

# Parakeet Princess

## By Jandy Branch
Copyright © 2012 Jandy Branch

All rights reserved. No part of this electronic book may be reproduced for any reason or by any means without permission in writing from the author.

Cover Design: Stephanie Van Orman

Cover Image: Dreamstime.com

Branch, Jandy 1973-

Parakeet Princess

Parakeet Princess Series: Volume 1

Issued also in print

Canada

2012

ISBN-13: 978-1479338146

For Stephanie

***

"Here there be dragons."

It's a phrase I've seen printed along the edges of antique maps in history books – maps made when the earth was still flat and full of scaly monsters. Back then, map-makers would draw all the bends and turns of the world they knew and then leave the rest to the dragons.

Warnings on crusty, yellowed maps used to seem quaint to me – kind of funny. But that was before I fell over edge of the flat earth I'd known for the first sixteen years of my life. I know. It's not like I actually got onto a wooden ship and sailed out into the ocean or anything. Still, that didn't make the year my family and I moved house and headed out into the unknown any less scary.

The first dragon I found out in the new, uncharted world was a full-fledged fire-breathing one. Actually, she wasn't so much a reptile as she was a middle-aged lady sitting behind a desk that stood crammed between stacks of Styrofoam take-out boxes and a greasy, gray filing cabinet. I tried not to wince as she flicked her lighter and set fire to the cigarette pinched between her lips. She sucked in slowly before she clamped her mouth shut and blew white smoke out both her nostrils at once. I could almost see the nicotine flooding into her bloodstream as she lowered her eyelids and leaned into her chair. Only then could she look down at my application for a job as part of her staff at a shabby little restaurant called TacoTown.

"So you've got some work experience serving food at Sub-a-rama," she read aloud, as if it was a question.

"Yeah, it's a sandwich restaurant chain on the east coast," I explained through my stiffest, most painful, job interview smile.

The lady vented the next jet of white smoke out of just one corner of her mouth, aiming it at the ceiling, away from my perfect, pink lungs. "That's a bit too far away to phone for a reference check," she mused aloud.

Do not panic, I told myself. Hold up the corners of your mouth – higher, brighter – hold them up just a little bit longer. No matter what kinds of dragons I found here, I really needed this job. It wasn't just for me. It was for my whole family.

"I can't believe the stack of applications we got since we put the 'Help Wanted' sign in the window this time," the smoking lady said. She fanned the corners of a mucky pile of papers with her thumb. "Things must be getting pretty bad out there."

Was this talk about all the other applicants her way of letting me down easily – already? Or was this comment on the nastiness of the economy at the tail end of the 1980s just meant to drag out the length of my job interview to the length of time it would take her to finish her cigarette? I didn't know anything about smoking so I couldn't tell how much more time I might have left to convince the TacoTown manager to hire me. Even though she was clearly not a wealthy woman, I wondered if she really understood how hard the latest financial downturn was on families like mine.

With nothing but the threat of bankruptcy left for my parents in our home thousands of miles away on the east coast, we'd sold our house, our business, and almost everything we owned and moved away. Finally, we'd landed in my grandparents' house, here on the prairies just east of the Rocky Mountains and just north of the American border. My grandparents were on a humanitarian service mission in Chile so we were going to be able to borrow their house while they were gone. It was one of those coincidences we recognized as a blessing.

Now, at age forty, my dad was starting his career all over again. We had avoided bankruptcy but things were still extremely lean in our family finances. If we were going to be able to sustain ourselves until Dad got back on his feet again, both my older brother and I needed to find jobs. There was no way our parents could support all seven of their children without someone's help. It made sense to my brother and me that the best people to act as helpers were the both of us.

The TacoTown manager balanced her smouldering cigarette on the edge of a black, plastic ashtray. "So you're not actually living in the city," she said. "You're living out in Upton?"

I laughed – a little embarrassed – and nervously fingered the big, silver locket I wore around my neck. There were only about four thousand people living in the town of Upton even when all the farmers and ranchers in the "half-town" were counted. It was like nowhere I'd ever lived before.

"Yeah, I'm living in Upton," I admitted. "But it's just a sixteen minute drive from here to there, really. There are places here in the city that you can't drive to TacoTown from in just sixteen minutes – I guess.

"Upton," she repeated from inside a cloud of smoke. "Isn't that a – a Mormon town?"

I was not embarrassed any more. "Yes, I suppose you could say that."

"But you yourself aren't..."

"A Mormon?" I finished. "Yes, I am. That's not a problem, is it?"

"Oh, no, no," the lady said quickly, a little defensively as if she was trying to prove she wasn't prejudiced. "We've just never had a Mormon working here before. I don't know why. I was starting to wonder if maybe Mormon kids weren't allowed to have jobs, or something."

"Well, no," I said, finding my plastic smile again. "And some of us actually really need to work."

"Sure, of course," she muttered, looking down to read my application again. With her eyes averted, I risked looking closely at her TacoTown uniform. Thanks to the horrendous uniforms, this restaurant had been the last place I had submitted a job application. The eighties were just ending: the decade when no one wore brown at all let alone three shades of it at once. And then there were the uniform's flare cut pants and the floppy knit shirts trimmed with all that dark brown piping. Under normal circumstances, it would have been a wardrobe nightmare. But I was no longer proud and I had never been very vain. I was, however, desperate.

"Look," I began. "We both know by now that I'm terrible at job interviews. But I'm great at jobs. And even more than that, I'm willing to work three shifts for you for free if you'll just give me a chance to prove myself. If you don't like my work by the end of the free trial, then I promise I'll go away and I won't bother you anymore."

She drew in a huge breath through her lit cigarette. "You'd do that?" she asked. "You'd give us a free trial – what's your name – Heather?"

"I totally would," I assured her. "This job isn't for my own pocket change. It's for groceries for my little sisters. My dad's between jobs right now and –"

She laughed out a plume of smoke. "Enough already, Heather-the-Mormon. You're breaking my heart," she cackled. Then she waved her cigarette at a shelf behind me. "See if you can find a uniform that fits you somewhere back there. And come in on Tuesday at 4:45."

I bounced to my feet. "Seriously? Thanks!"

"I'm Sandy," she finally introduced herself. "And you can forget about the free trial. Just consider yourself probationary staff with full starting wages."

I choked out a happy little cheer. "Thank you so much!"

She motioned to the shelf of uniforms again and I turned to dig through the pile. I folded a dark brown pant-leg over, deciding how I'd stitch it so the cut of the pants would look more like 1989 and less like 1976. With a little work, it wouldn't be so bad. I bundled the heavy, brown fabrics in my arms.

Government health department regulations said Sandy wasn't allowed to bring a lit cigarette through the food preparation area so I walked out of her office and into the unfamiliar kitchen alone. I couldn't quite remember the way out to the front of the restaurant so I wandered around, almost on tiptoe, wary of more dragons and sea monsters, looking for an exit.

The place was already vibrating with the beginnings of the suppertime rush. All the evening shift workers – my new coworkers – were standing at their stations with their heads down, their eyes fixed on their work. They looked young, as if none of them was old enough to be out of high school yet. I didn't want to disturb any of them. Frankly, they were a little scary to me, like anything unknown.

Instead of bothering them, I decided to quietly slip out a backdoor. From there, I'd walk around the outside of the building to the parking lot where I'd find my brother, Jeff, waiting for me in our family's only car. It was the same car we'd used to drive for five days across the country, sleeping squashed against each other, constantly watching the little kids for early signs of carsickness.

Still inside the taco restaurant, I pushed against a large steel door on the back wall of the kitchen. It didn't budge but the handle clanged like a car crash as I heaved against it with all my weight, once and then again.

"Who's trying to get out the backdoor?"

It was another dragon, one in the form of a boy about my age. His voice was calling through the window over the deep fryer, looking into the back kitchen from the front counter area of the restaurant. I turned away from the locked door and saw his face, along with another boy's, gaping at me through the indoor window. One of the boys was tall and pale and the other one – the noisy one – was shorter and dark.

The tall one said something to the shorter one. I couldn't hear him from where I stood but when the shorter one answered I distinctly heard every word. Everyone in the whole restaurant heard him.

"How should I know?" he questioned the tall boy in return. "It looks like she's got a uniform in her arms so she must be a new hire." He rolled his eyes and shook his head even though he knew I was looking right at him. "Nice one, Sandy," he apostrophized.

The tall boy spoke again, just as indistinctly as before.

"Go then," the shorter one replied, sounding like smoke was about to start fuming out of his face even though he wasn't anywhere near a cigarette. "Go let her out. But hurry up. We don't have time for this right now."

The tall boy's face disappeared from the window and an instant later he was clipping toward where I stood feeling foolish at the back door. He was dressed in a TacoTown uniform instead of clothes he chose himself. That made it hard for me to use any of my usual teenager cues to form a proper first impression of him. All I could tell was that he was taller than most grown men and had one of those pointy Adam's apples sticking out of his throat in a way that always made me want to reach up and cover my own neck.

"Sorry to bug you," I said, unconsciously rubbing my throat as he approached.

