As Cassie boarded her plane to New York, she envisioned meeting her cousins again. Of course Monica would be bossy, but Cassie was used to that, and it was her wedding after all. Seeing Monica in a wedding gown would be a treat. She'd seen pictures of Monica in the Geller Yeller and been amazed at how beautiful her cousin had become after losing all of the extra weight, though Cassie had always been conscious of the charm of Monica's dark eyes and exquisite little features. She knew that Monica had fulfilled some of her childhood dreams: she had become a chef at an expensive little New York restaurant, and she'd met what Cassie could only assume was the man of her dreams.

Ross, according to the family newsletter, had become a paleontologist. He'd been married, too. When the wedding announcement arrived in the family newsletter, Cassie had been shocked. She'd been only 21, and Ross had been 22, but Ross's parents had written that he and Carol had dated through of college. Cassie had been invited to that wedding but was studying abroad in France at the time.

In fact, Ross had been married more than once. When Cassie saw that he and Carol had divorced, due to "different interests" (maybe Ross was too geeky for Carol, who looked like a jock), she'd felt bad for Ross, knowing that he must have taken it very hard. The second marriage announcement took her by surprise: he was going to marry a British girl named Emily after an engagement of mere weeks. She was invited to that wedding too but at the time she couldn't afford the plane ticket to London on such short notice. But after that announcement, Emily's name never showed up in the Geller Yeller again. When Cassie had talked on the phone with Monica, settling the details of their visit, she'd asked about Emily. Monica had said that the marriage hadn't worked out, that it was complicated, and that it was probably best if Cassie didn't mention Emily's name to Ross, as it was still a sore subject more than a year after the fact.

Cassie had been struck by how Ross had grown up in the pictures printed in the Geller Yeller. He still looked like himself, a little goofy, but now he was a handsome sort of goofy, tall and broad-shouldered, his features unchanged but in nicer harmony on his face, with a bit of shyness remaining in his smile and the way he held his head.

Cassie worked as a manager at a yoga studio. It was not something she had ever imagined doing, but she'd picked up yoga in college and also realized that she had a knack for business management. Though she liked her job and it paid well, she was a bit jealous that Ross had become a paleontologist. Cassie's nerdiness was something she had to mask around her friends; Ross's nerdiness was his career.

o0o0o0o0o0o

When they were ten and eleven, Ross developed a backbone. He started making fun of Cassie, too. At first she was startled, then angry, and then she enjoyed it. She no longer felt guilty about taunting Ross when he had a comeback ready for her. Sometimes, both of them went a little too far and hurt the other's feelings, but they would always recover within an hour or two. They referred to themselves as sworn enemies, but no sworn enemies spent so much time together off by themselves. Sworn enemies also did not have midnight adventures. Cassie would sneak out of Monica's room in the middle of the night, when Monica's soft snores had deepened and she knew the girl would not notice, and go down to the kitchen, where Ross would be waiting for her.

Usually, they'd do nothing more than sit on the kitchen island, drawing together. Cassie taught Ross about DnD, which she'd just started playing, and Ross drew pictures of the different races of characters as she described them. Ross was a better artist than Cassie, but he kept both of their drawings in the same folder, which Monica insisted on organizing by sections: Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Star Trek (mostly Cassie's: Ross wasn't nearly as big of a Trekkie as she was), Dungeons and Dragons, Science Boy (Ross's comic book series that he started when he was twelve), and Miscellaneous. Monica had no idea when the cousins would do the drawings, and she didn't ask: she was too excited about having something new to organize. Ross resented Monica's meddling, preferring that the drawings be sorted chronologically. Cassie wanted to keep the drawings for herself and often considered stealing the folder.

Sometimes she and Ross would use their midnight meetings to rush out into the woods and climb trees. Ross fashioned flashlights that they could wear on their heads out of duct tape and rubber from a destroyed tire. Cassie always had to help Ross to find footholds amongst the branches, for which she teased him until he picked her up and threatened to drop her twenty feet down. Sometimes they'd play on the deserted, forgotten playground that they'd found one night: a playground that hadn't been maintained for at least thirty years, with rusty chains that squeaked as the cousins went back and forth on the swings, and monkey bars that rotated so it was almost impossible to hold on.

They'd play thumb war, which Cassie usually won. They'd arm wrestle, which Ross usually won. They'd have tickle fights on the muddy forest floor, which would always end in a breathless stalemate. She knew all of his 22 foolproof tickle-spots that would get him pleading for mercy. He knew a few of hers, and usually took advantage of the one on the left side of her stomach, which would make her giggle and screech and flail wildly until she knocked his glasses off. Fortunately for her, he never discovered the worst one: the sensitive area of her neck, just under her right ear.

Monica would wrestle with Ross too, and she generally won because of the weight advantage. Unlike gangly Ross and lanky Cassie, Monica had been a cherub of a child, and when she was around nine she started putting on lots of weight that took her from 'pleasantly plump' (according to Aunt Judy) to overweight.

She and Cassie did not wrestle together. The one time Monica came down to the basement and saw Ross and Cassie wrestling, tumbled amongst the corduroy ruins of their couch cushion fort, she stared with a strange expression. That night before she fell asleep, she said that maybe they were too old to wrestle with boys anymore. Cassie wanted to know what she meant, but Monica fell silent, and soon she was snoring.