“I’m sorry I freaked you out.”

Lucas was leaning across the desk again, smiling in a way that brought back the cartwheel feeling I’d had on the roof and chalked up to wide-open space.

“I’m okay,” I said.

“Really?” His clear blue eyes projected a look of such innocence I felt myself wondering how I’d ever thought it possible to be afraid with him. He jiggled his pen, then spun it around a few times for good measure. Then the pen stopped moving. His Adam’s apple jogged up and down one time. His eyes, looking at me, were still.

“Why did you say those things?” I asked. “We’ve never been up on the roof together before.”

Robin Sipe, intrepid girl reporter, shifted in her seat, so I knew she was listening. I must have turned in response to her, a gesture Lucas recognized. Without moving his head, he shifted his eyes to Robin’s back, then to me again. He held up a finger, jotted down a note, and passed it to me just as Mr. Hannihan was starting the class.

That was the first time I saw Lucas’s handwriting. It was horrendous, barely legible—all tiny, sharp angles and letters so squeezed you could barely tell the series of scratches formed words. The note read:

Is your mom out tonight? Can I come talk to you?

My mom was always out on Tuesdays. Tuesday was her take-a-donor-to-dinner night. But how did Lucas know that? Okay, I guess everyone has a mom, and everyone’s mom goes out from time to time. But how come he didn’t ask if my parents were out?

I wrote back to him:

Do you even know where I live?

And he wrote:

Lawn mowing. Do you remember?

It took me a second, and then I did.

After school, I got home early to work on an article for the paper. I set myself up the way I liked to for writing—at the desk by the window in my room—and pretended I was actually able to concentrate enough to get anything done.

I hadn’t been able to decide whether I should tell my mom Lucas was coming over. I hadn’t told anyone about going up to the roof with him. Rosemary had shrugged when I’d asked her opinion about letting my mom know he was coming to the house. “It’s up to you,” she’d said. “But I wouldn’t mention it to my parents.”

I’d decided I wouldn’t mention it either, but then, five minutes after getting home, I found myself dialing Mom’s work number.

My mom trusted me. She had every reason to. I wasn’t into the whole high-school-rebel scene. But still … a boy. Alone. In the house. She didn’t exactly freak, but the upshot was that I could see him, just not alone in the house. I wasn’t even mad at her for laying down the law. I was kind of relieved.

So when Lucas pulled his car into the driveway, I was waiting for him on the front porch. The hockey team didn’t have skate practice in the fall, but they had workouts, so Lucas stepped out of his hulking, rusting red car, his hair dark where it was still wet from the shower, the tips drying to blond.

“Hey,” he said, holding up a hand halfway as if he wasn’t sure I would return the wave. There was something about his hesitation—I felt a lightening of my whole body, the way you feel after you hold your breath.

“My mom doesn’t want me to have you in the house,” I blurted out before he even got all the way up the path across the front lawn. “Sorry.”

Lucas shrugged and squeezed in next to me on the stoop. His leg was pressed up against mine. It was close quarters, but I was pretty sure he’d sat even closer to me than he needed to.

“It would be okay to take a walk,” I said. “She said we could get food or something in the Center.” I pointed toward our tiny downtown—besides the library, the town hall, and the post office, there were a few fancy stores that no one I knew shopped at, a café that served lunch, and another for upscale Chinese.

“Great,” Lucas said, putting his hands on his knees and standing. I ran inside and got some money out of my desk drawer.

I’d left the front door open, and coming down from upstairs, I could see Lucas through the window in the storm door. He was waiting right where I’d left him, but his smile had been replaced by a look of intense concentration, as if the two pillars that tried to make our stoop into a bona fide porch might be holding a secret.

When he saw me, the look disappeared. “You ready?” he said.

I wondered what would happen if I just said no. My mom always said to trust my instincts, but my instincts were firing in multiple directions. Something about the way he looked at me was frightening. But I skipped out the door and down the step anyway.

The houses in my neighborhood were small and almost a hundred years old, the trees huge and towering, the sidewalks narrow and uneven. Walking shoulder to shoulder, Lucas and I bumped into each other a few times, and each time we waited just a second longer than we had to before separating.

