Every year at the beginning of April, my mom goes through closets. It has something to do with spring-cleaning, except she doesn’t do spring-cleaning. (We have a service; the rooms are as clean in June as they are in March.)

But she does care about closets. And when it comes to closets, my presence is required. So here we were, on the second Saturday in April, tossing things I’d outgrown into a pile with sweaters that had lost their shape, cotton pants that had shrunk in the wash, shoes that had worn thin in the soles, scarves that had felt right at the craft fair where she and Val had purchased them but looked a little too craft-fair-y once they’d brought them home.

The decisions were exhausting. Eventually my mom unearthed a Toblerone bar and we split it and a Coke, sitting on the front step of the house, where I had waited for Lucas that first time he came to see me.

Because the houses in our neighborhood are small, it has always been a neighborhood of families just starting out. Over the years, we’d given up on knowing anyone’s names, noting when they had new babies, or paying much attention when they moved out to the inevitable big house with a more modern kitchen. But that day, as we watched the kids on bikes, their helmets bobbing up and down as if their heads were balloons tied to the bike handles with strings, I thought, Where did they all come from? What was the point? Weren’t they all just going to grow up, fall in love, have their hearts broken, and die fighting in wars?

Confronted with the same view, Mom must have reached a very different conclusion. “You know,” she said, speaking with her mouth full, gesturing to the kids with her chin. “It’s a good life these people are making here.”

I turned my head to look at her. Her skin was streaked with shoe polish. Her hair was held back in a scarf. “I keep thinking about what you said last winter,” she went on. “How I’ve been too careful. I remember you asking me about fear, about if it wasn’t a good thing, exciting and such, to feel afraid. And I said it wasn’t. It’s certainly not something I want for you. But I can see how you might think, from the way I live, the way we live, that I’m running from it. You said there’s not enough experience in my life. Not enough … love.” She paused, gauging my embarrassment. “I think you don’t see a whole lot in the way of passion.”

“Oh, God, stop!” I said.

But she didn’t stop. Looking away from me, as if she was talking as much for her own benefit as for mine, she went on. “I know you think I’ve missed out, and maybe I have, but I don’t think so.” She started to speak faster, like she wanted to get this out before I got so embarrassed I truly shut her down. “I know it’s just me and Val and you, but I want you to know I’m happy. Being happy—what it takes to be happy—that changes as you get older. The way you want things changes. You can’t understand this now, but you’ll see.…” She trailed off.

“I’ll see what?”

“That at some point, love goes underground. It goes deep, like some sort of river. The kind of river that never surfaces because it doesn’t need to. It just flows deeper and colder and—I don’t know—eventually makes it into the ocean through some kind of underground tube.”

My mom and geology have never been the best of friends.

“I also want you to know that your dad and I—If I’d truly wanted to be married to him, I could have been. He never would have left us—never would have left you—if I hadn’t made him go.”

“But I thought it was Dad—” I stopped myself because I hadn’t just thought it was Dad who left my mom, I thought she had destroyed her own life by frightening him away. I thought she should have known better. I thought he was impossible to be married to—I still think that—but I also thought he’d broken my mother’s heart. “He didn’t—” I spluttered. “You wanted—”

“It was me.” She took a sip of Coke. “I couldn’t stay. It wasn’t his fault. He was just—human. Everyone is. I guess that sounds trite, but it’s true. We’re all trying to get everything perfect, but in the end no one can get past the fact that we’re all flawed. We don’t have any idea what we’re doing.”

“Okay,” I said.

“You know what I mean?” she said. “About the river?”

Strangely, incoherently, I did.

Dex got a haircut. He got the kind of haircut that made me wonder if his mom had been cutting his hair up until then. The kind of haircut that makes you see a person in an entirely new light. Like, suddenly, it was clear that Dex had a very significant jawline. The cheekbones of a Lenape warrior. Shoulders under those sloppy, too-big shirts.

He’d set up a fund-raiser for Lucas’s family to help with medical expenses. For fifty dollars you could have five guys from the hockey team come to your house and clean out your gutters or spring-clean your lawn. The fact that he scratched all the appointments into a free calendar his mom had gotten in the mail that had pictures of babies dressed in flower costumes took nothing away from what he was doing. At school, Dex was now important. Teachers would pull him aside to talk lawn care or commend him publicly for the initiative he was showing. Robin Sipe put him in charge of organizing volunteers for prom.

“I think Dex has a new girlfriend,” Rosemary teased when the four of us were in Dex’s basement one Friday night eating pizza and watching episodes of Columbo, which Dex’s mom had set the VCR to tape. “Robin loves you.”

Dex blushed. “Not my type,” he said.

“So what is your type?” said Rose, chewing, laughing.

Dex blushed some more. He shrugged. He was about to reply when Lucas cut him off. “Oh, cut the shit,” Lucas said, his anger at Rosemary cloaked in deadpan jocularity. “His type is you. Isn’t that what you wanted to hear? Will this save us from your pulling it out of him strand by strand?”

“Lucas!” I said.

“No, no, fair enough,” said Rose. “I should leave poor Dex alone.” She turned to Lucas, her eyes flashing. “Let’s turn the spotlight on Lucas, shall we? Lucas, how would you describe your type?”

