.

He cleared his throat. “Have you, uh, started. Yet. Or would that be a joke?”

“Omg. Dad. You don’t even know? I promise that once I get my period, I’ll tell Mom, and she’ll tell you. Did you think that had happened and you didn’t know?”

He shrugged, both hands on the wheel. “It’s your business. Didn’t want to assume you’d tell me. But you can. You don’t have to go through your mom.”

“Really?” I tried not to sound so surprised, but his lips quirked up in a smile; he had to see why this was a shocking development.

“Really,” he said. “I know you’re growing up. You’ll be a teenager soon, and I want you to be able to talk to me too. About anything.” He cleared his throat. “Like your feelings, your friends. Any boys you have crushes on.” I’ve always loved his voice; it’s light and reedy, but I’d never heard it like that, almost rough.

There was something I could have said then. About boys, and crushes on them. How I might never have one. And that I didn’t know why. But I held back. “Well, thanks, Dad. I’ll probably value Mom’s opinion about pads and bras and that kind of thing more, but I’m sure we’ll find other important coming-of-age topics to bond over! Maybe once I hit high school, there will be boys worth having crushes on, and your male insight will come in handy.”

Probably not, a little voice whispered at me, but I told it to hush. Because Dad smiled and nodded, then turned up the radio. Because we finally did “bonding” right, for once, and I wanted to keep it that way.

chapter 2

“What do I wear on the first day of school of my last year at school?” I yelled down the hall.

“Clothes,” barked Dad, unhelpfully. But I wasn’t asking him.

“Moooooom! Help me pick out my outfit!”

“You don’t need my help, Annabelle, you’ll look beautiful no matter what,” Mom called back. “And we have to go.”

“Please?” I hollered. “I am suddenly overwhelmed by choices!”

Yes, I should have figured out my first-day-of-school outfit before the first day of school. But in my defense, there were so many first-day-of-school decisions to make. What kind of binder to get, whether or not I needed a new backpack (I said yes, Mom and Dad said no, we compromised and Mom helped me sew some cool patches onto my old one: unicorns and shooting stars and emojis), and also since I didn’t have our class schedule yet, there were so many unknown factors! What if I wanted to wear the shirt that goes with my green Converse but I also wanted to wear my green Converse tomorrow because we’d have gym class, but I didn’t want to wear them two days in a row? Or what if I decided to wear my absolute best outfit today but everyone else dressed normally and it looked like I was trying too hard? But what if there was a cool new kid and this was my only chance to make a first impression?

Well, that last one wouldn’t happen. People didn’t move to Tahoma Falls often, and the kids that I’d be graduating with had been my classmates since kindergarten. A few joined in first or second grade, but the rest of us had known each other since we were babies. Our class used to be twice as big, but the younger grades are always bigger than the older ones. People move away, or go to different schools, and I guess “small class size” is something that parents think is important, but I wouldn’t mind more choice when pairing up for group projects. So the odds of someone new joining in the sixth grade? Maybe in a movie, but not in real life.

I pulled a bunch of things off the hangers and threw them onto my bed. Mom thumped down the short hallway, and of course when she came in my room she was already perfectly dressed in a knee-length orange sun dress, bright red lipstick, and my favorite pair of her glasses, the magenta cat-eyes with rhinestones.

My mom and dad are total opposites in every way. And I know they say that opposites attract, but they’reso different that it was hard to imagine them ever attracting each other. Like, my dad only ever wears dad jeans, which means “out of style.” He might wear a T-shirt if he’s working in the garden, but otherwise, it’s jeans and a button-down. Button-up? Anyway, a plain shirt with buttons. So boring. Whereas my mom always, always, always wears dresses. I think I’ve seen her wear pants three times in my entire life. And the dresses she prefers are like lush tropical flowers, eye-catching and surprising and able to turn any room into a party.

And they’re the exact opposite physically too. For most of my friends, the mom is shorter than the dad, and the dad is generally bigger than the mom. Not in my family! My mom towers over my dad, especially when she’s in heels. And it’s not only that Dad is short and Mom is tall. My mom is like one of those old paintings of rich ladies, all hips and belly and boobs. While my dad is like a blade of grass, sharp shoulders and a sharp jaw and a belt always cinched to the last hole.

I was waiting to see which one I’d take after. For now, in addition to having my dad’s eyes and nose, I was also on the smaller side, hoping for a growth spurt. I’ve always wanted to fill up a room the way my mom does, but I guess there’s more than one way to do that.