"We always keep this door locked so no one sneaks in from the alley," he said, reaching high over my head to throw back the heavy, aluminum dead-bolt mounted at the top of the door, near the ceiling.

"Sorry," I said again. "I don't know anything. I'm new."

"And I'm Darren."

The shorter boy was calling through the window again. "Darren, get her out of here."

Darren was pushing the newly unlocked door open for me. "So we'll see you later then?"

"Yeah, thanks," I answered, stepping out onto the gravel in the alley behind the restaurant. I stood and blinked for a moment in the bright September light as the door banged to a close behind me. The sun was so fierce here on the plains, as if we were living on the roof of the world with nothing at all between us and the sky. I wondered if I'd ever get used to it.

My feet crunched their way around the building to the parking lot. There was Jeff, reading a newspaper, listening to music on his headphones, waiting for me in the big, green station wagon.

I opened the fake-wood panelled door and fell onto the passenger seat, clasping the brown bundle of clothing.

Jeff plucked his headphones out of his ears. "You got the job."

"Yay," I cheered in return.

Jeff wasn't my twin brother but we weren't even a full year apart in age. Tomorrow morning, he would start his last year in high school while I would begin the eleventh grade. We'd been spending a lot of time together since the move – trapped in the car for days and days, torn away from our old friends outside the family, and left to rely on each other for companionship and comfort. It's a good thing we were already friends before our social lives were completely obliterated.

"So did you use my 'free trial' strategy?" he asked.

"I sure did," I said, twisting into my seat belt. "It's genius. You're the best."

Jeff grunted back at me in a way that I understood to be somehow gracious. "You smell like French fries already," he told me. "And – tobacco smoke."

I sniffed hard, pulling a handful of my thick, blonde hair toward my nose. He was right. It reeked of the dragon lady.

"And you smell like pepperoni," I countered. His new visor from Pizza Paradise sat on the seat between us and I tossed it at him.

He got his hand up in time to deflect it and it fell onto the seat. "That's what I smell like, all right," Jeff crowed, throwing his arm along the back of the seat as he reversed into the driving lane. "It's the smell of money."

***

I guess I never really expected my first day at Upton High School to be a particularly good day. Really, my new school was just another corner of an old map where a larger, more organized horde of dragons was waiting to meet me.

I was far more than nervous as I got out of bed the morning I started school. The first challenge of the day was to dress myself as well as I could in last year's clothes. Fortunately, the days of growth spurts were long past for me. I chose a pair of comfortable jeans and long-sleeved, black t-shirt. I pulled the black fabric over my head even though I knew Mum would probably prefer me to wear something more upbeat, more vibrant, something that screamed, "Please love me!" But I felt most like myself dressed in black – especially on a morning like this one. And all I wanted that day was just to feel normal – to act like my true, best, self instead of some high-strung, desperate, pathetic version of me.

The most interesting part of my plain outfit hung from my neck in the form of an enormous silver locket. It was cast in the shape of an oval covered in intertwining ivy vines. The locket was a gift from the girl I still thought of as my best friend, even though I knew it might be years and years before either of us managed to cross the country for a visit. A little part of me I didn't like very well quietly acknowledged the possibility that I might never see her again at all. She was another Heather, like me. We used to joke about how unfortunate we were to have parents with so little imagination when it came to naming their baby girls. I loved my fellow Heather. I missed her. And today, thousands of miles away, on the other side of the country, she would be starting a new year of school without me.

I stood in front of my mirror, holding her locket in the palm of my hand, and watched my reflection as I pressed the warm metal to my cheek. I would bring the locket into Upton High School with me that morning as if it was a protective talisman. But every good luck charm is really just a sham. I knew that. Maybe the Heather-locket would be more like a little, shiny piece of a suit of armour, protecting me from my own self-doubt. I hoped it would remind me that I was likeable – even loveable. And maybe it could serve as hard, real proof to everyone else at my new school that I hadn't always been friendless.

The final thing to reckon with before school started was all my hair. I thought about curling up my bangs and shellacking them with hairspray to make myself look more like the other girls my age. In the end, I couldn't bring myself to do it. Instead, I took a moment to rehearse my smile in the mirror. Unfortunately, the best I could muster was the same kind of cracking plaster smile I wore to my TacoTown job interview. It would have to do for now.

Jeff and I didn't really look at the other students in the foyer of our new high school as we walked past them on our way to the principal's office. Like most kids, we had been taught not to openly gawk at strangers. My peripheral vision registered a vague sense of my new schoolmates' spiral perms, dark blue eyeliner, NBA logos, and – were those cowboy boots? Seeing people dressed as cowboys on days other than Halloween was going to take some getting used to.

I gulped a breath into my lungs as the doors of the school office parted in front of us. When the principal stepped out to meet us, I let out my breath in a little. I recognized him from the group of men who'd come to help unload the few possessions we'd brought with us from our old lives. Apparently, our new principal also went to church with us. This was strange to me after a lifetime of being part of a tiny, close minority of Mormon people inside a big city. Suddenly, we were in a little town where people with the same religious beliefs as us actually outnumbered everyone else. All the way across the country, Dad kept promising us we'd love that about Upton. I hoped he was right. Maybe I could start appreciating it sooner if everyone here would stop talking about high school football as if it really mattered.

Upton High School itself was really just one long hallway with a gymnasium and a library stuck to one end of it. It was very different from the immense, labyrinthine, three-story campus of our old high school. There was no way to get lost here. I supposed that was both a good thing and a bad thing. At least it would be easy for me to find all my classes. My first one was French.

In our little red-neck school, there weren't enough French students in my grade to fill an entire class so the room was a combination of both twelfth and eleventh grade kids. I sat down at the back of the room just as the teacher began to speak. It was like no French I'd ever heard spoken before in my life. My teacher spoke with hardly any attempt at a French accent at all – not a France accent, nor Quebecois, nor Acadian, nor even an obscure French-African one. Instead, he sounded like some kind of robotic computer simulation of a French speaker.

The sparkly-eyed girl in front of me turned around in her chair as I sat down. " _Bonjour_ ," she sang.

At least someone in the room can speak French, I thought. " _Salut,"_ I answered aloud. _"Parle-t-il toujours comme un ordinateur?"_ I asked, wanting to know if the teacher always spoke like a computer.

"Whoa," she said. "That was awesome."

" _Quoi_?" I went on, blinking almost innocently. It seemed her French wasn't really as fluent as her confident " _bonjour_ " had promised.

The girl smiled and shook her long, brown hair – though her high, over-sprayed bangs barely wobbled as she moved. "You can totally speak French," she said.

" _Seulement un peu_ ," I answered. The meaning of the words themselves may have been modest but I was clearly showing off.

She perked up. "' _Un_ ' means one," she translated for herself.

"Unfortunately, this is not a language immersion class," someone drawled from across the aisle, on the twelfth grade side of the classroom. He was a thin boy in glasses, slouching in his seat, and he had spoken to me as if the sparkly girl couldn't understand English either. "None of them can actually speak French here. Not even by the time they get to the eleventh grade."

" _Mais vous, vous pouvez me comprendre_ ," I continued, talking to the boy now, trying to see if he really did understand everything I said.

The girl directed her talk to him too. "Ben, are you really getting all that?" she demanded.

" _Bien sur_ ," he replied, generously using his intonation to show her he meant, "Of course, I understand her."

By now, the teacher had stopped talking at the front of the room and all the eyes and ears of the small French class were turned to me and the boy called Ben Jones.

" _Très bien_ ," the teacher congratulated me. "Class, this is Heather MacLean. She's just moved here from Halifax." In the teacher's defense, there was something about his way of speaking English that also made me think of a computer simulation. He continued in French.

" _Bienvenue, Heather. Tout le monde ensemble: Bienvenue_."

" _Bienvenue_." The class muttered their welcome in something not very much like unison at his command. It was all far more embarrassing than it was welcoming.

"How long have you been studying French?" the teacher asked me, reverting back to English.

" _Depuis grade trois_ ," I said, holding up three fingers so my classmates would be able to guess that I'd been learning French since the third grade.

I thought I might have seen the teacher grit his teeth as he nodded. " _Très bien_ ," he said again.

" _Pauvre monsieur_ ," the boy named Ben said, whispering across the aisle to me. "He learned enough French to get by while he was a missionary in France and now the school makes him teach it so they can say they offer the full high school curriculum."

"So that weird accent of his is actually..."

"American," he grinned into his textbook.

I snorted a laugh into the back of my hand.

The pretty girl in front of us looked uncomfortable and turned around to face the front of the room. "You guys are mean," she said.

"Sorry," the boy said to her. "You're right, Melanie. I'm sorry."

" _Pauvre monsieur_ ," I echoed.

Even though the first day of school started off with the smug security of French class, things degenerated quickly when I sat down to the review worksheet handed out by my new math teacher. I knew my old school division hadn't been known for excellence in its math programs. But I still wasn't prepared for what I found at Upton High School. Some of the math problems on the review worksheet were so alien to me they may as well have been written in Chinese characters.

