As the fall moved forward, all I wanted was to be with Lucas. I didn’t care when Val got tickets to shows. I didn’t want to hang out at Rosemary’s after school, eating cheese popcorn and drinking the Pellegrino that was supposed to be for guests. I didn’t care if Rose was watching Doctor Who. I didn’t care what Jake and Amanda were up to on Melrose Place. I didn’t want to try on dresses I would never wear. I didn’t want to spend Saturday mornings wandering the museum’s galleries while my mom finished up a few projects in her office overlooking the sculpture court.

I made excuses. I’d tell my mom I had homework, then spend the night on the phone with Lucas, pretending that I’d just called him when she picked up the extension downstairs.

I knew my mom was watching me—over the top of her knitting, her glasses pushed down to the bottom of her cute-as-a-button nose, the questions she wasn’t asking swirling in her brain. I could tell what she was thinking. She was thinking that Lucas wasn’t enough. That he didn’t understand the world—her world. That someone not going to college was going to pull me down.

I could have made a case for him. I could have put her mind at ease, telling her about how in physics Lucas was the one who understood how velocity and momentum affect the universe. About how he beat me in Scrabble.

I could have told my mom how much Lucas knew about the marines. How he’d memorized the complex hierarchy of job classification. How, if you wanted to see any action, you’d need to be an “03,” and how you needed to time your enlistment with the annual cycle of job assignments to maximize the available choices. He would say things like “Guys make the mistake of thinking only about basic, but you have to plan for four years. You need a good job going in—you don’t want to just be a grunt.” He talked about how technology was changing the way the military fought. He mentioned Grenada. The Gulf War.

I could have told my mom how protective Lucas was of his little brothers, how because of whatever weirdness was going on with his dad, he had been the one who helped out their Little League team the year before. I could have told her how once, when he and I got stuck in a traffic jam Mrs. Dunready had warned us about, Lucas pushed his hands against the steering wheel, locked his elbows, and said, “You know what I hate about my mom? I hate how she always ends up being right.”

I could have told her how generous Lucas was. Generous in ways most people didn’t notice. Like, he didn’t interrupt people. When Rosemary was talking, he turned his full gaze on her and let her say what she needed to say. He did the same to me, and also to my mom, to his friends, to Mr. Hannihan, although no one interrupted Mr. Hannihan—God forbid he should get off the subject of his sailboat and start talking about physics.

But I didn’t tell my mom any of this. Maybe because, from the beginning, there were things about Lucas that I knew better than to tell anyone. Or maybe it was just because what I really wanted from Lucas was Lucas. Undiluted, uncopied, unphotographed, unprocessed Lucas. I didn’t want to share him. I wanted it to be just him and me. Alone.

One Sunday, Val invited Mom and me over for her famous chili and I said I couldn’t go because I already had plans with Rose.

My mom let me know with a withering glance that she assumed I was meeting Lucas and just not telling her. But she was wrong. I did have plans with Rose—sort of. We were going to meet up with Lucas and his friend Dexter Fine in the park near my house.

“You lied to your mom?” Rosemary said as we waited for Lucas and Dex to arrive. Rose and I were sitting side by side on a bench facing the drained swimming pool. “Your mom?”

Uh-oh, I thought. Rosemary loves my mom. She glamorizes her independence. She thinks of her as that camp counselor you never lie to because she’s just that cool.

“You lie to your mother all the time,” I said. “It’s practically a religion for you.”

“But that’s my mom. She wants me to lie to her.”

I pshawed.

“If I tried to tell my mom the truth, she couldn’t take it. It would be like when those opera singers hit that note that makes everyone’s wineglasses shatter.”

“Your mom’s nice.”

“My mom acts like it’s the 1950s. All she did in high school was take flower-arranging classes and ride horses. She was obsessed with horses. Which is how I know she was a virgin, by the way. Horses are proof positive.”

