That night I couldn’t sleep. I kept smelling dead fish, so around one o’clock I changed my sheets and took another shower and got dressed and decided to go for a walk in the middle of the night. On the way out the back door I noticed my dad’s car keys hanging there, so instead of going for a walk I took my dad’s Lexus for a drive.

I didn’t really think about it much; I just grabbed the keys and went. Almost like it was a normal thing to do. I didn’t even think about what my dad would do if he caught me.

There are thirty or forty lakes in the Twin Cities area. I drove around seven of them and only got lost once. It was a quiet, dark night with hardly any traffic and no moon. Very peaceful. I didn’t even turn on the radio. I just drove until the gas gauge was on empty, then went home. It wasn’t nearly as exciting as stealing somebody’s car for real, but it felt good to be driving around on my own. When I got home I poured most of the gas from my dad’s lawn mower gas can into the car so he wouldn’t notice that his car was suddenly on empty. Then I sat on the front porch for a while. It smelled like roses and cigarette butts. The rosebushes were sort of a hobby of my mom’s. The cigarette butts that littered the ground between the roses and the house were my mom’s too. She had been sneaking smokes ever since I could remember. My dad and I never said anything about it.

I sat there for like an hour, then went inside and took

another shower and climbed into bed and fell asleep almost right away.

Just so you don’t get the idea that I have only two friends and that we are locked in some weird sexless triangle, I should tell you about the Vails.

Jon and Jim Vail are almost twins, but not quite. They were born ten and a half months apart, but they are both starting twelfth grade in the fall. Jon, the older one, is Will’s big sister’s ex-boyfriend, and Jim is the one Jen had a secret crush on and the one I once almost had sex with in the basement of his house—and I maybe would have, except his mom started yelling something down the stairs and we freaked and quit doing what we’d been about to do.

I guess Jen and I have exactly the same taste in guys.

That thing in the Vails’ basement happened way back in May, and Jim and I hadn’t really talked since. I’d seen him a few times, but he was like, “Hey, how’s it going?” without any hint that he actually cared. I guess I acted pretty much the same, so I was surprised when he called and asked if I wanted to drive up to Taylors Falls with him and Candy Cohen and Jason Harris—Jason had a car—to go cliff-jumping, or what passes for cliff-jumping in Minnesota. I’d never been to Taylors Falls, so I said sure.

I didn’t mention it to Jen.

Jen Hoffman has been my best friend for almost my entire life. When I was nine and got pneumonia and had to spend six days in the hospital and two weeks at home after that, she came to visit me every single day. She loaned me her entire collection of Anne of Green Gables books, and her iPod, and she even brought me Mr. Poo, my stuffed poodle, who I’d had since I was four. I was way too old for Mr. Poo even then, but it was super-nice of Jen to ask my mom to dig him out of the closet where he’d been hiding in a box with a bunch of other stuffed toys I’d grown out of but still sort of missed. That’s how Jen is. Even when we fight I always know she’ll be my best friend forever. We made a sacred pact to be each other’s bridesmaids, no matter what. In fact, we even talked about moving to Utah and marrying a polygamist so we could have the same husband. Like with Will—only for real.

Jim Vail was a different deal. He was Jen’s secret, and even I wasn’t supposed to know about her thing for him. And it turned out he was my secret too, after that one time in his parents’ basement, which was when I found out about him and Jen.

The way it happened was I was walking through Bassett’s Creek Park on my way to the SuperAmerica and Jim was there playing frisbee golf with one of his friends. I sort of slowed down to watch and Jim threw a frisbee at me. He said later he meant to throw it to me, but I wasn’t ready for it and it hit me right in the forehead. Big drama with tears and a welt on my forehead and accusations and so forth.

I’d known Jim for years. We live just a couple of blocks apart. But until recently our two-year age difference had put us in different worlds. So it was interesting having him hovering over me and touching my shoulder and apologizing and for once treating me as if I actually existed. We started talking. His friend got bored and took off but Jim and I stayed and talked for a long time and then he suggested we walk over to his place so I could see their seven new puppies.

You’re probably thinking, Uh-oh. Older Boy uses puppies to lure Sweet Young Thing into his lair of Depravity and Sexual Excess. But it wasn’t like that at all. Jim was extremely polite and chivalrous and never touched me except to put some ointment on my frisbee wound. The puppies, golden retrievers, were amazing, three weeks old and all tongues, ears, milk teeth, soft paws, and sweet puppy breath. They crawled over and around me for a frantic half hour while Jim just sat in his dad’s TV chair and laughed and watched.

“You want one?” he asked.

Oh. My. God. Did I ever want one! But of course I couldn’t, what with my dad being allergic and all.