At the end of class, I lingered behind the rest of the students and trod meekly up to the math teacher's desk. He sat in front of a wall of large, wide windows, leaning back in his wheeled chair with his fingers laced behind his head. He looked content but I always wondered how high school math teachers managed to get up in the morning to the same old functions and theorems, year after year. I always figured they must have rich inner lives. Judging by the way this math teacher didn't seem to see me until I was right at his desk, it's probably true.

I laid my partially completed review sheet down in front of him. "I don't think I belong in this class," I began.

He sat up slowly from his rich inner life and pulled my worksheet toward himself.

"Hmm," he said, brushing away the stray eraser bits that clung like little pink parasites to my paper. "It's probably not as bad as you think. Most of the kids in here forget how to do these problems over the summer. It's the same every year. And somehow we still end up with some of the highest math test scores in the region by the end of the semester, if I don't say so myself."

He scratched over my work with a red pen while I stood flinching and cringing beside his desk.

"Look at that," he said, pushing the paper back at me. "You got a C minus."

I shuddered. "I've never been anything but an honours student. I can't start getting C minuses now."

The teacher leaned back again, until the chair sounded a warning squeak beneath him. "Okay, now. Let's keep our heads. It looks like we need to make a little adjustment. My daughter, Tawny, is in this class too. She can help you catch up. She's looking for a volunteer tutoring position to put on her resume anyway. Stay behind class on Friday and I'll get you started with her help. In the meantime, here's last year's textbook for you to read. And you may as well take some practice sheets too."

I gathered up the pile of extra work and answered with a miserable nod. "Thanks. Sorry for all the trouble."

At home, Jeff looked just as dejected as me. He'd played out almost exactly the same drama after his own math class. "The teacher lined me up with some guy named Ben Jones as a tutor," he reported.

"Ben Jones," I repeated, idly closing and unclosing my locket. "My tutor is named Tawny. Jeff, we've come to a place where the smart girls are named Tawny."

Jeff snickered. "Jones says he already met you. You're in his French class, or something."

"Oh, you mean that guy," I said. "Tall and skinny and smart? Yeah, he seems like he's an okay guy – a little stodgy and formal maybe, but okay."

Jeff hummed. "He's actually kind of cool. But I get the impression he thinks he doesn't really fit in here even though it's the only place he's ever been."

"Wow," I said. "You learned something that personal about this guy in one math study session?"

Jeff yawned. "Well, we're in most of the same classes. You know, twelfth grade pre-university core subjects. So we basically spent the entire day together. I think I might have found my new best friend in the form of the town's resident brainy dork."

Jeff wasn't quite being sincere but I sighed anyway. It was disappointing to hear I wasn't going to get to stay his best friend for long. "Lucky Ben Jones," I said.

Something was crashing down the stair well. It was our younger sister, Carrie, rushing down at us. "Dad got a job," she announced.

Jeff and I both bolted to our feet and ran upstairs. Carrie tore on ahead of us as if we were chasing her.

"Dad," I called. "What's going on?"

Our dad was still standing beside the massive, green telephone bolted to the kitchen wall. He was failing to look as ecstatic as I thought he would upon getting his first job since our business failed. "Oh, it's nothing much," he said, scrubbing his face with his dry hands, "just a little job in a warehouse."

"Cool," I said, folding my arm around his. "Forklifts are awesome."

"Maybe. But I'll be too junior to be allowed anywhere near the forklift," he explained. "I'm just there for the heavy lifting."

"The job's not 'nothing,'" Mum said, coming to take Dad's other arm. "It's definitely something. When it comes to honourable work, something is always better than nothing."

"Very true," Dad agreed.

"Besides, it's not a life sentence," Jeff added. "Something better will come along."

Dad patted my hand where it rested on his arm before he went back to peeling potatoes. I think he was glad to be able to stop talking about the warehouse and start asking Mum about her first day at her new job. Mum had the best luck of any of us in the employment market. When she was a teenager in the 1960s, her dad had given her the choice between careers in teaching, nursing, or the secretarial arts. She'd chosen to become a secretary. I used to think it was kind of sad that her options had been so limited. But now that Mum had already found herself a sweet job working in a clean, peaceful office building in the city, it looked like there might have been more than a shred of practical wisdom in my grandfather's crusty approach to career counselling.

I would have liked to have stayed in the kitchen, listening to more of Mum's report on her new job. But there wasn't any time. Now that she was home for the evening, Jeff and I had just a few minutes to collect our aprons and uniforms before turning the car around and leaving for work of our own.

***

Jeff's shift at Pizza Paradise started at 4:30 pm. It meant he needed to drop me off at TacoTown fifteen minutes early for my very first shift. A little sheepishly, I pulled open the glass door, grasped my locket, and made my way across the restaurant's dining room to the table reserved for the staff to use. A tall, fat kid was already sitting there reading the newly drafted work schedule. He looked up at me as I took a seat on the opposite side of the table.

"Hey. You must be the new girl," he greeted me, "Heather M, right?"

I groaned. There was already a Heather working here – of course – so I'd have to wear the initial of my last name as a permanent accessory. I leaned forward to look at the schedule myself, reading upside down. "Which one are you?" I asked.

The boy as I pointed to the list of names. "I'm Tom," he said, gulping down a mouthful of cola. "I just started a month ago, when they were desperate for people."

"Desperate?"

"Yeah. The labour market's a fickle thing, eh?"

I shook my head but I smiled. This Tom guy seemed safe. He was more like a walrus than a dragon. It could have been nothing more than my preference for awkward, quirky people. I was a recovering ugly girl myself – the girl once unofficially voted the ugliest in her junior high school by the table of cool boys in the cafeteria. That phase of my development had left me a little scared and uneasy around beautiful people like the perfectly nice girl from my Upton High School French class that morning. Maybe that's why I felt I had to protect myself from her and her prettiness with the big, bristly wall of a different language. But around guys like Tom, I felt secure and I could magically just act like myself.

I smirked across the table at him. "At least you didn't get hired by making yourself pathetic enough to offer to work for free."

Tom smirked back at me. "I heard about that. You're kinda nuts."

"Nah," I said, "just afraid of going hungry."

"So who else can we expect here tonight?" Tom said, turning away from my poverty and back to the schedule. "Ooo, the triplets."

"Seriously? Triplets?"

"Sure." Tom pointed to the name "Wayne" written on the schedule in Sandy's curly handwriting. "This is the alpha male. He's a shift supervisor and he likes to act like a jerk."

"Dark hair? Totally obnoxious?" I asked.

Tom nodded. "That's Wayne, all right. This," he pointed to another name, "is Crystal, his sister. They're fraternal twins."

"Yeah, most opposite sex twins are," I snickered.

"True enough," Tom nodded. "They're the only children of a classic, bitter single mother. Don't let all their squabbling fool you. They've got this real strong loyalty thing going on – like bear cubs."

"Or dragon pups?"

"Huh?"

"Nevermind," I shrugged.

Tom was moving on. "Now this," he pointed to the only familiar name on the schedule, "is Darren. He's not a blood relative of the twins' but he's been Wayne's best friend since they were little kids. They're like this." Tom crossed his fingers. But he dropped them quickly and spoke his next words toward the tabletop. "Here they are now: the triplets themselves."

I looked up at the glass front doors of the restaurant just as the triplets walked into the building. The girl, Crystal, came in first. She didn't even look at me but marched, quick and straight backed, right into the ladies' room.

The two boys came next, Wayne first and Darren behind. Darren was tall enough to look at me from above Wayne's head and he grinned as they advanced toward the table. Fraternal or not, Wayne did look a lot like his sister, right down to the dark, flat Hollywood mole above his lip. For a boy, he was pretty in a dark eyed, Johnny Depp kind of way. The natural, easy confidence I'd enjoyed when I was alone with Tom started to slip. I hated myself for it but I couldn't seem to help it. Maybe I was still the ugliest girl in my junior high school after all. It didn't help matters that pretty dragon-boy Wayne was already glaring at me. I fumbled for my locket.

"So you're starting tonight, are you?" he said to me, already sounding aggravated and territorial.

"Yeah," I answered. "And you're, like, the boss for tonight?"

"The supervisor." He sounded disgusted as he corrected me. "How come you're not dressed yet? Don't you like your uniform?" He wasn't trying to relate to me in a jocular, commiserating kind of way. He was daring me to risk complaining about my job on the night of my very first shift.

"It's fine," I mumbled. I stood up and moved past him to the ladies' room, hoping Crystal would already be finished dressing by the time I arrived. I needed a minute of solitude to take some deep breaths and quiet my frazzled nerves.

"Come on, Wayne," I heard Tom begin as I walked away. "I thought you liked blondes..."

I found Crystal standing in front of the mirror, finishing the braid in her thick, dark hair as I stepped into the ladies' room behind her.

"Hi," I said.

Her reflection looked out of the mirror at me with huge brown eyes. They were just like her brother's only without all the scorching hostility. "Hi," she answered, not unpleasantly.

I waited. I don't know why. Maybe I was hoping she'd say, "Sorry about my brother. He's really not so bad. I'll try to keep him away from you," or something like that. But she didn't. She hadn't even seen how Wayne had looked at me or heard how he'd spoken. Maybe that's why all she said was, "See ya," before she left me alone in the small, beige, tiled room.