“That’s obvious,” he said, not missing a beat, though he knew enough to be on guard taking on Rose. He slung an arm over my shoulder and flashed me, then Rose, his huge grin.

Rose didn’t grin back. “Well, yeah, but what is it about Juliet that gets your heart racing?” she said. “What qualities in her do you predict will show up in the next girlfriend you have, and the one after that, and the one after that?”

“What are you driving at?” I said, trying to slow Rosemary down. She ignored me.

“You’re not planning on marrying Juliet or anything, are you?” Rose said. “You’re going to eventually break up, right? I mean, let’s face it, your lives are going in totally different directions.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s enough.”

But Rose wasn’t done. “Do you think you’ll always date brunettes, Lucas?” she went on. “I heard guys always end up dating women who turn out to be just like their mothers.”

“God help us,” said Lucas, shaking his head. “After Juliet breaks up with me, I’m not going to date anyone else ever again. I’ll just become some cranky control freak who hand-carves wooden lawn ornaments, then dies alone.”

“Yeah,” I laughed. “And after Lucas, I’m going to become a nun.”

Rosemary rolled her eyes, deciding, I guess, to be done. She turned to Dex. “Disgusting, right?” she said.

Dex smiled helplessly. All he wanted was for her to turn her smoky blue eyes in his direction, to look at her, to feel her attention on him.

But then the phone rang, and it was another call about the hockey team lawn service. And for once, Rosemary was left waiting for Dex instead of the other way around.

That spring, Valerie arranged for me to intern at her law firm, helping with background research for a pro bono case.

I loved it. I loved taking the bus downtown after school, stepping into the wood-paneled hallways of the firm, smelling the fresh flowers on the receptionist’s desk, helping myself to one of the free sodas from the kitchen, where the young associates would tell me about the law schools they went to, what they studied in college. I found hours passing when I wasn’t thinking about Lucas, or Rosemary and Dex, or all three. It was a relief.

But then, when I exited the building through its heavy glass revolving door, moving from the air-conditioned thrum of the ventilation system into rush hour and the warm spring air, I would think about Lucas, and it was almost as if there were a rope tied snugly around my waist and he were tugging on it. Riding the bus home, I’d close my eyes and see his, remembering the way he looked at me, remembering what it was like to feel myself mirrored in his gaze.

On one of these afternoons, the paralegal supervising my project was out sick, so I went home early enough to try to catch Lucas while he was still at school, lifting weights with the team.

I was cutting it close and had to hurry from the bus. I was speed-walking. Maybe I was frowning. I remember my backpack feeling heavy.

Then I heard a car going fast enough that I looked up, and when I did, I saw that it was Lucas’s rusty red heap, stuffed full of hockey guys, their cut arms and rough faces filling the front and back so I couldn’t have said how many of them there were besides Lucas, who was driving, and Dexter, riding shotgun. The music was loud, some kind of metal. I remember that Dex was smiling a little too broadly and that Lucas wasn’t smiling at all. And then Lucas’s eyes met mine. He saw me, I’m sure of it, but he didn’t give me any sign. He kept driving, fast, while arms and shoes and wet hair were waving from the windows.

All winter I’d felt like the car was mine. I kept my favorite flavor of gum in the glove compartment. You could see my footprints on the passenger-side windshield when the light struck it in just the right way. But the car didn’t belong to me anymore. Maybe it never had.

I stopped walking.

Lucas had seen me. I knew he’d seen me.

He hadn’t stopped.

I remembered the other time when I thought he’d picked the hockey guys over me, when I’d been at debate practice and I’d seen him take off with his friends. I remembered his crooked smile when it turned out he was waiting for me in the hallway, the way I’d felt sure I was what he most wanted in the world.

I remembered the night he went drinking with the hockey guys even after I asked him to stay with me.

He’d seen me. He hadn’t smiled.

I waited a long time, as if he might turn around and come back to me. He never did.

“I didn’t see you,” Lucas insisted that night when we talked on the phone.

“You looked right at me,” I said. “You couldn’t have missed me.”

“Maybe I was lost in thought,” Lucas said. “Does it ever occur to you that sometimes I’m thinking about something besides you?”

I felt myself sputter.

“It wasn’t like you’d asked me to pick you up,” he went on. “Sometimes it’s just time for me to be with the guys, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” I said, my voice a deflating balloon.

“Don’t be like that,” Lucas whined, and I knew what I was supposed to do now, what he wanted: what Dex did for Rose. I was supposed to make myself sound cheerful and happy and too busy to care.

“Come on,” Lucas groaned. “This is high school. It’s supposed to be fun. All that debate stuff you do, burying your head in back issues of Time magazine. Is that really good for you?”

“What, I should try lighting tennis balls on fire?”

“You know,” Lucas said, “it might not be the worst idea.” He was laughing like he was kidding. Then he said “Hey” in that way that belonged just to me. I knew that if we hadn’t been on the phone, he would have tickled me or grabbed me or moved me, reminded me that we belonged together, that we knew each other through touch as well as words. But still, something had changed. I didn’t want to even say what it was.

