Tasting Light

I was sitting on the bed, tweaking my digital twin, when Jaxx showed up for class. He was early. He came up the ladder to my loft over the cab, leaned over my shoulder before I knew he was there, and said, “Nobody really looks like that, Liam.”

I dropped my screen facedown so fast I nearly fumbled it onto the floor. I whipped my headphones off.

“Noise-canceling,” Jaxx said, ignoring the existence of parents and picking up the headphones. “Great until you don’t want to get snuck up on. You might have seen me in that mirror” — he pointed to the one on the bulkhead, crammed into the corner — “if you hadn’t thrown a shirt over it. What are you doing?”

He flopped down on the bed beside me. “Anyway, you shouldn’t mess with your dop’s measurements. You can lie to your parents. You can lie to your shrink. You can lie to your priest —”

I snorted. My dop’s image was derived from footage my device had captured of me over the years. I didn’t see anything weirder about adjusting its measurements than adjusting its gender. “I’m not trying to fool anybody.”

“If you keep corrupting its data, it’ll probably enter you in a bodybuilding contest. And then you’ll have to do it, or all the girls you like will know you’re chicken.”

“I don’t like any girls.” Another lie. I took my headphones away from him. “Go get yours — it’s time for class.”

Jaxx comes over to my place for class because his family is #vanlife on a small scale and there’s no quiet or privacy over there. With two kid brothers, not even a headset would help. My place is closer to the Wi-Fi node, we’ve got a booster, and I have my own little room up over the cab. We can sit on my bed and do school on our remote days.

My moms even got Jaxx a set of noise-canceling headphones to use at our place and told him they were spares. That way, they stay with us and nothing happens to them, like it would if he took them home. Jaxx isn’t absentminded, so I know it’s not him who breaks or loses everything.

Halfway through history, I glanced over at Jaxx and noticed he was grinning down at his screen. The Magna Carta just wasn’t that interesting. He was still in class — at least, I saw him down in the corner on my screen, looking like he was paying attention.

I leaned over to peek at his screen. He was playing Zaladoz, which, okay, is a supercool tower defense game but definitely not schoolwork.

He jerked his screen away from me, but I’d already seen. I muted my headset. “Mx. Seaman is gonna be pissed if they realize you’ve got your dop sitting in class for you.”

“Look, there’s no reason at all for this class to be synchronous! It’s crap that we have to be here in real time when we could, I dunno, listen to this boring-ass lecture while we sleep.”

I pointed to Jaxx’s dop on my screen. “And isn’t that supposed to be blocked?”

He tried to look modest. “I jailbroke it. Crap, they’re calling on me.” He unmuted hastily — “King John!” — and muted again.

I mouthed, You’re gonna get in so much trouble, but Jaxx was already back to building towers and staffing them with flying monkeys.

After class, we slithered down the ladder. Mom Stacy was at work, tucked into the booth behind the table with her headset on. She looked up and waved as we came into the kitchen. She’d already put protein powder, yogurt, baby spinach, and frozen bananas on the counter for smoothies. I made Jaxx’s first, standing between her and the blender so she couldn’t see that both bananas and most of the yogurt went into that one. He needed it more than I did, but she gets mad at me when I don’t eat, even though I keep telling her I can’t have carbs, like, at all except right after practice.

We went outside to drink the smoothies and sat on the fold-down steps. Jaxx must have been worrying the whole time, because as soon as the door was shut, he looked at me and said, “You can’t tell anyone.”

“I just don’t want you to get busted.” It seemed like a good time to change the subject. My smoothie tasted like watery fake strawberry. “What about Kiara?”

“Oh no.” He gestured so dramatically he got smoothie on his pants. “Don’t you dare tell anybody about that, either.”

Jaxx has a crush on Kiara. Jaxx should just tell Kiara he has a crush on her, but he’s always got reasons not to. “Come on,” I said, as I had six million and three times before. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

I was out of smoothie. I took his empty glass and carried both of them inside to put in the sink.