Rosemary is full of theories like this. I put them in the same category with her knowing when celebrities get arrested or divorced and which teachers are having affairs and who is gay. She called it “gaydar,” a word I didn’t even know existed until she tried to convince me that my mom and Val were “obviously” an old married couple who kept their true relationship under wraps for my sake and for the sake of their careers. (“Shut up!” I had said. That was crossing a line.)

“But your mom talks to you,” Rosemary was saying now. “You could tell her about stuff. Like guys. Like Lucas.”

“I don’t want to,” I confessed. Rosemary shot me a look. Maybe she was connecting what I was saying about my mom to my reluctance to discuss Lucas with her too? I wouldn’t have been surprised. Every conversation we’d had lately seemed to end with one of us stopping abruptly because to say one sentence more would mean we were in a fight.

Take Dexter, Lucas’s friend who was on his way to meet us at that very moment. Rosemary had been torturing him for weeks, and as I’d watched her draw him in, I’d found myself thinking, What is she doing? I mean, the poor guy. He wasn’t in Rosemary’s league. He never would be.

Dex was … well, he was Dex. Lucas’s best friend. A good kid in general, but no rocket scientist. He had shiny black hair that fell into his eyes, and he wore impossibly baggy pants. I’d never heard him speak more than five words in a row. The hockey team—playing, lifting weights with the guys, driving around and partying together—seemed to be his life.

And yet here we were, meeting up in the park and then driving over to Dex’s house on a Sunday night because Rosemary said she wanted to see where he lived.

“It’s nothing special,” Dex said, embarrassed and flattered by her interest at the same time.

Dex’s house was the kind half the kids in our town lived in—a picture window in the living room, a minivan in the driveway, a basketball hoop over the garage, a wreath of dried flowers on the front door, one backyard spilling into the next. I was expecting the inside to be all about family, with lots of kids, muddy shoes, and sports equipment, a dad cooking pancakes or hot dogs, a mom running school committees.

But when we got inside, the hall was dark. The wallpaper in the half-lit living room was faded. Dex’s white-haired mom was sitting at the kitchen table alone, under a single light, clipping coupons and drinking a cup of tea, a pale blue cardigan draped over her shoulders like she was afraid of drafts. His dad was watching golf in the den, smoking a cigar, which gave the house a rich, foreign smell that reminded me of the incense in Rosemary’s church. “Hullo!” Dex’s dad said affably, but he looked a bit disoriented, like someone just woken from a nap.

“Sorry my parents are so old,” Dex said once we were in the basement.

“They’re not old.” Rosemary slapped Dex gently on the shoulder like he had just said something funny. “They’re nice.”

“They’re old,” Dex sighed.

“Your mom gave us snacks.” Rose held up the crinkly package of weird Stella D’oro cookies his mom had foisted on her.

“She gave us grape soda,” Dex said, matching her cookies with a plastic liter bottle. “Who drinks that anymore? What are we, twelve?”

“I love grape soda,” Rosemary countered, but she couldn’t keep the laughter out of her voice. She ran a finger through the dust on the bottle’s topmost curve and ended up snorting. “I’ve been craving a nice ancient bottle of flat grape soda for weeks.”

Now Dex was laughing too, but a little uncertainly, like he wasn’t sure he was in on the joke.

Rose extended an open palm. “Cookie me, please,” and Dex fumbled bravely with the bag. After he’d finally managed to get the cookie into her hand, Rose sat down on the couch next to me, crossed her legs, and smiled like a cat settling into a sunny spot on a windowsill.

Her cookie sat untouched on her knee.

Dex walked over to the TV, which was part of this wood-paneled, stereo-television console from the 1970s. He flipped on a Celtics game.

“How old are your parents, anyway?” Rosemary asked.

Dex shrugged.

“You don’t know?” Rose narrowed her eyes, as if she were looking at a rare specimen of tree frog flown in from the Amazon rain forest to satisfy our scientific curiosity. “You’re kidding, right?”

“My sister, Jessie, is the oldest, and she’s thirty-five or something, so mid-fifties? Older?” Dex shrugged again. “I didn’t know there was going to be math on the test.”

