On Friday night, when Lucas picked me up, my mom was home, so he came inside and shook her hand. He was wearing a clean sweatshirt and jeans. His sneakers were tied. And all of a sudden I got nervous.

I hadn’t been expecting this to feel so datelike.

My mom craned her neck to look past Lucas out to the curb. “Is that your car?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Lucas answered. “A Mustang.”

Ma’am?

“How old is it?”

“It’s an ’80.”

“Good Lord,” my mom said. “That’s almost fifteen years old.”

“The engine’s solid,” he said. “Or at least, that’s what the guy who sold it to me said. You only have to hit it a couple of times with a wrench to get it going.” It took Mom a minute to realize Lucas was joking.

She looked like she was warming up to lecture him about how the car wasn’t safe, so I took Lucas by the arm and pushed him out the door before she could speak. But when we were on the sidewalk, she came running down the front path. “Do me a favor?” she said, putting a quarter into my hand for the pay phone. “Check in around nine o’clock, when the movie’s over, just so I know not to worry.” I slipped the quarter into my pocket, and my mom jogged back inside.

In the car, Lucas gave me a choice of three movies, all playing at an art house. I was surprised that he wanted to see any of them—I would have pegged him as a specialeffects and car-chase kind of guy. Was this what he thought I liked?

“Are you hungry?” he said. “I was thinking we could get a pizza after the movie?”

“That’s fine,” I agreed, and from his list, I picked Flores de Dolor, because it was the only one not based on an English novel. Of all the foreign films my mom and Valerie take me to, I know those tend to be the slowest.

But Flores de Dolor, which was in Spanish with subtitles, turned out to be a quasi-terrifying story about a little girl trapped in a mountain cabin. There were lots of long, boring shots of her arranging dead flowers around a family of dolls. At the end, she ran through the woods while a crazed maniac with a crowbar followed her.

Lucas paid for my ticket. He sat straight up in his seat next to me. He didn’t reach over and hold my hand. He didn’t look at me. He didn’t laugh at the funny parts—not that there were any.

Afterward, on the way back to the car, when I asked him what he thought of the movie, he said, “It was great.” But he didn’t sound like he thought it was great. He sounded like someone trying to be brave before he gets a shot.

“Well, I hated it,” I said, because someone needed to. “It was boring and stupid and pretentious.”

“Wow,” Lucas said, really looking at me for the first time all night.

“I don’t only like art movies,” I said. “And I’m not freaked out by your dreams or your memories or whatever. Maybe you’re a psychic. Or maybe you have a concussion. Or maybe you’re—”

“Crazy?” he offered.

“Whatever,” I said. “I’d rather talk to you about all that than have you take me to movies that you think I’m going to like but are actually really stupid.”

“I—” Lucas started. I saw something pass across his eyes, almost like I was seeing a shark swimming in the back of a shadowy aquarium.

“Just tell me,” I said. “I can handle it.”

But he didn’t tell me. We were standing in the parking lot next to his car. It was not quite raining, but a fog was leaving a mist on our skin and clothes. Lucas took me by my wrists and backed me up against the car door, then moved his hands to my jawline, looking at all the different parts of my face.

“I’m so glad you hated that movie,” he said, and then he kissed me, hard, and I felt like I was finally addressing the sensation I’d had all week, the feeling of floating, like I couldn’t feel the connection between my feet and the ground. All that time I’d just wanted this, to be pressed up against him, kissing in the dark parking lot, my hair dampening in the mist, Lucas’s hands moving down my back and coming to rest around my waist.

When I remembered to call my mom, it was almost nine-thirty. She was cool, though—and she told me Rosemary had called a few minutes before, sounding upset. She’d left a number.

“He just left me here, the dweeb-breath mouth-farting douche bag!” This was Rosemary screaming into the phone when I called her back. She had picked up on the first ring.

“How did you know it was going to be me?”

She started using language that I can’t write down here.

“Where are you?” I said.

“I don’t know! Jason’s parents’ country place, but I don’t even know what town it’s in. He drives. I don’t pay attention. It’s in the middle of the woods somewhere, next to a random lake. I’m going to have to call my mom or dad to come get me. I am going to be so screwed.”

She was talking loud enough that Lucas could hear everything she was saying through the phone. I looked at him. He smiled. I shrugged.

I put my hand over the mouthpiece to ask him a question, but I didn’t even need to. He nodded, knowing right away what I had been about to say.

“I’m with Lucas,” I said to Rosemary. “We’ll come get you. Just calm down and figure out where you are.”