“It’s totally real!” he called after me. “You get so embarrassed you just melt. Glub.”

We parked our dops and left them behind. Jaxx stuck his in the school social space, running in bot mode so he could come back to the conversations later and see if anyone had said anything interesting. If someone needed his attention right away, they could text or use the override code. My dop was still trying on jeans, and I figured he couldn’t get into too much trouble, so I left the program running.

I started jogging slowly, warming up. Jaxx raced to catch up and then pressed his hands to his belly theatrically. “I am so full of smoothie I can feel it slosh.”

“No puking,” I said. I still felt kind of weird and awkward because he’d seen me reprogramming my dop. Despite what he said, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to reflect your true self with an avatar that fits your self-image, is there? Mx. Seaman does.

Jaxx and I ran over to the field house for wrestling practice. It’s about three miles, and we can do it in about twenty minutes. It was hot and humid — it’s always hot and humid; we haven’t had a real freeze here in New Jersey since I was ten — so the run helped us sweat down a couple of pounds. Since I’m always trying to cut weight, that works out.

Jaxx is wiry and he’s got a light frame. It doesn’t matter for him. But for me, every ounce counts.

We ran through the park, between vans and RVs, then onto the dirt trail under the trees. It runs alongside the highway, but there’s a chain-link fence and a load of dirt bike jumps made out of plywood. Nobody uses it but kids. We’ve traveled all up and down the East Coast and as far west as Rapid City, though we’ve been here since I was in fifth grade because Moms care about my “social development” and don’t want to take me away from all my friends. There’s always places like this. Sometimes you find a grown-up back there, a trail biker or a dog walker, but mostly it’s like they’ve forgotten those trails even exist. I guess once you’re driving, you don’t need ’em anymore.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if dops were real?” I wanted to pant, but I made myself talk in a normal-ish tone.

“They’re not real real.” He sped up, and I had to push. The heat made me light-headed. “They’re not people.”

“No good — they’d just destroy humanity. Take over, rule the earth. Like Terminators.”

I don’t know why everybody assumes that a superior intelligence is just going to want to wipe out humankind. On the other hand, maybe there’s something about our self-image that explains why we assume that’s what a superior intelligence would decide.

“You’re a dinosaur,” he answered. “You’re not even a dinosaur, because dinosaurs are cool. And even my mom uses a dop, so dops are for dinosaurs, too.”

I didn’t have breath to argue because we were racing now, giggling, shoving, bursting out in between trees and onto the grass behind the field house. We pelted across the lawn, feet thudding, and slammed into the corrugated wall. He got there half a second before I did. I gave him an extra shove for good measure.

We pushed each other through the door and into the locker room. Coach Jode frowned at us over his screen when we came in, and we quieted down, sort of. Still giggling.

The worst. I did it, and I was only three pounds over. The match wasn’t until the weekend. I had time; I could cut another pound and a half by then and make up the difference in the steam box. And then, I told myself, I was going to eat the biggest hot fudge sundae the world had ever seen.

I stared at myself in the mirror while Jaxx weighed in, looking at my eyes because it was too upsetting to look at my body. I blurred my vision and imagined my dop there instead. I could picture him looking tight, six-pack and a cut groin. He grinned at me in my imagination and waved jauntily. I waved back.

“Come on, Snickerbach,” said Coach, tapping me on the shoulder. “Quit admiring your reflection and get your shorts on. All right, everybody! Hit the mats.”

My reflection turned purple. I whirled away from him, living proof that you can’t die from embarrassment after all. I didn’t manage to get my shorts and shoes on without tripping, but at least I just hopped around like an idiot instead of falling over and bashing my teeth out on a bench.

I got my ass kicked six times at practice and could not have been happier that Friday was weight training. Coach stopped me on the way to the showers. “What’s going on?”

I wandered home, ate the salmon and salad Mom Elisa had made, and pushed the brown rice around on my plate. After dinner, I went upstairs, looked through the jeans my dop had picked out, and decided I only liked one pair, so I sent those to Moms for approval.