I put on my uniform, calmed down as best I could, and went to report to Wayne for an evening of dehumanization.

What a relief it was when I found Sandy, not Wayne, waiting for me at the door of the kitchen. "I try to do all the new hire orientations myself," she explained. I was so pleased I actually took comfort in the smoky smell that drifted around her as we moved through the kitchen.

After a detailed tour of the restaurant, Sandy stood me beside a line of three huge, stainless steel sinks. They were full of dishes caked with refried beans and sour cream and whatever other dregs were left of the bins of food the day-staff had prepared and dispensed while we were all still at school.

All through the evening shift, Wayne didn't talk to me except to holler, "Tables," through the window whenever it was time for me to take a rag and a spray bottle out to the dining room to clear up the debris people left behind after eating. He and his fellow triplets worked the front of the serving area while Tom and I toiled in the steam and molten vegetable shortening of the back kitchen.

By nine o'clock, the restaurant was quiet except for the screech and wail of the classic rock radio station playing over the dining room speakers. Darren came and leaned over the counter where Tom and I were portioning a huge vat of hot sauce into tiny plastic cups.

"You guys can go home," Darren said.

It was subtle, but I could see that even this was a slight from Wayne. I was so low he wouldn't even bother to dismiss me himself. He'd sent Darren to do it instead. I'm not sure if any of my anger showed on my face. Maybe it did.

Maybe that's why Darren made sure he grinned as he took hold of the back door handle, as if to hide it from me. "You can use the front door this time," he said, goofy but friendly, apologizing ever so slightly for Wayne.

I didn't even turn my head as I stormed past Wayne and Crystal to get my street clothes from the locker area. Footsteps sounded behind me as I reached for my bag. Was it Wayne, coming to spit brimstone at me for walking out without taking leave of him? Was I about to get to blow off some of the tension that'd been building in my shoulders all night by finally having a spat with him? I was still on TacoTown's new employee probation. Would Sandy fire me if I disrespected my supervisor on my first day – even if he was insufferable?

"Hey," a voice said – a warm, girl-voice. It wasn't Wayne but Crystal who had stepped up behind me. "I like what you did with your pants." She pointed to the neatly tapered legs I had re-sewn into the former bell bottom trousers of my uniform. "I've tried to do the same to mine with safety pins a million times. But I can never get it to stay. The pins just break open in the middle of my shift and stab me in the leg. How did you do that?"

A bit of the stress of the evening left me as I propped up my leg on Sandy's desk and explained my simple sewing secrets to Crystal. "Cool," she said. "Could you help me do the same to mine? We don't have anything like a sewing machine at our place."

I smiled, for real. "Sure," I said. "You don't really need a sewing machine, anyway. I'll bring in a needle and thread the next time we work and we'll figure something out."

"Great," Crystal said. She smiled so widely she felt like she had to cover her mouth with her hand. "See ya."

Outside the restaurant, I sat on the curb beside Tom and I waited for Jeff to arrive to drive me home. Insects beat their exoskeletons against the glowing TacoTown sign over our heads.

"I think two of the triplets might be willing to accept me," I told him.

"Which two?" Tom asked.

I laughed, loud and bitter.

"Seriously," Tom hurried. "Wayne's funny. He probably likes you fine. He was just mad that the wrong Heather came to work tonight."

"You mean, he would rather work with Heather V.?" I asked, remembering the initial of the other Heather penned on the schedule.

"Exactly. He's dating Heather V. She used to work a lot of hours when they first got together but she's coming in less and less these days. Everyone thinks it's because she's trying to lose Wayne – and he knows it," Tom explained.

"Lose Wayne?" I repeated with a sneer. "Why would anyone want to lose Wayne?"

Tom laughed. "Anyway, sorry it looks like he's taking it out on you. But it's not like he's a monster or anything, right? There's my ride." He stood up, his sloppy black jeans now covered in road dust. "Have fun back in your Mormon fairyland. See you Friday."

I'd never thought of Upton as a fairyland. I wondered for a moment if any of the old map-makers ever wrote "Here there be fairylands" in the margins of their maps. If Tom was trying to say Upton was sheltered and mild, I had to agree. But living in Upton had a kind of difficulty all its own. People there were close but so far away, friendly but not inclusive, kind but not quite loving. And even when they were mean to each other, they were always so nice. Upton had its own kind of dragons: soft, fluffy, happy ones. But they were still dragons.

In the hours I'd spent at TacoTown, I hadn't thought about Upton, or my new school, or the bundle of extra math review I'd brought home that afternoon. It would all be waiting for me back at my grandparents' house when we got home that night, just before eleven o'clock. This was my new life – the rush, the scramble, the late nights, the fairies and monsters and walruses. I sat alone on the curb in the light of the restaurant sign and sounded my emotions. The hysterical grief that had struck me when Dad first announced we needed to move away had subsided to a quiet ache. I still wished the move had never happened. Nothing, I thought, would have made me happier than to pack everything up and go back to our old lives.

But I pushed the wish aside and closed my hand around my locket. Right now, I was just trying to understand whether the demanding new schedule of my new life was going to make me into a new kind of sad—not just lonely, but harried and worn out. And I found that, beyond all reason, as if by a miracle, I was somehow happy – or at least happy-ish. And for now, that was enough.

***

Wednesday night was our church youth group's activity night or, "Mutual" as everyone was calling it for some baffling, unexplained reason. We didn't use that term in the church on the east coast. Maybe it was old-fashioned. I didn't know. I stood out in my new Young Women's group from the moment we recited the theme together. I droned on through its phrases without knowing the rest of the girls were going to pause, tilt their heads, and take a breath all at exactly the same time.

Pretty Melanie from my French class at school was in my church class too. She held the handle on the opposite side of a beat up laundry hamper from me as we walked through a small stand of corn, tearing away ripe, stringy ears and piling them in the plastic basket. It was part of some kind of annual service project that everyone understood and no one bothered to explain to me. Looking back now, I see that it was darling of Melanie to try so hard to be nice to me when I was so prickly and cynical with her. But at the time, all I could see was a page I imagined in her journal where she'd written down goals about being kind to someone in need of a friend.

Tawny, my prospective math tutor, was in our ward too. Melanie introduced us to each other as we rode back to the chapel from the corn field in the open bed of a grain truck.

"Is it legal for a bunch of minors to ride back here like this?" I asked her, dragging my bare arm through the air rushing by the truck. "We don't exactly have seatbelts – or seats."

Tawny grinned. "It probably isn't. But the only one policeman in town and he can't be everywhere so it's a moot point."

I managed to roll my eyes and smile at the same time.

"So when do you want to get started on the math tutoring?" she asked me.

"Oh," I stammered. "I was going to take a few days to try those extra readings and worksheets your dad gave me. If I can figure it out myself I might not have to bother you. I mean, it's really nice of you but I can't imagine tutoring me would be very much fun."

Tawny shrugged. "Oh, don't worry about that. Tutoring experience would make some nice padding for my resume, actually. But I hear you're a really good student so maybe you won't need me after all."

"Someone said that about me?" I was genuinely touched.

"Oh yeah," Tawny nodded. "Good gossip travels just as quickly as the bad stuff in a town like this. Sometimes the gossip even exaggerates our best features for us. Like, they used to say Ben Jones had a photographic memory. But it turns out he's just a plain old genius."

There was a pause—a little gap in the conversation where I could have assured Tawny that my talents had been exaggerated too. I left it gaping open.

"Well," Tawny continued at last, "people made sure word of your brains got back to me probably because I've been the top student in our class ever since kindergarten."

"When we started school at five years old she already had a third grade reading level," Melanie supplied.

"That's awesome," I capitulated. "You must be gifted, Tawny."

"Oh, she's definitely gifted," Melanie confirmed.

My fingers felt for my locket as I sat beside the girls, between the corn cobs, and marveled, a little miserably, at how beautiful it was to have a best friend close enough to hear and see and touch whenever she was needed.

"Aw, thanks you guys," Tawny said. "I guess people wanted to warn me that, with the new girl parachuted into town, I might not have next year's valedictorian award locked up after all."

I yelled out a loud laugh over the diesel roar of the massive, accelerating grain truck. In my huge high school on the east coast, the honour of being named valedictorian was reserved for top performing students who were also elite athletes and student body presidents and, preferably, Nobel Prize laureates. It seemed genuinely funny to think of getting the award myself – even in a place like Upton where the school valedictorian was simply the kid in the graduating class with the highest grade point average.

"I wouldn't get too worried about competition from me if I was you," I finally assured Tawny. "I work in the city at least three nights a week so I won't exactly have a lot of time for studying. That plus the dismal direction my math marks are heading will keep me well out of the running for anything like a valedictorian award."

"I hate to say it but that's probably for the best," Tawny called over the rush of wind. "The possibility that we might have a girl for a valedictorian next year is controversial enough in this town. If it was a girl who was also from out of town there might be mayhem." She ended these comments with a laugh that didn't quite dull their menacing edge.

