After a week at home with no TV, no games, no dessert, and no outside contact, I’ve grown feral. I keep my shades shut in my room, and on the rare occasion I venture out for meals, the light hurts my eyes. I’ve showered twice. I’ve left the protest state of punishment and just given up on basically everything, which I think is what finally wears Dad down. He has to get some work done this weekend, and watching me sulk around the house is making him edgy.

Still, I almost fight him on it because there’s pretty much nothing more embarrassing than when your parents try to make friends for you. Except when your dad calls it a “playdate.”

“Dad, answer me seriously. Do you know how old I am?”

“I didn’t mean an actual playdate.” Dad’s hovering over an early proof of tomorrow’s newspaper, a red pencil behind his ear and another in his shirt pocket.

“Because I’ve got this case of the sniffles I can’t kick, and you know how grumpy I get after naps.”

“Okay, okay, Narf. You’re a crusty old sage, a bona fide adult with bona fide adult interests. You don’t ‘play’ with friends. You …”

This new thought tugs him away from his proof. “What the heck do humans your age do?”

His eyes scan me for answers, none of them the right ones. Even Dad knows that, and he looks torn between quizzing me further or meeting his deadline.

“Just do me a favor,” he says. “Go hang out with Miguel’s kid. If you don’t like him, I owe you a Twinkie.”

A Twinkie. Dad means business. He’s pondering the big, important stuff.

Which is why I up the ante.

“Two Twinkies,” I say, and Dad lifts his eyebrow. “That’s right, cowboy.”

Now Dad knows I’m pondering the big life stuff, too, the kind that has me debating how much I’m willing to do to make friends in this place.

“You’ve got a deal,” Dad says.

*  *  *

The Espositos live three blocks away, in the newer part of town, and I fight back the usual pangs of envy when I look at the neatly trimmed hedges and colorful flower beds and fresh paint jobs. The Espositos probably own their home. They can probably paint it any color they want or put as many holes in the walls as they need to. They could mount a basketball hoop or dig an in-ground pool in the backyard.

I wonder if it’s too late to hate Enzo. He was cool at the Square, but maybe his dad was counting on him to take pity on me. Then he opens the door.

“Cool hat,” he says, and he ruins everything because he’s nice again.

Enzo pushes the door open and leads me through the living room to the kitchen. The house is big and new, but it doesn’t have the fancy furniture and white carpets I was expecting. The sofa looks old and worn with its cracked leather, and the floors are covered in a warm, rose-colored tile that makes our voices echo when we talk.

Enzo tears open a bag of chips that we eat by the fistful.

“My dad said your dad made him laugh so hard once, he puked,” he says.

I believe him. My dad makes everyone laugh like that.

“My dad said your dad went to school on a full ride,” I say with my mouth full.

“Academic. He’s gonna be pretty disappointed when he figures out I’m not as smart as him.”

He laughs first, so I feel like I can, too. Enzo’s that breed of nerd who can laugh at himself and skim by on mediocre grades. Something undefinable keeps him protected from embarrassment. I think it’s a total lack of self-awareness.

Enzo also has more video games than I’ve even heard of. We sink into two beanbag chairs, boot up a tag-team brawling game, and trade insults the way you can when you’re a pro basketball player or a dragon slayer or a half-human, half-bird ninja warrior because insults don’t really matter anyway.

By the time we look up from the screen, I’m blinking from the light of the TV screen and burping nacho cheese.

“I don’t think I’m going to be able to bend my thumbs tomorrow,” I say when my character is KO’d. I lean back and rub my eyes.

“So who else have you met yet?” he asks. “I mean, it’s practically impossible to meet anyone when school’s out.”

“Yeah,” I agree. “Pretty much just you and Aaron.”

Enzo keeps button-mashing and staring at the screen. He hasn’t died yet. His warrior lizard is still throttling some cat man.

“Hmm,” he says, and at first I think it’s a distracted “Hmm,” but then his lizard warrior dies, and he keeps staring at the screen without restarting the game, and now I think his “Hmm” had to do with Aaron.

“You don’t like him, do you?” I ask, feeling weird bringing it up, but the thing is, I’ve made a whopping two friends in Raven Brooks, and it’d be great if they didn’t hate each other.

And if Enzo really does have something against Aaron being not rich, then screw him and his impressive collection of video games.

Enzo looks uncomfortable, and I take that as a good sign because if he is a shallow jerk, at least he feels bad about it. He sets his remote control down but keeps staring at the game’s title track with the sound on mute.

“My little sister, Maritza, she’s the same age as Mya,” Enzo says. I didn’t even know Enzo had a sister.

“She used to hang out a bunch with Mya and Lucy.” He looks cautiously at me. “You know, the girl who …”

I nod, thinking back to the grainy newspaper photo of the Golden Apple Young Inventors Club. The third girl in the picture. The caption called her Maritza.

“So since I had to watch my sister and Aaron had to watch his sister, we used to hang out a lot together, too.”

“Okay,” I say, bracing for whatever bomb Enzo seems so reluctant to drop. So far, the only weird part of this story is the fact that Enzo’s sister was the other girl in the picture, and she and Mya used to play with a girl who isn’t alive anymore.

“We used to mess around at the construction site for the park. We were there all the time, and all the girls did was ask questions about how the rides worked. They were there so much, Aaron’s dad even made up this Young Inventors Club for them. I thought it was pretty cool. But Aaron …”

I can feel the bomb dropping. It’s like the air is getting heavier.

“I don’t know,” Enzo says. “It’s like Aaron didn’t want them to be a part of the park, or around his dad at all. But it wasn’t like he was jealous of us being with his dad. I just—don’t think he liked his dad very much,” Enzo says, but I can tell that’s not quite what he means to say.

“Like he was afraid of him?” I ask, and it feels like a betrayal even wondering about what Aaron feels when he’s not there to tell me if I’m full of it.

Enzo’s eyes widen, though, so I know I’ve hit on something.

“After Lucy …” he says, then trails off. He takes a drink of soda absently before continuing again. “It just got weirder. I’d bring Maritza over to their house, but it was like Mya and Aaron didn’t really want us around.”

This is a turn I wasn’t expecting. If Enzo was icing Aaron out because he didn’t have money, why would Aaron be the one blowing Enzo off?

“It was what Mr. Peterson said to Maritza, though. That’s what creeped me out the most.”

My guts churn because I think I’m starting to understand. I swallow, but my throat still feels dry.

“We were all in the kitchen, but he stopped her in the hallway. She didn’t tell me until after we got home. After that, we didn’t hang out with Mya or Aaron anymore.”

I ask, even though I don’t really want to know.

“What did he say to her?”

Enzo looks straight at me for the first time that afternoon.

“He said, ‘Did you see Lucy fly? She looked just like an angel.’”

It’s like all the sound has left the room, and the only thing I can hear is the fan blowing in Enzo’s tired game box. The lizard warrior cycles through his fight sequence over and over on the screen, but all the fight has left me. I’m not sure who to defend anymore—Aaron? Enzo? Mya?

What does make a person bad, then?

Being happy when bad things happen.

One thing I know, though. It’s getting harder and harder to defend Mr. Peterson. At the least, he’s just incapable of saying the right thing at the right time.

At the worst, there’s something really wrong in the Peterson house.