If I didn’t get my weight down and start performing better in practice, I was going to get cut from the team. Jaxx was lighter and better than me, though I was stronger. I needed to get myself together, or he was going to beat me out. I texted about it with my dop for an hour or so, but it didn’t make me any less worried. He’s a good listener, having no real life of his own. But he’s not great at solutions.

Thursday was pretty much the same, though I only got beat three times. Jaxx and I were out of the showers, toweled off, dressed, and lacing up our shoes when Coach came in, looking unhappy. “Cruz.”

Nobody likes to hear that tone in a teacher’s voice. Jaxx jumped guiltily, then got to his feet. “Coach?”

I slouched home alone. At least it was cooler out now. Moms had finished dinner by the time I got home, and Mom Stacy was washing up. “There’s a plate in the fridge,” she said. “Help yourself.”

“Okay, but I grabbed a sandwich with Jaxx after practice. I’m not super hungry.”

“Wow, when I was your age, I could eat a whole pizza. And dessert. And by then, I’d have room for another pizza.” She put the last plate in the drying rack. “I’m out of the kitchen!”

Mom Elisa came out of the bathroom, drying her hair. “I just remembered it was my turn to cook.”

“You came home absolutely fried,” Mom Stacy said. “You can’t take care of anybody else unless you also take care of yourself, and you can’t take care of yourself unless you’re kind to yourself.”

“Fine,” Mom Elisa answered, pretending to scold. “But I’m doing the next two nights.”

Oh man, Mom Stacy had made garlic bread. Pure torture. I tried not to smell the butter and olive oil and garlic while I filled up my plate with salad and two pieces of chicken Parmesan. While the chicken was heating up, I stirred the spaghetti around in the container to make it look like I’d taken some. I figured between the run and practice, the bread crumbs on the chicken would be okay.

I made myself eat slowly, though my stomach felt like an angry animal. When I’d just about licked the plate, I washed it off and put it in the rack beside the other two. Moms were in the living room part of the RV, cuddling on the couch and streaming some doctor show. Mom Elisa, who is Dr. Elisa Lopez, MD (I’ve got Mom Stacy’s last name), is a float doc, and she likes to critique the medicine.

I don’t even spend all day around sick people, and I can’t stand hospital shows. Grown-ups are weird.

“I can scooch over,” Mom Stacy said, but I waved my hand and said, “I’m going for a walk.”

When I got to Jaxx’s place, though, there didn’t seem to be anybody home. Unless the weather’s bad, their slot usually has people spilling out the sliding door and hanging out under the awning on the yard couch or at the picnic table until well past dark. The sun was still a finger above the trees, but the ugly brown van was locked up tight, a sunshade propped across the windshield.

hey man. lil worried about you gettin pulled in u ok

He didn’t answer. I went home and got started on my assignments for class, but it was hard to concentrate. Jaxx always texted me back, like, right away. I hoped he hadn’t gotten his phone privileges revoked.

I tried getting my dop to talk to his, but his was offline and set to no messages.

In bed, while I was lying there listening to my stomach growl and thinking about burning calories, I tried one more time. hey what’s up. u ok?

Nothing answered me but the sound of the cicadas droning through the louvers on the windows.

I woke up the next morning, rolled over, and grabbed my phone, and the first thing I found was a message from that girl Jaxx liked, Kiara. What the hell is wrong with you?!

Just as well I didn’t have any appetite for breakfast, I guess. I grabbed a cup of coffee — “It’ll stunt your growth!” (Mom Stacy) — and slithered back up the ladder in time for class. I’d shower after lifting and save on water. I had plenty of time to comb my hair. After that, I had nothing to do but bust out a hundred push-ups, then hang out on my phone and wait for Jaxx.

Five minutes before class, Mom Stacy yelled up the ladder, “Isn’t Jaxx coming today?”

I looked at the unanswered texts on my phone. There was a horrible sensation inside me, like when you fall out of a bunk bed in the middle of the night.