“I’ll give you math,” Rosemary said. “Your sister’s thirty-five—that makes you a love child!”

Dex blushed. “Oh, come on.”

“You mean an accident.” Lucas was fiddling with the rabbit ears on top of the TV to adjust the reception.

Dex shoved him. A playful shove. They were like this together; all the hockey guys were. “How old is your mom?” he said.

“You don’t want to go there.” Lucas held up his hands in a gesture of “I surrender.”

Rosemary cleared her throat dramatically. “Are you two done?”

Dex snapped to attention, brushing his hair out of his face. Grabbing a Ping-Pong paddle, he said, “We could—you know …” The rubber was peeling off the paddle on one side. “No one uses it anymore.”

Rose popped the cookie in her mouth, uncrossed her skinny legs, extracted herself from the sofa, and, holding Dex’s wrist to keep the paddle steady, ripped off the rubber like she was removing a Band-Aid. “Great idea.” She turned to me. “You playing?”

“No, she’s not,” Lucas answered for me, grabbing my hand and somehow making it look like I was pulling him violently down onto the sofa, even though he was basically diving on top of me. “We’ll watch,” he announced.

Rosemary rolled her eyes and then turned her attention to the table, running her hands over the surface to determine where it was warped, laying out the ground rules for the game.

Rosemary is an amazing tennis player, and she’s also got a mean Ping-Pong game, but what she was demonstrating that night wasn’t her control over the ball. It was her control over Dex. She flipped her hair. She giggled. She bumped his hip with hers. When he aced a serve, she said, “Dex, Dex, Dex, what am I going to do with you?” and he actually apologized, somehow forgetting that she’d aced him three times when she had served. She treated him like they were old friends, instead of people who two weeks before would have passed each other in the halls without speaking. Like Dex was someone she thought about. A lot.

But he wasn’t. I’d seen her roll her eyes when he called her, pumping him for dirt on who liked who in the senior class and which seniors were in a fight while she drew pictures of octopuses on her math homework.

The only thing that made what she was doing not incredibly cruel—at least, Ping-Pong-wise—was the fact that Dex played with the same kind of aggressive intensity as Rose did. In fact, he beat her. Then she beat him. Then they played a game where the points lasted so long Dex’s old-man dad poked his head down the stairs and informed us that “Mom says it’s getting a little late for guests.” It was nine.

“Want to rent a movie?” Dex said. “Video Galaxy’s open for another hour.”

“Nah.” Lucas smiled ruefully. “My head is killing me.” We all knew why—preseason training had started, and he’d been sprinting at practice all afternoon. He stood up from the couch stiffly, offered me a hand. “Want a ride home?”

I looked at Rose. She put her hands in the front pockets of her jeans, somehow making her legs appear even longer than they were. She was looking at me but talking to Dex. “Ever seen any Audrey Hepburn movies?”

“Who?” said Dex.

“Oh, right,” she said. “I guess Juliet and I are the only non-Neanderthals in the room.”

“Come on,” I said to her. The only reason Rosemary knew about Audrey Hepburn was because my mom had introduced her movies to both of us.

Rosemary shrugged. She wasn’t looking at me anymore. I think she was deciding that I had failed her. I think her treatment of Dex was supposed to demonstrate how not to let a guy into your inner sanctum. Guys are to be played with and teased, not trusted. See? I interpreted her as saying. This is how we leave them behind.

But I didn’t want to follow her instructions. I didn’t want to leave Lucas behind.

“Poor Dex!” I said to Lucas when we got in his car.

He didn’t answer, just reached across me to open the glove compartment, where he kept an economy-sized bottle of ibuprofen. He shook three pills into his hand and swallowed them without water.

“Aren’t you only supposed to take two?”

He shrugged. “Three work better.” He kissed me. “And frankly,” he said, kissing me longer this time and harder, until we both lost interest in the conversation. “Frankly, those two are starting to get on my nerves.”