“You haven’t let me dress you since you were four!” Mom remarked as she came into my room. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t need you to dress me, but this is a special occasion and I could use your expert eye! Is that too much to ask?”

She laughed. “I suppose not. And it’s nice to know I’m not irrelevant yet. But everyone in your class has known you since kindergarten, so I’m not sure why this is such a big question. Pick one of the new outfits we got for you over the summer, they’re all perfectly nice.”

“Mom!” I huffed. “Don’t you get why it’s important to start off on the right foot? It’s a new year in the oldest class in the whole school! A new me! I don’t know exactlyhow it’s a new me, but I want it to be, so let’s pretend anyway.”

“Okay, okay,” said Mom, putting up her hands in surrender. “So the question is, do you want to go in and make a big statement right away? Or begin as more of a blank slate, so you can evolve into a style as the year progresses?” She walked over to my closet and started pushing hangers aside.

I mulled over my choices. That was a good question. No wonder Mom always looked perfect. “Can I go with something in between? Not a boring blank slate but also not ‘Annabelle Blake, fashion icon’?”

Mom groaned. “You couldn’t have thought this over yesterday? Okay, we’re going for interesting but with plenty of room to grow. How about your denim skirt and this flouncy top?” She held out a shirt that I would describe as more ruffly than flouncy.

“The denim skirt has not fit me in six months, you know that!”

“I didn’t buy you a new one?”

“. . . Also I didn’t like my denim skirt.”

“Fine. Okay, your pink overall dress and a white shirt underneath.”

“No, that screams that I’m a girly girl, which would be okay as one outfit out of a lot of outfits, but not as the first one of the year.” I hopped off the bed to join her in front of the closet, frustrated that nothing seemed quite right, and then inspiration struck. “How about my yellow capris and the forest shirt?” I pulled them both out and held them against me.

“Perfect. Beautiful. See, you didn’t need my help after all. And now you have two minutes to get your yellow-capri’d butt in the car.”

I threw on my outfit, which was super cute, grabbed my backpack, bounded down the porch steps, and was in the car in three minutes. Mom was already waiting for me, engine idling, and Dad waved at us from the door.

I started walking myself to school last year; it only took twenty minutes, there weren’t any big hills, and driving is bad for the environment. But the Lab was on the way to one of my mom’s early clients, and she said that her baby only started sixth grade once. She worked for a program like Meals on Wheels, helping old people keep themselves fed, which meant that my lunch was always balanced and nutritious.

And honestly, I was glad for the ride. It was the hottest first day of school I could remember. Not that I had a cataloged memory of every first day of school and how sticky I was on each one, but global warming is a thing. I told myself that one short car ride wouldn’t make much of a difference in the overall life of Planet Earth, and I didn’t want to sweat through my deodorant before the day even started (I started using deodorant this summer, I hoped everyone else did too).

I watched the same old scenery scroll past me, trees and ivy-covered ditches and identical split-level houses, and sighed. School was fine, mostly. We called a lot of teachers by their first name, and parents were encouraged to volunteer in the classrooms or even teach special lessons. In the second grade we learned about embryology by hatching duck eggs, and also learned about how farm-to-table restaurants work because some kid asked what happened to the ducks we sent back to the farm once they got too big for the classroom. That was a sad day for Peepers, Quackers, Spots, and their siblings, but also my mom made duck for dinner once a year around Christmas, and ducks are delicious, so I couldn’t feel too bad about it. We only ever took tests when we had to because the state made us for funding or whatever, and we never had to do boring stuff like reading a textbook and answering questions at the end. I only knew what textbooks were because sometimes teachers talked about how lucky we were not to have them.

The Lab was started by a bunch of parents a million years ago. Back then, there wasn’t a public school in the area, and they didn’t want to drive for hours every day. Now there is one, of course, but the Lab is smaller and closer to our house, and when it was time for me to start kindergarten my parents talked to people who had kids there and they liked the set-up.

Sixth grade was supposed to be fun. Rumors had circulated for years about what our last year at the Lab would be like—ice cream parties every week, unlimited library books, more field trips, generally being the bosses of all the little kids. Caroline, the sixth grade teacher, had been there since before I was born, and everyone talked about how nice she was.

But I was more excited about the end of sixth grade than the beginning or the middle. I wanted to graduate, and get out. The Lab was fine, but I was getting tired of fine. In the same way that Tahoma Falls was a perfectly nice place to live, but “perfectly nice” had started to become code for “boring.” If I was too young to go to Seattle by myself, I at least wanted to start middle school, where some things would be different.

