Sam used to tell me that honey was the most amazing food in the world, the only one he knew of that never fermented or decayed. Honey is sweeter than sugar, he would say. A natural preservative. Full of health benefits, rich with vitamins and minerals from nectar gathered by the bees. He told me that honey had once been valued as highly as gold, that it had symbolic significance to almost every major religion. It had even been used by some cultures to preserve the bodies of the dead.

Of course, sometimes when he got going like this, I couldn’t resist pointing out that honey is technically just glorified bee vomit. His reply would usually be all scientific, reminding me about bees’ special honey stomachs, how all those extra enzymes made the ripe honey easier for humans to digest. But then other times he would just shrug and say, “Well, if all they eat is flowers, how bad could it be?”

Sam Paulson used to be our neighbor. His house was directly behind ours, on the opposite side of the block, his backyard running right into ours with no fence to mark the property line. The white hive box sat on the back roof of his garage, although technically it was both Julia’s and his. They had both invested in the bees for the sake of their gardens, but it was always Sam who tended the hive, meddling just enough to help them out when they ran into trouble. The bees were always out buzzing around Julia’s flowers, and anytime Julia was out there, Sam was usually buzzing around as well, joking about random things until he made her laugh.

In first grade, when we were supposed to draw pictures of our families at home, I sketched two houses – ours on the left, outlined in black crayon to show that it was white. Inside, I had drawn Julia and me, top-heavy with violet red lips and impossibly long eyelashes. The house on the right was empty. I had drawn Sam outside, his ratty old Broncos cap colored in burnt orange and midnight blue, walking on long legs between rows of jungle green plants from his house to ours.

Even after Julia put a stop to any wishful thinking by explaining that they were just friends, it still didn’t stop me from fantasizing about having a regular family with two parents – and when I was feeling truly inventive, throwing in a sister or a brother. Because even when I ignored the fact that I was adopted, I had to admit that Julia and I didn’t bear much resemblance to a regular family. We were like a pair of mismatched socks that had gotten randomly tucked together - nothing much in common, but each completely alone without the other. Just two people drifting along in a little canoe, sitting at opposite ends, surrounded on all sides by water. And every now and then a little of that water would seep in between us, creeping silently into the boat, threatening to sink us both.

Of course, I didn’t always notice these things. I was always fine when I was little, which I suppose isn’t really saying much. The word “fine” is a lot like the Italian word bene – kind of a throwaway word, even though they both generally mean “good.” Some words are just like that, I guess, the old standby you tend to take for granted.

It’s sort of surprising, though, considering that ti voglio bene is one of the most common Italian ways of saying I love you. Not that love can’t be a throwaway word, too, something people say just to smooth over the tension, to get a needy person off their back. As Julia would say, words can be very empty. Which is sort of a strange thing to hear from someone who truly loves language and is fluent in three, but she’s been telling me this for years. Words are so easy, she says, we tend to hide behind them.

When I was little, I believed what people told me. I believed in the word “fine” like it was some kind of religion, as if my life depended on it. It seemed so important to the grownups around me, this idea that for at least a few years, kids should believe everything is fine. And for the longest time, I did. The phrase How are you never really sounded like much of a question to me. It was more like a knock-knock joke, and everyone seemed to know the punch line.

Julia would probably say that this is just good manners, that there are unwritten rules about being considerate and not burdening people with too much information. But I think the real issue is that people just aren’t all that interested in other people. Unless, of course, those other people happen to be on TV. Then everyone seems perfectly happy to see them stripped naked in every possible way – down to the bone, to the soul. But in real life, about all people ever reveal to each other is the nice, clean, G-rated part of who they are. The part that’s ‘fine.’ It seems to me that politeness just amounts to good bullshitting half the time. People don’t want to see other people’s guts. Most of the people I’ve met can barely handle a close look at their own skin.

“Leigh, look at this.” We were at Goodwill, the last of our stops for the day, and I had finally found something I liked. I held up the enormous coffee mug, lettered in ornate Old English script.

THOU SHALT NOT TALK

SO BLOODY MUCH

Leigh grinned. “Awesome. Are you buying it?”

“No, it’s a message for you.”

“Shut up, dumbass.” She laughed, shoving me out of the way as something on the rack behind me caught her eye. I shoved back, which was always kind of a joke, since I’m so much smaller. Not that this makes Leigh a giant or anything. She’s taller than the average girl by only an inch or two, but I’m smaller than just about everybody.