But Rosemary wasn’t ready for that. “I thought I was being respectful,” she was saying, “breaking up with him in person. I knew he was really into me, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but you know what? Screw his feelings. He started screaming at me.”

“Mail,” Lucas whispered. “Tell her to look for a piece of mail. A magazine label or something with an address on it.”

“He threw a book across the room. He started asking me if there was someone else. I was like, ‘Yeah, how about anyone else? That would be better than you.’ Jesus, Juliet, how am I going to get home?”

“Rose?” I said. “Are you aware that Lucas can hear every word you’re saying?”

Rosemary found a piece of mail.

It took nearly forty-five minutes to get to the town where Jason’s country house was, and then we still made a few wrong turns. We eventually had to stop at a gas station for directions.

Finally, a mile down a side road, we found the house. Rosemary had turned on every light and was standing in the doorway. As soon as she saw our headlights, she started running, the lights blazing behind her. “Shouldn’t you shut the front door?” I said. “Is it okay to leave the lights on like that?”

“He’s lucky I didn’t trash the place,” Rosemary said. “Do you realize that I could never have explained to my dad what I was doing out here?”

“We can TP the house if you want,” Lucas suggested.

“No.” Rosemary tossed her hair and sniffed meaningfully. “I’m better than that.”

“Nice,” said Lucas. “ ’Cause I’m starving.” He looked at me, then Rose. “You guys want to eat?”

Over pizza, Rosemary asked about the movie. “It was awesome,” Lucas said. “There was this little girl, right? With big eyes.” He looked at me. “Huge, right?”

“Saucers.”

“And a doll.”

“A creepy doll.”

“Like Chucky. Like, ‘I’m baaa-aaack.’ ” Rosemary was laughing too hard to get any Coke up through her straw.

“And Chucky and Big-Saucer-Eyes Girl only spoke Spanish.”

“You noticed that?” I said.

“Yeah, like, what the heck? The whole movie was in Spanish.”

Rosemary was laughing harder. We all were.

Then Lucas asked Rosemary about Jason. “So who is this clown?”

“I thought it was so cool at first,” she said. “How he took me to restaurants and knew about all the food and liked to drink wine.” She spoke with an air of pity, as if she were describing someone with a terminal illness. “But he’s not cool. He’s pathetic. He’s in college. He should be going to frat parties and drinking beer. He should have friends. I swear, he would rather spend weekends antiquing with his parents.”

“Yeah, that’s just sad,” said Lucas, kind of snorting. We were all laughing again.

After we were done eating, Rosemary went to the bathroom, and Lucas took her place on my side of the booth. He slid his arm around my waist and looked down at me, half joking, half serious, his eyes narrowed to slits. “I hope I never hear you talking about me like that,” he said. “If I don’t go away nicely when you break up with me, just keep it to yourself, okay?”

I couldn’t help it—I giggled. Having him so close to me, pretending to warn me, feeling his face next to mine … The whole time I’d been listening to Rose, laughing with her, I’d been wondering when I’d be able to kiss Lucas again, how long I would have to wait, if it would be tonight or some other time.

“I won’t,” I said, shaking my head. I was laughing still, almost like I was being tickled, but I was also serious. I wanted him to know the truth. “It’s not the same.”

Lucas started to say something, but then he stopped. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I’d registered a bell ringing as someone entered the restaurant, and now that I was following Lucas’s eyes, I saw it was a soldier wearing fatigues, his tiny-boned wife at his side. The soldier was carrying a toddler, and the wife had a diaper bag. They were beaming.

“Hey!” shouted a voice from behind the counter. A man who worked there came running out to give the soldier a slap on the back, and then he kissed the wife. “You’re back!” the man said. “She was in here last week and told me you were coming home. You got in just now?”

“Today.” The soldier put the baby down so she could toddle, and he rubbed a hand across the top of his stubbly crew cut.

“That’s going to be you, right?” I said quietly to Lucas, pulling my gaze away from the soldier. I was teasing, but when I saw the look in Lucas’s eyes, I could feel my smile fade. His description of his dream came back to me in a flash—everything the color of sand. Bedsheets on a clothesline. The heavy feeling in his body, his knees, what he thought was an older body.

Was Lucas thinking about the dream now? He squinted like he was concentrating.

“Yeah,” he said. He put his hand on his own head, touching his almost-curling hair, imitating, maybe without even realizing it, the way the soldier had rubbed his head.

And then my brain started to go into overdrive, as it sometimes does when I’m in a debate round.

“Oh my goodness,” I said. “Of course! Lucas, I just figured all this out.”

Lucas pulled back his head like a turtle retreating into its shell. “Figured what out?” he said.