But before I could work myself into a funk Mom pulled up to the collection of low, flat-roofed buildings that didn’t quite fit together but would be my educational home for one last year. She kissed me on the cheek, I grabbed my backpack, and I zoomed out the car. The year couldn’t end until today started, and I was more than ready for it.

chapter 3

As I approached the classroom door, the tiniest part of me held out hope thatsomething interesting would happen. Like maybe a swirl of blue jays and hummingbirds would accompany me into the room, or I would all of a sudden learn how to walk in slow motion with the wind dramatically blowing my hair back. Or I’d open the door into my face and start the year with a bloody nose, because at least that would be a story. Instead I walked through the doors without a problem, and discovered that the sixth-grade classroom looked exactly like the fifth-grade classroom: desks arranged into groups of four, a library nook, a rug in front of the smart board, a big closet for teacher supplies. I hadn’t been expecting a space-age set up, but they could have spruced it up alittle.

“Good morning!” a voice chimed from behind me. “What’s your name?”

I turned around. Instead of staring up at Caroline, who was very tall and usually wore blouses and skirts, I was right at eye level with a woman with hair cut in a cute bob, a bright orange scarf twined around her neck over a dark purple shirt, and black jeans.

“Where’s Caroline?” I blurted out, before remembering that it was probably a bad idea to be rude to the person who was going to be grading my homework for the rest of the year.

But she didn’t seem offended. Her laugh sounded like the bubbles you blow in a milk carton, delighted and fresh. “I’m Amy. Caroline got sick over the summer, unfortunately, so I’m her replacement. We sent an email to the families, did your parents miss it?”

One thing my parents loved to complain about was how many emails my school sent. “When I was a kid my parents figured school would keep me alive and that was about it,” Dad griped sometimes. I don’t think he’d set foot on campus since dropping me off for the first day of kindergarten. Mom paid attention, sometimes, but she only went to the parent-teacher conferences they scheduled twice a year, no school board meetings or parenting discussion groups or anything, so I wasn’t too surprised to hear that they had entirely missed some big announcement.

“I guess so! But, it’s okay, I like surprises. I mean I don’t like that Caroline is sick—that’s sad and I hope she’s okay—but we’ve all known each other forever, so it’s cool that there’s at least one new person in the room.”

Amy smiled. I couldn’t tell how old she was because she looked like an adult, not a teenager or a senior citizen. She was definitely either older or younger than my parents. Maybe thirty? Or forty? Probably in between those two numbers. “You never did tell me your name,” she reminded me.

“Oh! Sorry. Annabelle.”

She picked up the class list from her desk. “Annabelle Richards or Annabelle Blake?”

“Blake. Annabelle B. That kind of sounds like Anna Belby, which I don’t want to be called, so maybe you could call her Annabelle R.? Sometimes teachers call both of us by our full names but that’s a lot of syllables to say every time. Maybe she’s decided to go by Anna or Belle or her middle name over the summer.”

I hoped so. Us having the same name always bugged me. Not because she’s a bully or a teacher’s pet or anything that bad, really, she just never seemed quitehere. It’s hard to explain, but talking to her always made me feel uncomfortable. She was so clearly in another world, you could never tell if she understood what was going on. And I don’t want to sound mean, but she chewed her hair a lot, so it was always kind of wet and clumpy. She never paid attention, so whenever she asked questions it was usually something the teacher hadjust said. It wasn’t a big deal, no one ever got us confused, but I still wanted to be the only Annabelle in my class.

And right on cue the other Annabelle walked in. She always dressed like her mom picked out her clothes, without realizing that her little girl had grown up. Sixth grade didn’t seem to be any different. She was wearing orange sweatpants, and a yellowish shirt that used to be white with a bunch of Disney princesses on it. Amy introduced herself, and the other Annabelle blinked a few times, said hi, and that her name was Annabelle (dang it) and looked around for the desk with her name on it.

“Where am I sitting?” she asked slowly.

“Oh, I haven’t assigned you seats yet!” Amy said. “I want to get to know you all first. We can figure that stuff out as we go along. Go ahead and find a spot anywhere.” The other Annabelle put down her Frozen backpack, the same backpack she’d had since third grade, at the desk closest to the back of the room. I was glad I hadn’t picked a seat yet, so I wouldn’t have to sit at the same desks as her.

I put my backpack down at the desk diagonal from Sadie, closer to the front. Sadie wasn’t my best friend or anything; my best friend had been this girl named Franka,