Mom looked over the form with all the school-photo packages you could buy like she was studying for the SAT. She had three brochures, two order forms, and a dozen sample photos sprawled out on the kitchen island. She said she was buying the super-premium package, which cost 140 dollars and came with enough photos to give four copies to every single person I’ve ever spoken to in my entire life. It was like they were expecting me to get kidnapped and wanted to be prepared to staple my face on all the telephone poles in town.

“We don’t need any copies,” I said. “The picture will go in the yearbook. You don’t have to order anything. Right, Dad?”

Dad turned his head toward me but kept his eyes planted on the newspaper. “Whatever your mother wants.”

“I want to have lots of photos so that someday when I’m an old lady wondering about that high-schooler who lived upstairs in my house and spent all his time locked in his room, I’ll be able to say, ‘Oh, yes, it was Kevin.’” She smiled at me. I squinted at her.

“Come on,” she said. “That was funny. Smile.”

“You really don’t need to waste the money,” I said. “It’s fine.”

She put her hand on my back. “You’ll never have to see them, sweetie. I’ll keep them hidden, all for myself.”

I shrugged and stepped away from her. There were about a million things I could think of that would be a better use of 140 bucks than a bunch of photos that will get dumped in the recycling bin someday when Dad’s on a weekend trash run. But it wasn’t worth the argument.

“What about these options?” she said. “They can do all sorts of stuff to your photo now. Whiten teeth, remove blemishes.”

The blemish removal example showed this kid with a bowl cut from, like, twenty years ago with three big red bumps on his forehead and cheeks like stigmata. In the after-shot his skin looked like a freshly waxed car door.

Mom said, “Do you — would you want that?”

“I don’t know,” I mumbled. It looked strange and false. Isn’t the media evil for Photoshopping celebrity pictures and making all of us have unrealistic ideas of how we should look? Wouldn’t this just be part of that problem? On the other hand, by next spring when the yearbook came out, the Accutane would have cleared up my face and I’d look as smooth as the kid in the after-shot.

“I think you’ll be happy you had it done,” Mom said.

I kind of wanted it. But I was embarrassed to admit I did, so I pretended I was doing Mom a favor by huffing “Fine” and saying she could order it.

I stood in the yearbook picture line with Luke and Will, but they were mostly talking to Sam Hedrick and Patrick Baldwin, two guys they’d, I guess, become friends with at football tryouts. I couldn’t believe Luke and Will had actually followed through on going to tryouts. They forget about 98 percent of the plans they make, but of course they remembered that one.

I’d known Sam and Patrick since fourth grade, but we’d never hung out with them outside of school or anything, so I felt like I’d never actually met them.

Sam has a buzz cut and is built like an ox. His dad has been training him to lift weights since he was an infant. He’s my height but meaty, like a bowling ball made out of muscle.

Patrick has long, messy hair and is the bowling pin, tall and skinny.

They’re always trying to attract attention together. The first time I ever saw someone get detention, it was those two, in Mrs. Yockle’s sixth-grade language arts class, for charging at each other like a bull and a matador during quiet reading time. It wasn’t funny at all. Patrick was the leader of the two. They were sort of like a comedy duo from the 1940s: flapping their limbs while the crowd goes nuts and you have no idea how anyone could find what they’re doing or saying funny.

“Check out this nasty son of a bitch,” said Sam, flicking the top of a whitehead in the crease of his nose. “I saved him up for right now so when I pop him, I’ll be bleeding in the picture. It’s gonna be sick.”

All the other guys laughed, making noises like they were about to throw up. The zit they were so grossed out by looked exactly like any one of the twelve inflamed lumps on my forehead, nose, and jaw. “I’m gonna do it,” he said, laughing. “Ready? Ready? Stand back.”

Luke, Will, and Patrick backed out of the way and shielded their faces while Sam squeezed out the whitehead. It popped a minuscule amount of pus and the other guys all went nuts, hooting like apes. Sam laughed and cheered like he’d won a contest. It was an extremely weak pop, but I wasn’t going to point that out. Considering how nasty they thought Sam’s one pimple was, they must have thought of my face as some hellish nightmare that belonged in a photo of a Great Depression freak show.