“It makes perfect sense,” I said. “Your remembering thing? You’re not remembering. You’re scared.” He gave me a “Huh?” look, but I plowed on anyway, sure he’d understand soon. “You’re afraid to join the marines. But you don’t want to admit it, so your brain is resorting to these dreams. It’s your subconscious trying to tell you something.”

Lucas twisted his mouth in an expression of skepticism, but I just kept going. “Don’t you see? Your dream isn’t a memory, it’s a projection of the future.” I was inventing the theory as I described it. “You’re so sure this is what it will be like you can’t imagine it any other way.”

“Juliet—” Lucas began, trying to stop me.

“No,” I said. “It’s fantastic, because this is so easy to fix. Lucas, you know you don’t have to go. No one’s forcing you to enlist. There are colleges for everyone—”

“Juliet—” Lucas tried again.

But I still wasn’t done. “Sometimes a plan seems great when you’re a freshman or something, but as you get closer to the time, it looks like less of a good idea. You can wait—”

Lucas cut me off. “This isn’t about talking to a guidance counselor and picking a career path,” he said, his tone sharp.

“Then what is it?” In the cloud of self-congratulation at the brilliance of my own theory, I couldn’t imagine that he wouldn’t see it just like I did.

Lucas took a breath and shook his head. And then he smiled, a slow-moving smile. “It’s because that guy’s army, you bonehead.” Like it was a joke.

Passing the soldier and his family, Rosemary came to the end of our booth. She nodded at the seat that Lucas had vacated to sit next to me. “I’m not disturbing you two, am I?” she said.

“Not at all,” said Lucas, standing quickly, like he was happy to move on.

He dropped Rosemary and me at my house without kissing me good night.

Was something wrong? I didn’t have a chance to ask him and didn’t really want to anyway. As soon as Lucas had stood up from the table, I’d seen how intrusive I had been. I wished I’d kept quiet. I just wanted to go back to the part of the evening when we were kissing by the car. Or laughing with Rosemary over pizza.

Inside, we found my mom reading on her cozy white couch in the living room, her knitting basket at her feet and the TV, muted, turned to the news.

Valerie was with her, working on a crossword, drinking bourbon—her de-stressing routine.

“Rosemary?” my mom said, her eyes narrowing as she tried to figure out what was going on—I’d left with Lucas and was returning with Rose, a good hour later than I’d said I’d be home.

“We met up after the movie,” I explained. When my mom didn’t answer immediately with “Oh, sure,” it occurred to me that she was deciding whether she believed me.

“So how was the movie?” Val asked. “And more to the point, what kind of self-respecting hockey player takes you to a foreign film?” Val hadn’t met Lucas yet, but she’d grown up with brothers and loved the idea of him. I think she was envisioning Sunday afternoons on the sofa, with Lucas her surrogate nephew, watching football.

“Flores de Dolor? Wasn’t particularly well reviewed,” my mom said, yawning.

I laughed, remembering Chucky and I’m baaa-aaack. “It shouldn’t have been.”

My mom was looking at me, a question in her prettily furrowed brow. For a second, I considered telling her what was going on, if only just to get it off my chest. I could sit down on the couch between Mom and Val and let them fold me into their easy, protective arms, making like I was still ten, and we’d talk and talk, them hooting at everything I said like I was the most brilliant child ever born.

What would my mom make of Lucas’s dream/memory weirdness? Would lawyerly, practical Val have a theory? They would believe my subconscious-fear theory, I was sure. They wouldn’t be able to tell if a soldier was army or marines.

Before we went to sleep, Rosemary and I lay silently for a while, and I thought, This is when you tell your best friend what’s been happening. But I didn’t. And then I thought, Now. Still, I couldn’t start.

And when Rosemary finally said, “I should have seen this thing with Jason coming,” I was grateful. “The boring ones are always the angriest,” she went on. “They don’t know they’re boring. They just think everyone else is blind to their charms.” She yawned and arched her back like a kitten. I knew she’d be asleep in five minutes. “Sad, really.”

“That he’s so boring?”

“That he’s so cute. Such a waste.”

“Maybe there has to be something a little bit wrong with anyone in college who would date someone in high school.”

“You mean I’m supposed to date high school guys?” Rosemary scoffed, then caught herself. “Oh, Lucas. I forgot. Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“It’s better than okay.” Rosemary yawned again. “I could tell tonight. He’s crazy about you.” She was two breaths away from losing consciousness. “And he should be.”

I could have said something about his memories to her then. But just at that moment, her breathing grew even. Rosemary was asleep.