Maybe that's what made me set a goal of my own – only it was too mean-spirited to write down in my journal. At that moment, in the back of the grain truck surrounded by all that corn, I decided I was going to rise to the very top of the academic standings of Upton High School. And I might just do it out of something like spite.

That night, the boys from church were meeting at the Jones' house on the western edge of town. I sat in the front seat as my mother pulled into their long driveway. It was a narrow strip of asphalt running between two rows of tinder dry white spruce trees. The bristling trees all bent slightly eastward, away from the winds that came falling down the Rocky Mountains onto the town. Picking up Jeff from the Jones' house was Mum's last stop after rounding up the rest of us from all over town. We waited in the driveway, watching the big, brown front door for signs of Jeff coming out to meet us.

"He's not coming. Honk the horn," Carrie hollered from the backseat.

"That is uncouth," our mother instructed her. "Heather, go and politely ring the doorbell."

"But I'm all smeared with dirt and corn silk."

"Look, somehow I've been driving around this little town for hours tonight, Heather," she cut me off. "I've had enough. Please, just go."

I rolled my eyes and clambered out the car, smoothing my pony tail and scuffing mud off the soles of my shoes as I walked to the entrance of the Jones' posh ranch house. I'd heard the dad of the family had a good career – one of those icky but highly educated healthcare professions that earn a lot of money. He was some kind of specialized dentist, or something. Whatever he was, it meant he could afford to have a huge solar panel bolted to the roof of his house. I was so distracted by the sight of it I didn't notice the door opening just a crack at sound of my knock.

"Hurry!" a young boy called through the crack, beckoning urgently. "Squeeze in. Don't let her out."

I turned sideways and crammed myself past the big, wooden door. Behind the first boy stood another, even younger brother. On his head sat a little turquoise bird, cocking its head from side to side as it examined me with each of its bright, black eyes in turn.

"I'm looking for Jeff, the new guy," I told the boys even though they didn't seem interested in anything else but their little pet.

"I'll go get him," Bird-Boy offered, turning to go.

"Leave the parakeet!" the other one called after him.

"Oh, right," he grinned, trotting up so close to me that our toes nearly touched. "Hold out your pointer finger and say, 'Step up,'" he directed.

I glanced at the other boy and saw him miming the instructions his brother had just given me. There was nothing to do but obey.

"Step up," I told the parakeet.

It raised one pink foot and then the other, stepping onto my finger as if it had perched there a hundred times. Bird-Boy spun on his sock feet on the fancy tiled floor before he capered out to the vast cedar deck at the back of the house where Jeff and the others were meeting.

"Isn't she the coolest birdie ever?" the other boy asked me, reaching up to scratch the parakeet's neck.

"It's a girl?" I don't know why it surprised me but it did.

"Yup."

The animal leaned into the boys' fingernail. I had never held a tame bird before. Its feet were surprisingly warm against my finger and the tiny claws didn't scratch my skin at all. The bird's feet were covered in a soft, pink skin nothing like my own. It was scaly looking but not quite like a reptile's. The little creature was amazing.

There were heavy footsteps coming down the hallway – the sound of Jeff's canon ball walk. He came into sight, followed by tall, lanky Ben Jones from my French class.

"Hey, it's Jeff's little sister," Ben Jones greeted me. I looked up at him but even though he was talking to me, he wasn't looking at me – not directly. It was like I was a solar eclipse or something and he knew to be careful of me. Maybe that was the way he acted whenever he talked to any girl. "And," he went on, "she's standing right here in our house, charming our family's pet parakeet."

"These crazy guys just gave her to me like they could trust me, or something," I said.

"Why wouldn't they trust you?" Ben Jones asked. "You and the parakeet look great together."

I scoffed. "Thanks, Jones," I said, "but I know what I look like."

At the sight of Ben Jones, the tiny bird started waving its neck like it was locked in a bitter game of dodge ball and then, with a rustle of wings, it was sitting on Ben Jones's shoulder. "Hello, Wazo," he said. "Weird name, I know. It's an Anglicization of ' _oiseau_ ,' obviously."

"The French word for 'bird,'" I explained to Jeff. My poor brother had some kind of mental block when it came to French and could hardly speak a word of it.

Jeff nodded and reached for the doorknob. The same little boy who'd let me into the house let us out, pressing us sideways through the same narrow crack between the door and the jamb.

"Sorry for squishing you," he said. "We have to be careful. No matter how much she loves us, Wazo still might fly away."

***

I burst through the TacoTown doors two minutes late for my Friday night shift. The rest of the crew was already dressed and taking their places around the kitchen. Wayne looked at me from behind the counter as I banged my way through the ladies' room door. It wasn't friendly but I couldn't quite call his expression a scowl either. I hoped it meant things were improving between us. There was no way I could quit this job so we were going to have to learn to peacefully coexist, eventually.

I was still braiding my hair as I stood over the sinks full of dishes, ready for another night as the lowest of the low in the restaurant. Tom was at his usual post filling paper boats with French fries again. Through the window in front of him, I could see Wayne and Darren, standing by the counter where they practiced the mysterious art of high-speed yet drip-free burrito folding.

The twin cash registers at the front counter were staffed by Crystal and a fresh faced girl with shiny blue eyes and thick blonde hair that made mine look frizzy and muddy. If she'd plaited it into two braids instead of just binding it in a ponytail she would have looked like the pretty mascot for a certain brand of abrasive bathroom cleaner. Wayne's improved mood was beginning to make sense – and it had nothing to do with me.

"Don't tell me," I remarked as I breezed by Tom on my way to clean up the dining room. "Heather V. is working here tonight."

"Oo, you're good," he congratulated me. "It's Heather V. indeed."

The opening two hours of my first ever weekend shift were a blur of furious activity. Wayne's voice called out instructions and reprimands but it lacked that hostile, angry edge it had when Heather V. wasn't in the restaurant.

During the rush hours, the mess in the dining room was never ending. It seemed like I just went round and round the restaurant stacking, dumping, and wiping the same tables over and over again. I tried to remember what Tom told me about keeping an eye open for dental retainers accidentally abandoned on trays. By the time I made it back to the sinks, the dishes emptied during the suppertime rush were overflowing onto the floor. I grabbed the throttle of the large rinsing nozzle and started spraying away the mess.

"Hey," someone called over racket of the water pounding against stainless steel pans and trays. "Try to keep some of the water in the sink, will ya." It was Wayne, hockey-skating toward my work station over the wet tiles.

Naturally, Darren was right behind him, feeling his way along the wall to keep from slipping. "Whoa," he said when he saw the cloud of water around me in the dish area.

"Sorry," I replied, batting the nozzle on its spring-loaded mounting. "I'm still getting used to this thing. It's pretty splashy. But look at what a good job I'm doing on the dishes."

"Whatever. Listen," Wayne began. "We need to change your name. It's too confusing having two Heathers in the same restaurant all night." He braced his jaws against each other, ready for my inevitable opposition.

But all I said was, "Suit yourselves. Names are meant to serve the needs and interests of the people and societies who give them more than the vanity of the individuals who receive them anyway."

Tom looked up from the deep fryer. "I heard all those words but – what did she say?"

"She said we can call her whatever we want," Darren interpreted.

Wayne didn't flinch at my unexpected acquiescence. "Fine," he said before he spun on the wet tile to face the rest of the crew. Crystal and Heather V. were standing in the doorway to the serving area, listening. "So what are we going to call this girl?"

"What does the M in your last name stand for?" Crystal asked.

"MacLean," I answered.

"Oh, then it's easy," Heather V. chirped. "You can be Mack."

I could tell Wayne hated the idea. There was nothing abusive about calling me Mack and that disappointed him. But it was Heather V.'s idea so he grinned past it.

"Mack sounds fine to me," Darren seconded.

"All right, you're Mack," Wayne said, backing away a little deflated. "Tom," he called, "Bring Mack a mop for all this water."

Tom came charging into the dish area, brandishing a gray, mucky mop.

"Tom, slow down!"

It was Heather V. calling out a warning to him – but it was too late. Tom took two quick steps onto the wet tiles and slipped so fast we barely saw him falling before he crashed down on the hard floor. He lay stunned for a second before he began to roll from side to side in the grimy water. I think he was too shocked to speak but he could still moan, lolling on the floor like a big, sad walrus.

An involuntary squeal escaped me as Tom went down. "Are you okay?"

Heather V. was fussing over Tom with her own sympathy, on the floor beside me.

Wayne indulged us for a minute before he poked Tom with the toe of his shoe. ""Get up, dude. I need to see how many floor tiles you smashed to bits when you hit the ground." He didn't do much to hide the laugh in his voice.

At the same time, Crystal and Darren covered their faces and gagged on their own laughter.

"I'm so sorry, Tom. It's really not funny," Crystal said.

Tom finally pushed himself up into a sitting position on the wet floor.

"How can I help?" I asked him.

Wayne pointed a finger at me. "You can help by mopping up this water before you maim anyone else."

He turned his finger away from me and reached his arm down toward Tom. The boys grabbed each other's wrists and together they got Tom off the floor. He rose to his feet, still doubled over. "Go take a break, dude," Wayne told him. "And try'n be more careful."