I had worried that we wouldn’t have anything to talk about, but Lucas made it really easy. He wanted to know how long I’d lived in the neighborhood, whether I had any brothers and sisters. When I mentioned that my parents were divorced, he asked all about my dad, about what kind of a doctor he was (oncologist—he’s a researcher who also sees patients) and how often I saw him (once a year, for two weeks in the summer). His questions seemed so straightforward and normal I started to wonder if I’d just imagined that he already seemed to know too much about me. When he’d written “Is your mom out tonight?” on the note, maybe he’d meant it to be shorthand for “mom and dad.” Maybe he assumed dads come home from work late. Maybe it was common knowledge around school that I lived with just my mom, in the same way Rosemary and I knew that Lucas lived in Jefferson Valley.

“How about you?” I said. “Do you have—you know—an intact nuclear family, parent-wise?” He’d already mentioned he was the oldest of three boys. He had a brother who was nine and another who was seven.

“Yeah,” he said. “For now.”

“For now?”

“My parents fight some.”

“In front of you?” It was a nosy question, but something about the way Lucas had been acting with me, like he wanted to skip the getting-to-know-you part and move straight to the let’s-go-up-on-the-roof-and-talk-crazy part, made it feel okay.

“Sometimes,” Lucas said. “Now that I have the car, I just take off. I bring Tommy and Wendell with me. In a year I’ll be gone.”

“So you are going to college?”

“Hell no,” Lucas laughed. “I’m joining the marines. They’ll pay for college after a few years of active service.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Why would I be kidding?”

“It’s just—I don’t know. I’ve never actually known anyone who wanted to join the military.”

“Half my relatives are marines.”

Oops, I thought. Time to backtrack. “Your dad?”

“And my grandpa. My dad’s grandpa. Uncles. There’s been a Dunready mucking up the marines since there were marines, probably. We’ve been in every overseas conflict since World War II.”

I tried to keep the look of horror off my face, but I guess I didn’t try hard enough. Lucas burst out laughing. “Not everyone goes to law school,” he said. “We’re not all you.”

I stopped walking. “How do you know I want to go to law school?”

He smiled a slow, lazy smile that spread across his face like a cat stretching its limbs after a nap in the sun. He shrugged. “You’re saying you’re not going to be graduating from law school in, let’s see …” He counted on his fingers. “Two years left of high school, four of college. How many at law school?”

“Three.”

He checked his watch as if he could tell time on it in years. “About ten years?”

I laughed at the watch thing. And okay, I did want to go to law school. I loved the image of me in a suit like Valerie’s, poring over important documents on a computer, the way my mom and I would find Val when we picked her up for a play or a concert. To me, Val’s big desk, her secretary, and her expensive suits signified power, security, intelligence, independence—everything I wanted for myself.

“Okay,” I said. “You win. But how did you know?”

“Lucky guess?” He stepped onto a tree root that was pushing up through the sidewalk, balancing for a second with one hand on the tree’s trunk, and then spun around in the air to face me, steadying himself by laying his hands on my shoulders.

“I used to think you were too serious,” he said, as if now that his face was close to mine, he could tell me something that was just between the two of us. His dog tags were tucked under his T-shirt, but I could see the chain around his neck. “But something changed. I don’t know. It’s like I can see what you’re thinking. All the time.”

I felt like my belly button had been pressed up against my spine. But I tried to keep it casual. “Want me to think of a number and you’ll take a guess?”

“Yeah,” he laughed. “Think of six. Got it? Okay, I’m gonna guess.” He put a finger on my nose. “Six!” Belly button. Again. “Am I right?”

I am pretty sure I was blushing as red as the barn-red house we were standing in front of just then. He let go of my shoulders and we started walking again side by side.

“So where do you want to go?” he said. “Do you want to get something to eat?”

“Eat?” I asked, as if I no longer understood the meaning of the word.

“Friendly’s?” he prompted.

For no reason that I can name, I laughed.

And then he laughed. I knew he couldn’t possibly have understood what I was laughing at, since I didn’t even know, but there was something so good in our laughing together. He took my hand and it felt like the most natural thing in the world. He squeezed. He swung his arm forward.

I looked down. Looking at him and holding hands with him at the same time was almost too much to take. Was I an open book? Did he really see right into what I was thinking? I’d always thought of myself as decisive, quick to judge, a get-it-done fighter, the kind of person who doesn’t wear her heart on her sleeve.

Lucas pointed at something. A kid had built a crazy skateboard jump with a ramp, a two-by-four, and a bicycle wheel. He was getting ready to attempt his first run through it—no helmet.

“You could write the word ‘stupid’ in three-foot-high letters, and this kid still does a better job of getting the idea across,” Lucas said.

I snorted, and Lucas laughed again too.