“Keep in mind,” Rosemary said, “that the way Lucas is acting, being a dick to you, this is totally normal.” We were at her house, on the patio, the first time we’d hung out alone since Lucas got released from the hospital. “We’re in high school, after all.”

My eyes filled with tears, and I didn’t know if it was because of Lucas or because of the satisfaction Rosemary was clearly taking in telling me that.

“You can cry,” Rosemary said. “But do yourself a favor. Don’t cry in front of Lucas anymore. Don’t wait around for him at school. Don’t act like such a puppy. You are probably freaking him out. Obviously he still likes you. He’s just not obsessed with you. He’s a senior. He’s got other things on his mind. Give him some space. And then break up with him. You need to do it to save yourself.”

I was staring at her. “But I love him,” I said.

“I know you love him,” she laughed, landing on the word “love” like it was a bug she was crushing with her shoe. “But I also understand something about love you don’t, maybe because I’m not in love personally: if you let him walk all over you, given the way you feel about him, you will be stuck loving him for life.”

I didn’t break up with Lucas. I wasn’t like Rose. I wasn’t even like my old self—careful, in control.

I guess I was the kind of person who, even though I knew better, found myself saying “I need to tell you something” to Lucas when we were sitting at the table in his kitchen, doing homework. He had his books spread out in front of him, but he was actually just doodling the globe and anchor with an eagle on the top that is the marines’ emblem. I covered up the drawing with the flat of my hand.

His brow furrowed. He put down his pencil and said, “What?”

I said, “It’s just—” And then he looked worried, so I rushed in quickly with “It’s not bad.”

He still looked worried. “Actually,” I said, “it is bad.”

“Are you breaking up with me?”

“No,” I said. “But after I explain something, you might want to break up with me.” I picked up the pencil he’d put down and rolled it back and forth between my thumb and fingers.

Now his worried look was replaced by a raised-eyebrows expression of curiosity, hope, intrigue. “It’s not funny,” I said, and he instantly, dutifully, repressed what had only been the beginning of a smile anyway. “Listen,” I said. And I told him everything, from the very beginning. I told him about Friendly’s, about kissing in the park after, about the dance, about the dream, about the hospital, about the way the dream ends.

I talked. And I could see that he was only pretending to listen. I could feel my face start to burn in humiliation—I could only imagine how ridiculous this sounded to him—but I continued.

Finally, he took the pencil out of my hands, as if it were a microphone and he wanted to turn the sound of my voice off. It was a gesture of mercy, saving me from myself. But I didn’t need saving. It was Lucas I was trying to save. I took the pencil back.

“You told me things,” I insisted, my voice growing sharp. “About the future. Things you couldn’t possibly have known were going to happen, and then they did.”

Out of my backpack, I fished the Post-it on which I’d been collecting a list of Lucas’s predictions as I remembered them. “You knew your parents were going to split up,” I read. “You knew Sanjay’s house was going to burn down. You knew I was going to give you that watch for Christmas.”

“That’s great, Juliet.”

“You told me George W. Bush was going to be the next president.”

“Wasn’t he already president?”

“Not that one. His son, W.” Lucas gave me a blank stare. “He’s the governor of Texas.”

“Juliet,” he said.

“You told me something bad was going to happen in the US. That we were going to go to war. In Iraq. And see—”

“We already had a war in Iraq.”

I pulled out an article I’d printed off the New York Times microfiche in the library that day after the dance, back when Lucas first told me about all this.

“This is about people in Washington who want us to go back to Iraq. They used to work for George Bush, so if his son gets elected, their opinions will start to matter again. It makes sense. Look.” I pointed to the smudged printout. “It’s all about oil. These people think they can use Iraq to turn the countries in the Middle East into democracies and then it will be easier for us to use their oil.”

Nothing.

“Look.” I stowed the printout and opened up the notebook I’d brought with me to the library that day. “I’ve done research. Here’s stuff on head injuries,” I said. “Déjà vu.” I flipped the page. “The biochemistry of the human brain. Recovered memory. What you told me about could happen. I don’t know how, exactly, but the dots are there. Someday some scientist’s going to connect them, but for now all I can say is that I swear to you it’s real. What you told me is real.”

He looked up at me, his eyes sharp and hard. He took the notebook and Xeroxes out of my hand and pushed them to the side as if he were putting a screaming child in time-out. “I get it,” he said. “Research. Note taking. Reading. This is what you do best. And you never miss a chance to dump on the military.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but Lucas stopped me. “Don’t even pretend,” he said, “that this isn’t completely convenient, your premonition that everything bad happens after I join the marines, which you’ve been against from the get-go.”

“It wasn’t a premonition,” I said. “And it came from you, not me.”

Tommy and Wendell ran into the kitchen just then, making a lot of noise. One of them had something that belonged to the other. There was a chase. When they were gone, Lucas was looking down. “I know myself,” he said, his voice guarded and low. “I know who I am. Don’t talk to me about this anymore, okay? I don’t want to hear it.”

He took my hand, looked up at me again, and cracked a smile, and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to save him. He wasn’t going to believe me.