Tom hobbled away to recuperate at the staff table while Wayne stayed behind in the vapours of the dish area with me. I didn't look at him but I knew he watched me—probably with all kinds of contempt – as I leaned on the lever that wrung out the mop into a huge, wheeled bucket.

"Great squeak, by the way," Wayne added when everyone else had gone. "You sound like you could do voice acting or something."

I looked up from the mop bucket. "Seriously? Like, as a cartoon character?"

"Totally – that is, if this whole taco-slinger thing doesn't work out for you." He pulled his hat back down over his head and glided away on the slick floor.

Maybe someone else would have found his vague attempt at a compliment cute – but not me. The fact that Wayne was conventionally good looking just made it easier for me to dislike him. That big white smile and those Johnny Depp eyes didn't touch me at all. On the contrary, they put me on my guard. They still filled me with all the resentment of those years of junior high school torment I had suffered at the hands of pretty boys like him. Maybe looking the way he did helped him get away with treating nobodies like Tom and me however he wanted – whether he was paying us ambivalent compliments or tapping his toes on us while we were down. There was definitely some power in good looks. Sandy seemed to do whatever Wayne wanted. Most of the night-time TacoTown staff was handpicked by Wayne himself. Obviously, that kind of charm worked on people like Sandy and Heather V. – but not on me. It would never work on me.

Crystal came back to talk to me after the floor had safely dried. "Hey, Mack, did you remember to bring that needle and thread we were talking about last time?" she asked.

I gasped. "No! I'm sorry. You know, I'm not really a screw-up."

She laughed. "It would probably be pretty hard to sew my pants at work, while I'm wearing them anyway. I don't think we know each other that well yet." It was a great relief to see Crystal acting less shy than she had been during the first shift we'd worked together. Our sewing project, my new nickname, even Tom's accident – it had all somehow broken the ice between us.

"When's our next day off?" I asked. "You should come out to Upton so we can do a proper alteration using my mom's sewing machine and everything."

She hummed uncertainly. "I've never been to Upton."

I faked a shocked expression. "What? You haven't? Well, it's spectacular. You must see it."

She was laughing again. "I'll try to get Wayne to drive me out there."

"How come he drives and you don't?" I asked, feeling a little indignant on her behalf. Jeff had his license before me because he was older. There was no such reasoning when it came to the twins.

Crystal just shrugged. "Mom got him driving lessons because it reduces his car insurance premiums and girls don't need the insurance discount as much and blah, blah, blah. It's really just sexism. But he took driving lessons on the condition that he has to teach me everything he learned from them."

"How's that going for ya?"

Crystal wrinkled her nose. "You can imagine," she said. "But at least it's good leverage for forcing him to drive me places he'd rather not go."

By the end of the shift, Tom was back on his feet as if he hadn't been mightily wounded and Wayne had grudgingly agreed to drive Crystal to my house that Saturday afternoon.

"Saturday in Upton," he spat. "Like I'd ever want to go to Upton."

Crystal pushed him on the back of the head with the flat of her hand. "Then you should teach me so I can drive myself to Upton."

"Crystal."

"Wayne."

"Hey, come on you guys," Darren interrupted. "Not in front of the help."

***

I opened my eyes in the bright light of late Saturday morning. Why could I smell French fries? I rolled over onto my side. The smell was coming from my own hair. I sniffed against the pillow. Then I remembered. I wasn't quite me anymore. I lived on the prairies in a tiny Mormon town, I worked in a restaurant called TacoTown to help keep my parents' family solvent, and Jeff and my little sisters were the only friends I had left – except maybe...

"Crystal," I said to myself as I opened my eyes and looked around the room at the mess of clothes and books heaped all over the carpet. "Crystal is coming over today."

I slid off the end of the bed. My grandparents' house was strange. Its space was all cut up into small bedrooms – six of them – almost like little non-descript sleeping cubicles. It seemed like the family that built the house, long before my grandparents owned it, was full of children who couldn't stand to share rooms with each other. I couldn't think of any other reason why it would have been made all of bedrooms. It sometimes made me feel like we lived in a dormitory.

The bathroom was at the end of the hall where the bedrooms gave way to a family room furnished with nothing but a flagstone fireplace, an old vinyl-covered couch, and a huge wooden cabinet with a little radio and turntable hidden inside it.

I was halfway down the hall before I froze in mid-step. I could hear Jeff's voice in the family room. I thought he must be talking on the phone. But then I heard another voice answering his. Someone was in the family room with him – someone who was not one of our sisters, someone with a deep, lively voice and a sophisticated vocabulary. It was a boy. And there was no way for me to get to the bathroom without Jeff's guest having to look at me in my glorious, unaltered, morning state. I was trapped.

"Dang," I almost cursed.

There was nothing for me to do but square my shoulders and float down the hall as if I wasn't bothered at all when near-strangers saw me before I had a chance to shower after a greasy night's work. At least, I assured myself, whoever Jeff was talking to probably didn't know me and would never care about me anyway.

I clipped down the hallway on light feet and made sure my eyes didn't stray into the family room – as if keeping my eyes off Jeff's visitor would make me invisible to him.

I was just pushing the door of the bathroom open when the visitor called out, " _Bonjour."_

"Oh, it's just you," I said, turning back into the hallway.

Ben Jones was sitting on the vinyl couch sketching trigonometric proofs on a clipboard in his lap. "Just me," he repeated. "Nice."

Even though he pretended his feelings were hurt, I wasn't flustered. We both understood it was a game. "Come on, Jones. It's my way of saying any friend of Jeff's is a friend of mine."

Jeff grunted into his calculator screen. He had a way of retreating whenever I spoke to his friends. Maybe it was because I had a history of choosing dates from among them. We'd never discussed it, but I assumed Jeff wanted no culpability if I ever got my heart broken by one of his friends – or vice versa. Maybe he was wiser than me. Despite the looming threat of future awkwardness, it was hard not to prefer Jeff's friends to other boys. They were always the perfect age for me and they came pre-screened by Jeff's low tolerance for bad character. We were close siblings, and it was hardly a surprise that we grew to have the same taste in human beings.

But it seemed unlikely that any of our unspoken understandings about dating would ever be relevant to Ben Jones. After all, he was known in Upton's collective consciousness as a serious boy with serious goals who wasn't interested in trifling with girls before he was in a position to marry one, years and years from now. Still, Jeff kept his head down while I chatted with his new friend.

"I can't stick around," I explained to the boys. "I need to get cleaned up before my guest arrives."

Jeff looked up. "You're having someone come over? Here?"

"Yup."

"Tawny?"

I didn't mean to grimace but I did. "No, not Tawny. Her name is Crystal. I work with her in the city."

"Ah, the irresistible mystique of the out-of-towner," Ben Jones mused over his triangles.

"It's actually a work party. We're going to be sewing together." I smirked at the irony of being considered anyone's sewing mentor. The only successful sewing projects I had to my credit were some sad little throw cushions we abandoned when we moved west, and a pair of baggy shorts that weren't fit to be worn anywhere but to bed.

Jeff gave a low whistle. "Your guest's not a member of the Church, is she?" he said, labouring under the bizarre but common assumption that sewing prowess is connected to going to church among girls. But since the assumption was correct in Crystal's case, I didn't bother to argue with him.

"Nope," I answered.

"Sewing with publicans," Ben Jones nodded. "Good for you. Do you realize that in all my life I've never had a close personal friend who wasn't also a member of the Church?"

"What – never? Jeff, did you hear that? It's crazy!" I raved. On the east coast, there were so few members of the Church we all would have been pretty lonely if we hadn't made friends with kids from other churches – or from no church at all.

"Crazy but true," Ben Jones confirmed. "It's not really by choice. I just never get out of Upton long enough to meet anybody."

"Well, typical non-member kids are usually far more similar to us than they are different," I assured him. "Right, Jeff?"

My brother grunted somewhat affirmatively. I was delaying his math study session and it was starting to annoy him.

"It must get awkward eventually though – I mean – now that you're dating age and – and I assume all your friends aren't girls and – you know." I'd never heard Ben Jones speak with so little eloquence.

I folded my arms and grinned at him. "I have no idea what you mean."

He smirked at me. "I mean, don't 'friends' get crushes on each other, just like us Mormon kids do?"

I laughed way too loudly. "Don't worry. No one gets crushes on me, no matter where they go to church."

Ben Jones raised his eyebrows. "Are you sure?"

I laughed one more time as I stepped over the bathroom's threshold. "Yes, I'm sure," I said as I was closing the door. "Trust me. I am not Crystal's type."

By the time I peeked my wet, towel-wrapped head out of the bathroom after my shower was over, Ben Jones and Jeff were gone. I dressed, made my bed, stuffed my laundry basket, and went to open the window to air out my solitary cell of a room. I stood in the window, trying to decide whether the stale air inside was better than the smell of the manure on the air outside.