“He didn’t say anything. Maybe he’s sick?” I almost told her that he’d gotten into some kind of trouble at school, but it would have embarrassed him, so I kept my mouth shut.

Oh man, if Jaxx didn’t turn up, I was going to have to figure out which one of the neighbors had a dog that liked smoothies.

First class on Thursdays was physics, which I liked a lot more than history. Jaxx was there, and so was Kiara. I tried to catch both their eyes and they both avoided me. So that was the real Jaxx, not Jaxx’s dop. Also, every time he answered a question, I could hear his brothers screaming in the background. Confirmed.

After class, lunch was leftovers. I had salad again and left a plate with a piece of chicken up in my loft for after practice. Ran over to the field house and hit the weights without bothering to change. I was just going to run home again in the same clothes. It didn’t matter if they got more sweaty.

My form sucked. I couldn’t concentrate, and I kept checking my phone to see if I’d missed a text. My whole body ached with some emotion I didn’t really have a name for. Maybe it was anxiety.

I had just finished a miserable set of hamstring curls and rolled over when I realized Coach was standing right over me. I blinked up at him. I probably looked like a goldfish when its tank pump stops working.

I should have kept my mouth shut and played it cool, but some people have those genes and I . . . just don’t. “Why wouldn’t I be here?”

Coach scrubbed his hand across his mouth. “Sometimes guys drop out after their friends get cut.”

“Oh,” I said, head spinning. I managed not to say anything dumb. I just nodded.

He slapped me on the shoulder and walked away. I stared after him. I couldn’t focus my eyes. That little animal burrowing in my gut felt like the time I ate way too many green peaches. I slung myself off the bench and jogged to the men’s room.

He was twice as good a wrestler as I was, and he never had a problem making weight. Why would he get cut before me?

I couldn’t lift so good after that, but I faked it for a half hour, then ran back to the park like six mean dogs were after me.

I was sure — I was sure — that by the time I got to the park Jaxx’s van would be gone and there would be nothing where it had been parked except an empty lot with grass growing in it, or maybe a completely different RV. But the ugly brown van was there, and the kids and toys and rugs and plastic tables spilling out onto the dusty ground.

Jaxx was out there with both his brothers, lying on a rug on his stomach, watching them play with blocks. I stopped at the edge of the rug, and he looked up, made a face, and pushed up onto his knees. “Shove off.”

I stared at him. Then I sat down in the dirt cross-legged and said, “You don’t have to take it out on me.”

How could it be my fault? I didn’t even know what was going on. “Wait, what? Jaxx, let’s go for a walk.”

He pointed at the kids with his chin. “Babysitting. And I don’t want to talk to you.”

He whispered, I imagine so his brothers wouldn’t hear. “Jealous! You’re the one who’s jealous. I mean, I assume that’s why you did it.”

You know how some people can stare at you as if you’re a complete jerk and stupid to boot? He had the knack. “Turned me in.”

That feeling like I was falling out of an airplane was just getting worse. “I did not.”

Jaime had started hitting José over the head, but he was using his fist instead of the blocks and José was a lot bigger, so I decided to let either them or Jaxx sort it out. I shoved my hands into my pockets.

Jaxx might not have noticed the kids. He snorted. “You were the only one who knew I was cutting class. Anyway, Kiara told me you told her I liked her when she let me down easy yesterday afternoon. So thanks for that, also.”

I pulled my hands out of my pockets, but then they were just kind of swinging in the breeze, so I crossed my arms over my chest instead. “I did no such thing.”

“Come on, Jaxx. You know I’m not like that. You could have come to me and asked!”

“Yes, and one of those sides is a lie.” I wanted to hit something. I jumped up and started pacing back and forth. Now I was mad at him. “You didn’t come to me when you heard that. You didn’t ask. You just made up a story in your head and blamed me. We’ve been friends since fifth grade! When you busted yourself up on your bike and were stuck in the hammock all summer, I came over every single day and played games with you. I missed out on everything else!”

