The Blonde of the Joke by Bennett Madison

reflection, and said, “You’re my best friend. You know that, right?”
    “Of course,” my reflection said.
    “I have your back,” she said. “Do you have mine?”
    “I will always have your back,” I told Francie. And I meant it. Of course I meant it.
    Francie could do this. She could be bossy, selfish, thoughtless, bug the crap out of me. And then, just like that, she would remind me of not just everything that she had given me, but everything she would always give. Her irrational, unquenchable generosity. A lock of hair had worked its way out of her beehive and was curling around her jaw.
    Francie grabbed my hand. It was the real Francie now, no reflection, and my real actual hand. She squeezed it, hard. It was then, feeling her inch-long, foil-plated nails digging into my knuckles, that I knew that Francie was not exaggerating at all. Maybe Francie never exaggerated. She did have myback. She would not let anything hurt me. She had said it over and over again; it was important to her in a way that I could never totally understand. The way it meant something to her, I knew I could never, ever match.

Chapter Eleven
    T he fountain was holding the whole thing together.
    From a perch on the edge of it, in the middle of the mall’s central hub, you could skim your fingers along the surface of the water and look around and see every aspect. The vantage allowed for an unsettling feeling of omniscience, the way a simple swivel in any direction presented another tableau. The Trench Coat Mafia loitering outside Hot Topic, pretending to be dangerous; the Caribbean nannies wandering out of the Gap and yapping at each other over giant strollers. From the fountain, you could just shift your gaze to another cluster and understand not only who they were but know instinctively exactly what they were saying to each other.
    Even the few parts of Montgomery Shoppingtowne thatyou couldn’t actually see: sitting at the fountain, it was like you had this awareness. Like you were somehow plugged into the nervous system. The water bubbling, the lights shining up from the bottom. Country club blue. Scrape the tiles with your fingers, sift through pennies. Francie and I could both feel Max heading toward us, I think. We looked at each other. Francie smiled an I told you so and quickly wiped a small trace of Cinnabon icing from the corner of her mouth. She patted down her hair.
    And then he was sitting next to us. Just slid right in, all cool like that. “Hey, ladies,” he said.
    “Hey,” I said. He was looking at Francie.
    “Max!” she said. As if she was surprised. She ran a finger around the edge of her ear, along her cheekbone to her jaw, and then, tilting her chin, down her long neck and across her bare collarbone.
    “You remembered my name,” Max said.
    “Duh,” Francie said. “How could we forget?”
    Max had a nose you could write a poem about. I would write a poem about it myself if I was the kind of person who knew how to do things like write poems. Well, it was a nose like a cat’s. Broad and flat but strong, too; noble. It was a nose that meant something, if only you could figure out what.
    His eyes were small and narrow, and heavy lidded, giving the impression that he’d just woken up or been born. His hair hung barely to his chin, gold-blond on the surfaceand velvety dark—nearly black—underneath, when you ran your fingers through it. Obviously I had never run my fingers through Max’s hair. But I’m not going to lie and say I hadn’t considered it, more than once, more than twice, since the day we’d first met him in the parking garage.
    “We got you a present,” Francie said to Max. It was news to me. But somehow, there on the edge of the fountain, Francie reached into a gap of air in front of her and plucked out a Swiss Army knife. She held it out to him with a sphinxy gleam in her eyes, a certain mischievousness in her smile. It was a gift; it was a challenge.
    Max took the knife from her with