I still hadn't made up my mind when a noisy little car came careening around the corner of my street, blaring Guns 'N Roses music out its windows. It came to a jolting stop in my grandparents' driveway. Almost before the car had fully stopped moving, its back door was flung open and Crystal started stepping out onto the pavement. She turned back to shout something at the dark head behind the steering wheel, slammed the door, and waited until the car disappeared before approaching our front entrance. I bolted up the stairs, trying to make it to the door before my horde of little sisters materialized to spook her.

"Heya, Mack," Crystal said when I wrenched open the sticky front door. "We better get sewing. Wayne says he'll be back here in an hour."

We pinned and pressed and sewed new, leaner seams into both pairs of Crystal's work pants. I only had to get out the seam ripper – the sewing tool I used most frequently – one time.

"Yeesh," my sister Carrie cringed as she moved past the heaps of brown fabric and thread on the dining room table. "All this brown – it hurts my tummy."

Crystal held a finished pair of pants up in front of herself. "Wow. It's totally fantastic," she said. "My job satisfaction just went up. Thanks!"

"It's nothing," I told her as I coiled the sewing machine cord around my hand.

"Well, that was just about an hour. I wonder where Wayne is."

The telephone rang, as if on cue. It was Crystal's mother. Wayne's rickety little car was having mechanical trouble – again. He wouldn't be able to come back to Upton tonight unless he pushed his car all the way there. Crystal would have to wait until her mom could get away from work to come pick her up herself. She was now stuck in Upton until at least ten o'clock that night. Crystal looked embarrassed as she explained the situation to me.

"It's all right. You can just stay here and party with me – Upton style," I told her, even though I wasn't at all sure what I might mean by it.

"Where are we going now?" Crystal asked as we came out of Fast Freddie's convenience store with slushy drinks in our hands. We'd already been to the playground and pretended we were competing in a new Olympic event called the swing set competition. I won the bronze medal, the imaginary Soviet competitor took the silver, and strong, fit Crystal won gold, of course. We'd eaten a dinner of potato chips and strawberry marshmallows and now we were ready for the grand finale of Crystal's first day in Upton.

"We're heading to the graveyard," I answered.

Crystal laughed and shook her head. "Morbid."

"What? It's the most interesting park in the whole town," I protested.

"Well, yeah, I guess it would be," she allowed, "but doesn't it freak you out?"

"You mean all the dead people," I presumed. "Well, imagine if the place actually was full of the ghosts of everybody buried there. What do you think those ghosts would be like? They'd mostly be a bunch of old grandmas and grandpas – regular people – only dead."

"And that takes away the scariness for you?" Crystal didn't seem convinced.

"I'm not scared of the dead," I explained confidently. "Maybe it's a Mormon thing. We love the dead." This was probably not my best missionary moment ever.

"Creepy," Crystal said, dragging on the straw of her slushy.

We had reached the Texas Gate built into the surface of the cemetery driveway to keep stray livestock from grazing over the bones of the pioneers – not, I imagined, that those pragmatic pioneers would have minded particularly. I tugged at Crystal's sleeve when she hesitated at the gate. "Come on."

She leaned back, still resisting. "I – I've never actually been in a cemetery before."

"So it's high time you were," I insisted.

We stepped over the round bars sunk into the roadway and we were inside the perimeter of tall caragana hedges cultivated around the Upton Municipal Cemetery. "I discovered this place our first weekend here. Isn't it great?" I asked.

Crystal hummed uncomfortably.

"I know it's kind of scant on really old graves," I started, becoming her tour guide. "And there are no crypts in here at all, just earthen graves. That's what you get in a town that's not even a hundred years old yet. You should see the graveyards on the east coast. They're ancient. Oh, and try not to step right on top of where the bodies are buried."

Crystal gasped and hopped aside.

"There's nothing exactly wrong with stepping on them," I assured her, "it's just more respectful to pay attention and make an effort not to stomp all over everybody."

She shuddered. "Where do you learn manners like that?"

I shrugged. "I don't remember. It's mostly common sense, I guess. Look, you can usually tell the graves of children by these little white lambs sitting on the tops of most of their headstones." I pointed to a child's grave. "This one was only seven-years-old when he died."

Crystal was starting to loosen up. "I like the headstones that stand up tall better than the ones that lie flat like pillows," she ventured.

"I know what you mean," I said. "But the pillow ones don't take as much punishment over time. Like that one, for instance." I gestured at a high, thin slab that had broken into two pieces and been cemented back together.

"It broke? That's terrible," she yelled over the crudely repaired headstone. "Who would go into a graveyard and smash a headstone to pieces like that?"

"You don't need vandalism to get that kind of damage," I said. "The ground shifts or something and it just happens. Oh, here's my favourite." I led Crystal to the headstone of Wilbur S. Jamieson. His was the only stone in the cemetery that named the cause of death of the person beneath it: "Wilbur S. Jamieson, shot on December 8, 1951."

"I like this place," Crystal conceded as we sat on a bench, finishing our slushies in the graveyard.

I grinned. "I knew you would."

"And it's not that I'm completely cured of being scared of it," Crystal continued. "I just kind of learned how to enjoy that little bit of fear, or something."

"Maybe it's not normal fear," I suggested. "Maybe it's more like – a kind of awareness, some perspective on where we're all heading, in the end."

"Where are we heading?" Crystal asked quietly, into the end of her straw. She spoke the question as if the last thing she expected from me was an answer.

I squinted out through the headstones. I knew Crystal didn't know anything about the life after death as I'd been taught it all my life. But did she understand anything about the greater universe? She never went to any church. Had she ever heard of resurrection?

"These graves are just resting places – waiting areas. The people's spirits are gone from their bodies right now – but they'll be back," I began.

Crystal snorted. "Zombies?"

I laughed too. "No, silly. They won't be zombies – just whole, perfect people who can never be sick or hurt, or die ever again. It's called resurrection. It's a miracle."

"But just for good people, right?"

"No, for everybody."

"Everybody," she echoed.

"Yeah. God's not mean."

"Huh. Well, that's good to know," Crystal smiled. "You know what else?"

"What?"

"I think my dad might be dead."

I startled. "Seriously?"

"Well, maybe. I mean, I haven't seen him since I was six. I guess that was ten years ago, now. He came to visit us on our birthday, took us downtown to Woolworth's, bought me a green hula hoop, and that was it," she said, not sadly but just as a matter of fact.

"Your mom never hears anything from him?" I probed.

"Nope. No letters, no money, nothing. He's probably not dead. But he could be, for all I know. It doesn't matter to me much. Gone is gone, right?" she finished.

As someone who had just moved away from almost everyone I cared about, "gone is gone" was a hard thing for me to hear. But I tried not to turn our discussion to my own troubles. Whatever friends I'd lost, I still had a dad – a really good dad. He was alive and well and as devoted to me as any kid could hope for a parent to be.

"But maybe that's why I didn't want to come into your cemetery at first," Crystal continued. "Maybe I was worried I might see a gravestone with my dad's name on it – and then I'd know for sure."

I reached out to put my arm around her shoulders. I squeezed her and said, "Thanks for coming with me."

"Well, honestly," she admitted as I pulled my arm away, "my dad's probably not the kind of guy who'd end up buried in Upton with all these nice old Mormon grannies." And we were laughing again.

But the cemetery grounds were shadowy and the sound of the wind in the hedges was starting to get scary even for me. Crystal was eying them, maybe looking for her long lost zombie-dad. Old ideas like that are hard to give up in one afternoon.

"Let's go," she said.

I didn't argue.

Maybe we were retreating from the graveyard a little too quickly – or maybe I'm just clumsy – but as we stepped over the Texas Gate on our way out, I rolled my ankle. I sat down in the dirt with a yelp. "Dang it," I said.

For an instant it looked like Crystal might run away and leave me there to the imaginary zombies. But then she stopped and stayed with me in the dark, cemetery roadway.

"Uh-oh. Can you get up?" Crystal asked, bending to look at my ankle.

I held onto her arm and she helped me stagger to standing. I looked back over my shoulder, into the darkening graveyard. Shadows were reaching out for the headstones from the edges of the tangled hedges. How could I have been so cavalier in the daylight about not being afraid? "I might have to lean on you in order to walk home," I warned Crystal.

"Sure, whatever," she consented. We hobbled along the driveway for a few steps before Crystal stopped us. "This is no good. There's an easier way to do this," she said. She turned her back to me and held out her arms. "Hop on my back."

"What?"

"Seriously. I'm really strong and you're not very big. I can still piggy-back Wayne, for cryin' out loud. You'll be easy," she insisted.

She seemed so confident I took hold of her shoulders and sprung up as high as I could off my bad ankle. She caught my knees in the crooks of her arms and we set off down the street.

"See," Crystal called back to me. "No problem."

I laughed and waved over Crystal's shoulder to cars full of people I didn't know as they drove down the main street of Upton. They gawked at us as we moved down the road in what looked like a fragment of a cheerleading routine gone very, very wrong.

It was nearly ten o'clock, almost time for Crystal's mom to arrive. We sat on the bench swing on my grandparents' back porch, rocking back and forth while I iced my ankle.

"You know what you are?" Crystal asked me.

"A klutz," I answered.

"Maybe, but that's not what I meant. No. You are my new best friend."

I was so happy I choked. "Seriously?"