“Yeah, well . . . somebody ratted me out.” He made finger guns and shot me with them, bang-bang.

I tried to walk in looking normal, but apparently I wasn’t very good at it because Mom Elisa stopped in the middle of making chicken and broccoli and frowned at me. She traveled a lot for work, and it was nice to have her home. But she was too damn perceptive.

Without really meaning to, I found myself telling her, “Jaxx got cut from the wrestling team for cheating on his classes, and he thinks I turned him in.”

“You know,” she said, paying very close attention to the chicken she was slicing, “if you knew he was cheating and didn’t say anything, you could get in trouble, too.”

I sighed. “I know, I know. You’re just looking out for me. Well, I’ve got a ton of homework.”

The moment had passed, though. I headed toward the ladder. “Yell when dinner is ready.”

I beat it up to my room and pulled the shutter closed. I did not want to eat that chicken. I wrapped it up in a worn-out sock and stuffed it in the wastebasket. I’d take it out before dinner.

I did open my homework, but I found myself staring at it without any ability to concentrate. So I put my headset on and called up my dop.

Just looking at him was soothing. He was lean and sharklike, still wearing the jeans I’d picked out. They looked good on him.

He didn’t look anything like me, did he? I reached out across the narrow space and pulled the shirt off my mirror. I needed a shave, which was exciting. Nope, I was definitely kidding myself about those biceps. Among another things.

As I looked from my own reflection to the dop, that free-fall feeling inside me clotted into actual horror. I tapped the screen to open the settings menu and asked, “Activity report since Wednesday morning?”

“Hi, Liam,” my dop said. Since it was reporting to me, it sounded more mechanical than when we were just having a conversation. “Regular system maintenance, user edit, clothes shopping (see inline document for 572 jeans options), report clothing choices to Moms, report to school —”

“Sure,” said the dop. “As your agent, I contacted the anonymous report line at Judy Blume Senior High School to inform them of what you discussed with me last night concerning Jaxx Cruz —”

“Stop.” I closed my eyes. “I’m not a —” I realized Moms were still downstairs and lowered my voice. “I’m not a snitch!”

“Social models indicate with eighty-three percent confidence that you would have wanted me to take care of that for you. As your virtual assistant, I —”

“Because we’re jealous of Jaxx,” he said. “And now we don’t have to feel so bad. And because you told him not to cheat, and he blew you off, and that made you feel bad, too.”

Jaxx had been right. I’d lied to my dop, and in so doing, I’d made it not my twin at all. I’d trained the algorithm to behave in ways I hadn’t anticipated, somehow. So its best guess of what I had wanted my dop to do when I’d talked my problems out to it hadn’t been very good at all.

I guess it’s true, what Mom Stacy says — if you don’t like yourself, if you’re not kind to yourself, you can’t be a good friend to anyone else, either. And it turns out that if you don’t like yourself, you can train your dop to be a bad friend, too.

Maybe Jaxx had been right to blame me. I felt terrible. But I also felt angry. So angry I wanted to go outside and run around in the woods and kick trees. Except I’d have to get past Moms to do that, and I didn’t want to talk about it.

Also, it was dark outside, so there would be a fight about me leaving. And possibly bears.

Well, there was something I could do about wanting to scream and run around in the dark hitting things. I grabbed my screen and pulled the blanket up to hide the glow. Those noise-canceling headphones are also great for when I want to play games in the middle of the night without Moms catching on. I took my virtual self into Etern X and chased werewolves through a beautifully rendered forest. Every so often, I caught one and threw it into a tree trunk.

I was right to feel betrayed and terrible, I decided. But maybe I was also right to be a little bit mad at Jaxx. He could have tried harder to find out what had happened instead of just blaming me.

I looked at myself in the mirror again. Then I looked at my dop, comically muscular and lean, paused with a werewolf in his fist. No, he wasn’t me. He wasn’t what I wanted to be, either.

I logged out of Etern X, then scrolled down in the settings and found the toggle to reset the defaults to scanned-in information only. My finger hovered for fifteen seconds.