“Look at these, Allie, they’re only two dollars. Too bad they’re also a size two.” Leigh held up a slim pair of shiny red faux-leather pants. I knew I could probably squeeze my skinny butt into them, but there wasn’t much hope for them fitting around hers. “Why do I have to be so damn fat?” she muttered. “All the good punk clothes around here are for anorexic chicks.”

“Yeah, that must be the problem, Leigh Bee. You’re so fat.” Leigh’s mom, who had an overdeveloped fondness for rhyming words, was usually the only one who used that nickname. She was also the only other person who thought Leigh was overweight. “Those pants would clash with your hair, anyway,” I said, glancing at the cherry-pink streaks we’d added a couple of weeks ago.

“Like I care about being color-coordinated.” Leigh rolled her eyes and shoved the tiny pants back in with the others. In its natural state, her hair was an adorable, buttery blonde, but she had been bleaching it to fried-platinum perfection since seventh grade, then coloring it every so often with Manic Panic or Kool-Aid, whichever she could afford.

I browsed half-heartedly through a bin of neatly folded jeans. This was supposed to be a last-ditch effort to find back-to-school clothes, but I’ve never been as into thrift-shop clothing as Leigh is. She claims it’s because Julia would buy out an entire J. Crew store if I asked her to, but, unfortunately, the real reason is that I’m simply not very skilled at coordinating. You have to have a lot more fashion sense to make an outfit from retro clothes than you do from new ones, and fashion is not my strong point. What I’ve always been drawn to at thrift shops is all the junk in the back. Old candlesticks and ashtrays, lamps that are so butt-ugly they’re almost cool, even the beat-up cassettes by Neil Diamond and MC Hammer. Little random bits of other people’s lives.

Thrift shops are like big orphanages for all the things that have gotten in someone’s way enough times to finally get thrown out. And then all those things just wait patiently on a shelf or a rack to be picked up by someone else. Which might seem a little depressing at first, but I’ve always found the idea sort of comforting. Even when there’s something on the shelf that looks like trash, in the end there always seems to be someone who wants it.

I wandered back to the junk shelves to see if there was anything interesting besides the British coffee mug, but most of it I’d already seen. Leigh caught up with me half an hour later, when I was sitting on the floor flipping through the old vinyl albums.

“Look at this.” I showed her a near-perfect copy of the Marvin Gaye LP, Let’s Get It On. “Two bucks. Not a single scratch.”

“Sweet.” She held up a trashy-looking Barbie doll, dangling her by the hair. “Look what I found for seventy-five cents.”

I sighed. “What are you going to do to poor, defenseless Barbie?”

Leigh flashed me an evil grin. “You’ll see.”

We hopped on the number 15 bus back to my house, hanging on tight as the bus skidded to a stop before we even had a chance to sit down. The bus driver honked and yelled out his window at a car that had just made an illegal left turn in front of him. It was almost five o’clock, and all the little side streets off Burnside were jam-packed with vehicles trying to escape the downtown traffic.

I stared out the window on the way home, studying people’s expressions in the cars below us. Most people were driving alone, staring ahead like little robots, their faces slack and bored. A thin woman in a red hatchback was absentmindedly picking her nose, as if she had forgotten that her car had windows. The big-haired woman in the car behind her was singing to the radio, and she must have been listening to somebody with serious lungs, because her mouth was wide open and I could tell she was doing real vibrato.

“I think they should make Barbies with different facial expressions,” Leigh was saying. I turned to see her scraping at Barbie’s plastic pink lipstick with her fingernail. “She’s always smiling, it’s creepy. Didn’t that ever get on your nerves when you were little?”

“Yeah, kind of.”

“I want to see Crying Barbie, or Road Rage Barbie. Orgasmic Barbie. The woman needs some excitement in her life.”

“Didn’t you tell me about someone making a butch Barbie a while back?”

“Yeah, I think they called her Butch Bobbie. She came with combat boots and a tattoo and this big dyke symbol on her tank top. I saw it online but they were sold out before I could buy one, I was pissed.”

I laughed. “Your mom would have a heart attack.”

“Yeah, well, she’d live through it.” Leigh smiled then, her eyes fixed straight ahead on some delicious, invisible scene.

“Probably.”