“Have we forgotten anything?” Dominique asks. I’m about to answer him but see by the slight frown on this forehead that he’s really talking to himself. He looks through the three boxes of aquarium equipment that he’s carefully assembled. “Okay,” he says. “We’re all set.”

It’s Tuesday, and Dominique, Thomas Doherty, and I are walking the three boxes over to Thomas’s apartment to set up his new aquarium.

“Here we are,” Thomas says. “Here we are.” His apartment is on the ground floor of the three-story brick building. Thomas’s front door is blue with a brass “2” above the doorbell.

Thomas jiggles his keys and opens the door. “Come in,” he says. He’s humming a tune I don’t recognize. “This is my home, sweet home.”

The apartment is basically one large room. Against one wall is a bed with a cover and cushions on it, making it look like a sofa. There’s also a chair with a footstool, a television on a stand, and a bookcase stacked mostly with kids’ books. The other side of the room has a small stove with only two burners, a narrow oven, a refrigerator about half the size of the one we have at home, and a little table with two chairs.

“You have a nice place, Thomas,” Dominique says. “Good light, too.” He strolls to the window. “Look, you can see our shopping center.”

“But you can’t see the fish store,” Thomas says.

“No,” Dominique agrees, “only the drugstore.” He notices a small, empty table near the television. “Is this for the aquarium, Thomas?”

“Yup,” Thomas says. “My sister gave me that table. It was extra in her house.”

“O-kay,” Dominique flashes his white teeth. “Let’s do it.”

We unpack the boxes on the floor in front of the little table. “Can I help you?” Thomas asks.

“Well, first we need to wash the tank and the gravel,” Dominique says.

“I have this dishwashing soap,” Thomas says. “It smells real nice.” He walks to the kitchen sink to get the bottle of detergent.

“We only need water,” says Dominique. “Soap is poisonous to fish. Let’s just wash out the tank in your kitchen sink.” He takes the stuff to the kitchen and looks in the cabinet under the sink. ”Have you got a bucket? You can wash out the gravel in a bucket.”

Thomas doesn’t have a bucket in his apartment, but he knows where one is in the building’s laundry room. He also knows where the outside hose is hooked up. Dominique tells him to make sure he washes out the bucket first, and only then he should pour in the gravel and hose it down.

“You can do that, can’t you, Thomas?” Dominique asks.

“Sure, I can do that, Dom-Dom,” Thomas says. “I’ll be back with clean gravel soon.” He takes the bag of blue gravel he picked out at the store and heads out the door.

I wait for Dominique to follow Thomas. I assume he’s going to supervise, but instead Dominique wrestles the tank into the small kitchen sink and begins to rinse it carefully.

“Should I go—?” I gesture toward the door.

“With Thomas?” Dominique finishes for me. “If you want. But I could use your help here getting things ready for the tank.”

I have visions of Thomas dumping blue gravel all over the grass and then trying to pick up each stone, one by one, and dropping them back into the bucket. You wouldn’t want little pieces of grass and dirt in a new aquarium. But Dominique seems unconcerned, so I find the filter, air pump, thermometer, and plastic ferns and get them ready to be placed into the aquarium.

“So, school ends next week, hey, Gabe?” Dominique says. The tank is clean. He’s drying it. “What are you doing with your summer?”

My plans for the summer: This is a major topic of conversation at our house. I don’t have plans for the summer, and that’s a problem. Not a problem for me, but for Mom and Dad. If I’m not in a camp or school or something, who is going to keep an eye on me? Until I’m thirteen, my parents want me to have some kind of supervision. Maxie is going to a day camp where they do sports and arts-and-crafts and outdoor stuff. He loves all that junk. Jake is enrolled in a special program for talented kids at a local art school. Mom and Dad tried to get me to sign up for some kind of day camp but, as I see it, going to camp means trying to get along with a new group of kids that I really don’t want to hang out with anyway.

One thing I have been planning to do is to join the swim team at our neighborhood pool. I’m a decent swimmer. But there’s a problem: This plan kind of depends on Evan and me being friends. We were going to do it together, and his housekeeper, Martha, was going to drive us to the swim practices and pick us up. Evan’s mom even said I could hang around at their house whenever I wanted. Mom and Dad weren’t thrilled about that. They told me they didn’t feel they should take advantage of the fact that Evan has a full-time housekeeper who wasn’t being paid to look after me. But they also didn’t say no.