I slid down the ladder into the kitchen the next morning to a chorus of Moms yelling, “Three points of contact!”

It’s not like I’m going to pull the ladder off the wall. It’s bolted there.

I felt so sorry for myself that I grabbed one of Mom Elisa’s diet sodas instead of coffee, even though those things make you bloat. Seriously, she’s a medical professional. You’d think she’d take better care of herself.

Then I realized both Moms were sitting at the kitchen table, even though Mom Elisa usually leaves for work long before I get out of bed. She gets Sundays off and an alternating Tuesday or Thursday. It was Saturday, so she should have been long out the door.

“I have a study date in five minutes.” If I could just escape back up the ladder, I could avoid the bad news, whatever it was. I edged a step away.

I sat on the very edge of the built-in bench with, like, half my butt so I could make a quick getaway when they were done.

“I have a job offer in San Francisco,” Mom Elisa said. “But it’s a five-year contract. Good pay, and the Bay Area is amazing. I think you’d love it —”

“You promised I could finish school here!” I yelped. “And I just made varsity —” I was going to unmake it again in a hurry if I didn’t get my act together, but never undermine your own argument. I learned that one from Mom Elisa herself.

She turned her tea mug between hers. “We’re not going to make you switch schools unless you want to. Stacy and I can do a long-distance thing for a while, and she can stay here with you. Her job doesn’t care where she is. I do, but we can make it work until you leave for college. Or, if you want, we can all go out together and you can telecommute to school. The Bay Area has a youth wrestling club that’s supposed to be excellent, and some of the schools have an athlete exchange program now. And there are beaches and mountains. You get a driver’s license this year.”

I almost said, “I’d have to leave Jaxx,” but I remembered in time and took a drink of soda instead. It hurt my teeth and burned my throat. Well, I guess the stuff is acid.

Mom Stacy reached out and grabbed my hand. “Think about it,” she said. “You don’t have to decide right now.”

“I would,” said Mom Elisa. “But the pay out there is a lot better. You wouldn’t have to apply for scholarships and take out student loans. Or stick to in-state schools and commute.”

“I’m leaving in two weeks if I take the job,” Mom Elisa said. “I can give you until Monday night to decide what you want.”

I did have a study date, but, surprising nobody, neither Jaxx nor Kiara showed up for it. I needed to talk to Jaxx so bad it was like an itch inside me. I probably also needed to talk to Kiara; I was pretty sure she was mad at me because my dop had texted her and ratted out Jaxx to her, too. And probably told her about his crush.

I hadn’t asked, because I didn’t really want to know beyond a shadow of a doubt.

I lay there on the bed pretending I understood quadratic equations and intermittently texting Jaxx, begging him to call me, until it dawned on me that he probably had my number blocked.

I didn’t want to leave. I did want to leave. I could just duck away from this mistake and start over, and it wouldn’t cost me anything except a spot on the team. I could get away from Kiara and Jaxx. Make some friends who would never find out about how dumb I’d been.

And, you know . . . California. I wondered if the Bay Area had surfing or if that was just southern California. I wondered if it had surfer girls.

I could message Jaxx through the school system, but I didn’t think either one of us wanted there to be an official record of this conversation. I could text, dop, or call Kiara and beg her to beg Jaxx to call me. If she hadn’t blocked me, too.

I was too scared to find out. Though at least she’d had the guts to cuss me out to my face.

It took me forty-five minutes to realize that maybe Jaxx hadn’t blocked my dop from contacting his. And another forty-five minutes to write the message, because I didn’t trust my dop to pick the language anymore.

Hey, I need to talk. Moms want to move me to the West Coast. I figured out who ratted on you.

Please, Jaxx.

By then, it was basically time for lunch. I went downstairs and messed around with protein powder and a pear and some yogurt. It actually tasted okay and it didn’t make my stomach do any more backflips than it was already.