I said I would think about it. And I did. I thought of nothing else. I knew there was no way, but I just had to see them again so I went over to the Vails’ again the next day for another dose of puppy breath.

That was when Jim told me about Jen.

It’s always kind of strange to learn that your closest friend, who you share everything with—like Super-embarrassing Moments, and Dreams for the Future, and Worst Fears—has a secret. I mean, I have secrets from Jen, I guess, but nothing like the secret I found out about that day from Jim Vail, which was that Jen had been calling his cell number like five times a day and then hanging up when he answered.

Caller ID is a bad thing for stalkers. Back before I was born, you could call somebody up and when they answered you could hang up and they would never know it was you. But now all they have to do is check their caller ID. Yeah, I know you can block your number from showing up by dialing whatever-whatever, but here’s the thing: Stalkers do not think rationally. I guess secretly they want the harassed person to know who is doing the harassing. At least that was true in Jen’s case, and I could even kind of understand it a little because Jim Vail is majorly good-looking and two years older than us and therefore both unavailable and highly desirable.

It’s one thing to flirt with a couple of college boys at the country club pool, but another thing altogether to hook up with an older boy who happens to live in your neighborhood and whose parents know your parents, so the way I figure it, Jen was obsessed enough to dial Jim’s number repeatedly, but not crazy enough to actually talk to him. Unlike me.

What Jim Vail said to me as I wrestled with the puppies was “Hey, why don’t you tell your little friend to quit calling me?”

“What little friend?”

“Jen Hoffman.”

Then he told me about getting all those calls, and I just kept saying, “Wow,” while thinking about the utter weirdness of the whole situation.

And then, just to confuse me even more, he told me he liked my hair and said I should never cut it even if it grew all the way down my back to my legs. And then—I’m not sure how it happened—he was kissing me, and even though I’d never thought about him that much before, I was totally into it. I mean, in my heart and soul I gave up my virginity right then even though technically I still was one, thanks to Mrs. Vail yelling down the stairs about sixty seconds before I might not have been.

All that happened before Jen and I stole the Nissan. I never said a word to Jen, and she never told me about her stalking Jim Vail via cell phone, and so as far as anybody knew we were both still faithful to each other and to our possibly-gay boyfriend Will.

But now Jim wanted me to go up to Taylors Falls with him.

Tuesday morning I was awake but still in bed when my mom peeked into my room, then came in and sat down on the end of my bed with this scary blank expression on her face. She put her hand on the bedspread and sort of squeezed my leg, and my heart started beating in my ears like whoosh-chunkawhoosh because I knew she was about to tell me something really awful. Like they were getting a divorce. Or somebody got cancer.

“What?” I said.

“Honey…”

That was bad. The last time she’d called me “Honey” was when she’d told me Chipper had died. Chipper was our beagle. Later I learned that he hadn’t really died. They had given him away to my dad’s second cousin in Alexandria, because my dad couldn’t handle all the sneezing and red eyes. He said it made him look like a sick drug addict in court. But still, they didn’t have to lie to me.

“Your grandmother passed away last night.”

“Which one?”

“Grandma Kate.”

I breathed out a sigh of relief. I’d been afraid she was talking about my other grandmother, Grandma Gail, who I liked.

I’d known for a long time that Grandma Kate, my dad’s mom, was sick with emphysema and needed an oxygen tank. She and Grandpa John lived way up in Danbury, Wisconsin. I didn’t like her much anyway. That sounds really cold, I know, but all she ever did was wheeze and cough and criticize me and my mom and anybody else who came in range. I hadn’t seen her for a while, because lately she’d been too sick to travel. Then I had this weird thought that maybe they’d put Grandma Kate in some sort of home and were just telling me she was dead.

“The funeral is on Friday,” my mom said.

Friday was the day I was supposed to go to Taylors Falls with Jim. My face must have done something, because my mom leaned toward me and said, “Oh, honey, she was ready to go.”

I nodded, still thinking about Taylors Falls. I was disappointed, but at the same time I was a little bit relieved.

“How’s Grandpa John?” I asked. I liked Grandpa John.

“Pretty good, considering. He and your dad talked for a long time this morning. I think in a way he’s at peace—he and Kate had a tough last couple of years. I guess for the last few months she couldn’t even get out of bed to go to the bathroom.” My mom looked into my eyes. “Don’t ever smoke,” she said, squeezing my leg hard.

I don’t smoke. I don’t drink except for just a couple times. I don’t do drugs. I don’t shoplift or vandalize public property or cheat on tests or sell my body or eat with my elbows on the table or pee in the swimming pool.