Now, though, I’m in a major bind. If Evan and I aren’t friends anymore, I can’t exactly plan my summer around him. I find myself telling Dominique about our fight over the stop-action movie.

“I guess I was kind of tough on him,” I tell Dominique. “But I wanted to do it right. I mean, I’d never made a movie before. Suddenly I had this great camera to work with, and so many ideas . . .”

I trail off. I don’t want to tell Dominique about how hard it is for me to get along with other kids, especially since I like hanging out with him.

“It’s hard to be sensitive to other people when you’re totally into something,” Dominique says. “All you want to do is this thing you’re excited about. You don’t want anyone interfering with it—messing it up.”

“Yeah,” I say. “If I made a movie by myself, it would probably turn out better.”

“Maybe so,” Dominique says. “So why don’t you?”

“Make my own movie, you mean?”

Dominique nods.

“Well, for one thing, I don’t have a working video camera at the moment.”

“That’s the reason?”

“Yeah, if I had my own camera, I’d make my own stop-action videos. I’d be the director, producer, scriptwriter, everything.”

“So pretend today’s your lucky day,” Dominique says. “Imagine you’re doing all that with your own camera, all by yourself. Is it what you want to be doing?”

“Didn’t I just say so?”

“Yes, you just said so, but you’re allowed to say things and still be thinking about them.”

I think for a minute. “Okay,” I say. “The good thing is it would be a better movie if I did it by myself. The bad thing is, there’d be no one else to bounce ideas off of, and no one else to see it coming together. With Evan, the movie wasn’t going to be as good as it could have been, but until we started fighting, it was fun.”

“So making the movie was fun, even though the movie wasn’t going to win any Academy Awards.”

I snicker. “Or even any Kids’ Choice Awards on Nickelodeon.”

“So what do you think now?” Dominique asks.

“I guess I have to choose between wanting to win Academy Awards and wanting to have friends.”

“Do you?” Dominique asks. “Do you have to choose between Academy Awards and friends?”

“Looks that way.”

“Oh.”

I hear the disagreement in Dominique’s voice, so I add, “Look, that’s what it always seems to come down to. I can try to keep my ideas and feelings under the surface so that I don’t act up and kids will want to hang out with me. Or I can be myself, the guy who wants things to be right—”

“You mean ‘right’ according to you?”

“—yeah, whatever, and I’ll be mean to other kids, and they’ll all make fun of me and hate me.”

“There’s nothing in between?” Dominique interrupts.

Just then Thomas is back with a bucket of gravel. “All clean,” he announces.

Dominique looks inside the bucket and nods. “Let’s spread it in the tank,” he says.

The three of us—mainly Dominique and me, with Thomas humming—assemble the aquarium. We add water slowly, one glassful at a time, to avoid stirring up the gravel. I try anchoring the artificial plants under the gravel, but they keep floating up.

“Aw, you do it,” I say to Dominique.

“Keep trying,” he says, so I do and manage to get the plants secured on the bottom. Then we add more glassfuls of water—this is a job for Thomas—and put in special water treatment drops to neutralize any dangerous chemicals or minerals in the tap water. Next come the filter, water pump, heater, and thermometer. Finally, we plug everything into the electrical outlet underneath the table where the aquarium sits. Once we do that, water begins to bubble through the air pump and filter, and the little heater clicks on. Dominique sets the heater to seventy-four degrees Fahrenheit. He shows Thomas how to read the thermometer and tells him to check it later to make sure the water temperature is not below seventy-two degrees or above seventy-six degrees.

“When do we get fish?” Thomas asks.

“Thursday or Friday,” Dominique says. Thomas blinks his eyes, but doesn’t say anything.

I sit back on my heels and look at the tank. I notice that the gravel is unevenly spread. Also, I clumped the plants together a little too much on the left side of the aquarium, leaving the right half of the tank looking kind of bare. I also put in a little ceramic figure—a diver, but not the same as my Victor—and now I see that he would look better if I had faced him more toward the front of the tank.

“Good work, team,” Dominique says.

“It looks beautiful,” Thomas says. “Thanks, Dom-Dom. Thank you, Gabe.”

I decide not to point out the flaws.

“We work well together, Gabe,” Dominique says. “Do you think your parents would let you add a part-time job at Tanks for You to your busy summer schedule?”