I was drinking the last of my smoothie when my phone dinged, which caused an additional backflip. Feelings are the worst.

“Mom,” I called — not too loud, because Mom Stacy was ten feet away on the couch. “I’m going for a run.”

Jaxx was there. I had kinda thought he wouldn’t be. He wouldn’t meet my eyes, and he was kicking rocks, but he was there.

“Look,” I said. “They’re willing to do a long-distance thing until I graduate. But I can’t decide what to do until I find out what you want.”

He stared at me. The dark circles under his eyes made them seem sad and huge. “You said you knew who ratted me out.”

“My dop,” I said. “I messed with its programming too much, and it . . . kinda went rogue, I guess.”

Jaxx stared at me harder, one eyebrow creeping up. He practices that in the mirror, but that doesn’t make me feel any less like an idiot when he does it. “I told you.”

“Look,” I said, “I understand that you’re hurt and upset. I made a mistake, but I didn’t mean to, and you made a mistake, too. It was a dick move not to trust me enough to ask me what happened before you ditched me. And I’m still pretty pissed off, too.” I took a big breath. “You can still come over and do class at my place. And if you want to, I’ll ask to stay. We don’t have to be friends, but . . . man, your place is a zoo.”

So I guess he had unblocked me. After school, I skipped lunch and went over to the field house early. I ran my butt off, put in an extra lap around the soccer field, and still managed to get stuck camping out on the steps and waiting for somebody to come unlock the building.

I sat there in the sun, hanging out on my phone and trying not to feel horrible about myself every time I looked at my dop. Maybe if I just kind of . . . didn’t think about it too much, I’d start to not mind. I dunno, maybe it was working? Anyway, I was feeling sort of halfway decent for the first time in days when Coach Jode walked up along the wall behind me. “You want to tell me anything, Snickerbach?”

I looked at him looking at me and said, “I hate my last name. What the hell were they thinking at Ellis Island?”

That time, he did laugh. After a decent pause, he said, “I noticed you haven’t been doing so well since Cruz got cut.”

“He blames me,” I said. “And he’s got a right to, I guess. But I’m pretty mad at him, too, because he’s been my best friend for, like, a million years, and he still assumed I was a bad guy without talking to me about it first.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Coach nodding slowly. “Huh. That’s rough. But give it some time, see what happens.”

I braced for him to tell me I was young and none of this would seem so important in a year. Instead, he pointed to the cement steps. “Can we chat?”

I nodded, and he flopped down beside me. The light caught his face funny, and he almost looked like a real person for a minute, not a teacher. He didn’t look at me, just stared off across the lawn toward the trees, his lips pressed together and his jaw tight.

“Am I getting cut, too?” I asked when I couldn’t stand it anymore. That would solve my moving dilemma, anyway. If there was no Jaxx and I wasn’t on the team, well . . .

He looked at me, and his eyebrows went up. “Sorry,” he said. “I guess I was drawing out the suspense a little. No, nothing like that. But I think you ought to go up a weight class.”

“I know you can.” He sighed. “But there’s a difference between being able to do something and it being a good idea. And it’s going to keep getting harder. You’re already starting to fill out.”

“C’mon, Snickerbach. You get your butt handed to you because you’re hungry all the time. That’s not wrestling up to your potential.”

I looked at my hands. They were veiny and gaunt. “All right.” Then I had to change the subject. “How’d you wind up a wrestling coach?”

“I could have made better choices.” He took a deep breath and sighed. “But I didn’t.”

He frowned at me. I winced, sure I was about to get cut from the team after all. Then he shook his head and laughed with his mouth closed.

“I could have used a little more guidance,” he admitted. “Now, get out there and give me ten laps!”

I got up. I felt . . . not good, but okay. Pretty okay. Jaxx was going to have to make his own choices.

But I had made mine. If Moms were actually okay with commuting cross-country to see each other for a while, I figured I could stand to stick around and try to fix things with my best friend.

And hey, maybe I — maybe Jaxx and I both — could go out to California to visit. And to find out about those surfers.