“Excuse us,” said Patrick to a few girls who looked at us. “Just taking care of some last-minute blemishes.”

The girls laughed and smiled at him. The whole interaction was disgusting. Patrick is the kind of outgoing, arrogant, slimy jackass who once got away with addressing Mrs. Jones as “Barbara” in front of the entire class.

Luke said, “Did you guys see the retouching thing you can buy? If any guys paid for that, I hope they draw on a set of tits.”

The other guys laughed. I folded up my order form and stuffed it as far down in my pocket as it could go. I stood two steps back from them and didn’t say anything.

I finally got up to the front of the line. My heart pounded in my chest. I brushed my hair to the side and turned away from everyone and dabbed my face with the bottom of my T-shirt to get oil off it. The photographer called my name and I had to sit and smile. In a quarter of a second it was all over. The light was harsh and on top of it there was a flash.

I was glad Mom had paid for the retouching.

Mom called me downstairs that night when I was doing homework in my room. She said she just got off the phone with Mrs. Rossi. Apparently Luke and Will both made the football team.

Goddamn it.

“I didn’t even know you wanted to play football,” she said.

“Right. I don’t. They do.”

“When were tryouts?”

“A few days ago or something. I don’t know.”

“Why didn’t you say anything? You might still be able to get on the team as an alternate if you go to the practices. I can talk to the coach.”

“Please, for god’s sake, do not talk to the coach. I don’t want to play football. And I don’t think Luke and Will seriously want to play football, either. It was, like, a joke or something. I don’t know.”

“Oh. Well, Mrs. Rossi said they have practice just about every day after school now, and on some weekends, too. Are you sure you don’t want to play with them? It might be fun.”

“Sounds like a huge waste of time,” I said. “I have stuff to do that’s, like, actually gonna matter. A project they’re supposed to be doing, too.”

“What is it?”

“We’re making a movie. Like, a real movie. I’m writing it and it could . . . There’s this festival where . . . It’s . . . just . . . a lot more important than whatever they’re doing.”

I went back into my room, shut the door, and tried to work on the script, but I mostly thought about Sam and Patrick’s lame, obnoxious jokes infecting Luke’s and Will’s minds at football practice. They’d traded all their free time for the privilege of running up the bleachers until they puke and developing long-term head injuries via a hundred micro-concussions every day. They’d probably have brain damage by Halloween and wouldn’t be able to contribute much to the movie’s dialogue beyond incoherent mumbling and begging for ice packs on their groins.

I took my pill and spent twenty minutes on my face-washing routine while having this childish daydream about Alex somehow being there again at my blood test the next afternoon. The conversation we’d have played in my head and I locked in the perfect lines to say.

I went through my closet looking for an outfit to wear tomorrow like I was in a silent, lonely version of a teen movie makeover montage. I weeded through thirty dumb T-shirts to find the one button-down shirt I’d gotten for Christmas last year and had never worn. It was green and made me look older, or at least not so much like a child. I laid it out on my bed beside the least-wrinkled shorts I had. It was a decent outfit. Maybe she’d like it.

Even assuming she was on Accutane, I was taking a leap of faith that she’d be there at the exact same time exactly four weeks after our first appointment. Accutane requires patients to stick to routines, and if ours aligned, it would mean something. Synchronized schedules were a sign from the universe.

I closed my eyes and tried to picture her, but the harder I focused, the less of her I saw. I thought about her one part at a time, her legs or arms or shoulders, but I couldn’t remember the shape or color of anything. All I knew was the impression she left on me. It was like staring into a bright light, then shutting your eyes and seeing the lingering glow stained against the dark. That was what I had of her, an imprint of how she made me feel that was more natural and real than measurements or a photograph.

Somewhere I read that you shouldn’t worry about hypothetical bad things happening, because if they do happen, then you suffered two times. Maybe the opposite was true, too, though. That, as dumb and childish as it feels, you should let yourself hope because if you get lucky and the scene you play out in your head every night before you fell asleep comes true, then you get it twice.