"Yes. And if I ever get back to the city I'm going to tell everyone about my best friend, Heather 'Mack' MacLean – a Mormon from Upton who can sew and speak French and who's going to be valedictorian of her crummy little high school next year."

I laughed. "And I'll stay here and tell everyone about my best friend in the west," I said, quietly remembering to reserve the title of "best friend in the east" for my long lost fellow Heather. "Her name is Crystal. She's a fearless graveyard patroller from the city who has the strength of ten men – and probably some eerie, latent twin powers too."

A horn honked at the front of the house. Crystal sat upright. "It's Mom," she said, grabbing her bag and hopping to her feet. She turned and called back to me as she rounded the corner of the house. "See you Tuesday, Mack. And thanks for everything."

***

I stood over the TacoTown staff table looking down at the new work schedule a little disbelievingly. It was patched up with flaking, lumpy bars of dried white-out fluid. Tom's name had been blotted out of the schedule. Today was the last day of his new employee probation and he had been fired. He was just walking out of Sandy's office, white faced, as I stepped up to the lockers.

"Tom," I called after him. He slowed down and waited for me to reach him. "What the heck happened?"

Half of his mouth worked at something like a smile. "The triplets," he said. "Well, Wayne, anyways."

I couldn't accept that the word of one cute teen-aged dragon-boy could be powerful enough to cost Tom his job. "But how –"

"It's okay," he interrupted. "I didn't like working with that jerk anyway. I hear you and Crystal are best buds now so you should be fine under her protection. You sure don't need me anymore. See ya."

I guess I understood why he didn't want to stay and chat. "Well – see ya," I called. I watched Tom push open the glass entry doors and saw how he was sure to press two large, smeared handprints onto to their surfaces.

With no more Tom, it was up to me to operate the terrifying deep fryer. Sandy was still recovering from firing him and had shut herself in the office to smoke away her anxiety. Darren was the person who came to train me to use the fryer.

"The most important thing to remember," Darren cautioned, "is not to splash any water into the oil."

I nodded and nodded.

The next hour was a nightmare of beeping timer alarms and popping grease but I made it through the suppertime rush unburned. There was just one lull in all the furious activity. In the fleeting quiet, I stood at my counter not realizing I was glaring through the indoor window to the place where Darren and Wayne were folding tacos. I was looking right at Wayne as he raised his head and glanced back at me. He didn't seem to be surprised to see me staring at him – maybe it happens to pretty people all the time. Completely unfazed, he just looked right back into my face. For once, he wasn't burning but cold and aloof.

The timer on the fryer starting beeping just as my pulse started to beat against my throat. I looked away from Wayne knowing that I hated him. I didn't want to hate him. I wanted Wayne's power to affect my emotional state to be flat – as flat as a heart monitor tone at the end of a sad movie, as flat as the horizon all around us for hundreds of miles. I didn't want my feelings to have any connection to him at all.

As usual, when the dinnertime crowds died away, the staff from the front of the restaurant came into the back to relieve some tension. They stood around my deep fryer counter laughing and joking over my head. I kept my eyes on the fries for as long as I could before my accusation burst, "So, you managed to get Tom fired, eh Wayne?"

Darren gasped out a little laugh.

Wayne didn't even flinch. "Oh, so that's your problem, is it?"

"Then it was you –"

"Nope. Tom was the one who got Tom fired," Wayne said without any hesitation. "They were starting to let him work the cash register but every time they did his drawer was twenty dollars short by the end of the night. Sandy chalked it up to incompetence but Tom's lucky they didn't call the cops."

I looked at Crystal. "It's true," she confirmed.

"Yep. And all the dirty looks in the world won't change it." Wayne was smirking at me.

I knew I deserved it. "Oh," I said. "Sorry."

"Who told you it was my fault?" Wayne sounded more amused than offended.

"Tom did." I felt really stupid.

"Of course. Trying to save face always makes perfect sense. And I can't say I blame him for not wanting to tell you what really happened. But don't worry, Mack," Wayne waved his hand toward the dish area where Sandy's latest new hire was blasting the sinks with the rinse nozzle, "we got you a new guy to whisper with back here."

"Huh?" New Guy bawled over the roar of the water. He was a big farm kid who looked like he could be Heather V.'s long lost brother. He didn't look much like a dragon. He was more of a lion. And apparently, he didn't like Wayne talking about him when he couldn't hear him properly. I guess a guy who shoves around tonnes of live cattle every day is hard for even Wayne to intimidate.

"What's your name again?" Wayne hollered back at him. "Norbert?"

New Guy tossed the nozzle away from himself and looked Wayne squarely in the face. "It's Hubert."

"Sure, whatever. Go clean the dining room, will ya," he said to Hubert. "And you," Wayne turned to me, "cheer up."

And I realized I was no longer the main object of Wayne's abuse. Maybe it was because Crystal had christened me her best friend. Or maybe it was just because I clearly was not Heather V.'s replacement anymore. She had quietly quit her job soon after I started work but she hadn't broken up with Wayne as part of the package. He seemed satisfied.

When Hubert came back from cleaning the dining room he set the stack of greasy orange trays he'd collected to the counter beside my work station and stood wiping them with a clean cloth. The rest of the crew had gone back to the front counter of the restaurant.

"So do all your friends call you Hu instead of Hubert?" I asked, gingerly skimming blackened, broken French fries off the surface of the dark brown oil in the fryer.

"Most of the time," he answered.

"Can I call you Bert instead?"

He laughed. "Sure, whatever you want."

Wayne came around the corner, took a vigorous stir of the enormous pot of cooking taco meat, and started giving orders. Bert was supposed to take his dinner break.

"So how do you like your new buddy?" Wayne asked me after Bert had swaggered away.

"Just fine, I guess. He's got great posture. And he's a lot friendlier than some people around here," I answered lightly.

"Less suspicious of innocent co-workers than some people around here too," Wayne added. He suddenly took a giant step toward me. "Look, forget the Tom thing. I want you to know that I really appreciate what you're doing for Crystal."

I stepped back. "You mean being her friend? Believe me, the pleasure is all mine."

He glanced around the kitchen to make sure no one would overhear the rest. "Yeah, well – she's been kind of a magnet for mean girls ever since elementary school. I can't explain it. She's pretty enough and smart and athletic –"

"Just the kind of person insecure girls might want to keep down?" I suggested.

Wayne shrugged. "I don't know, maybe that's it. But her miserable social life makes me angrier than I ever let on to her or our mom. And – what I'm saying is, if you and I are both going to be Crystal boosters, we need to trust each other." He was standing beside the fryer, talking just barely over the roar of the exhaust fans overhead. I shrank back a little as he turned the full power of his dark eyes on me. What was more compelling than anything about his looks was the sight of him standing there acting like the man of his family's house, trying to protect Crystal in the place of his long gone, possibly dead dad.

Maybe I was wrong about hating him. I hoped I was.

"I have no intentions of ever messing with Crystal," I promised Wayne.

He nodded. "That's what I thought. But it's good to hear it. Now you can go clean the dining room for Hubert while he's taking his break."

I took a spray bottle and stepped through the kitchen door and into a cloud of tobacco smoke. There was Hubert, dragging hard on a cigarette at the staff table. He was smoking even though I'd already decided he was not supposed to be a dragon. I did nothing to hide my grief. "Bert! No!" I squeaked.

"What?" he sprang to his feet and darted his eyes around the restaurant.

Crystal had heard me squeal and came pacing up behind me, laughing. "Sorry, Hubert. Did we forget to tell you Mack's a Mormon?" she said as she passed.

Bert's alert posture slackened and he fell back into his chair. "Ya don't say," he said, his teeth closing over the orange filter of his cigarette.

"Why the heck are you smoking?" I said, still sounding betrayed.

"Because I have an addiction." Bert's answer was unapologetic.

"Do your parents know about it? Maybe they could help you," I offered.

Bert plucked the cigarette out of his mouth long enough to laugh. "My parents? As if. My dad was the one who first gave me smokes – along with a giant thermos of black coffee. He was trying to keep me from falling asleep at the wheel of the combine during harvest."

"Aw, I'm so sorry –" I began.

"Look, I know it's gross. I'm going to quit but it takes time, okay? It's not like I'm a kid who needs the nicotine rush to get my work done anymore," he explained.

"Not a kid? But you're just sixteen, right?"

"Whatever. I'm going to quit smoking soon and," he crushed the stub of his cigarette into Sandy's dusty ashtray. "And since you're such a cute, caring little Mormon, the first thing I'm going to do once I've quit for good is kiss you – right on the mouth."

I gave a little involuntary shriek and hopped backwards. Fortunately, there were no customers in the restaurant for me to startle. It was a brilliant strategy for Bert to play. From that point on, if I ever nagged him about quitting, it'd be as if I was asking him to hurry up and kiss me. It was a great way to make sure I didn't pester him about smoking.

Still, Darren's face appeared in the doorway at the words "kiss you" and instantly formed into a scowl he must have learned from Wayne.

"Mack," Darren growled, "go clean the tables."

***

I stood on the sidewalk beneath the theatre's marquee, reading the words mounted between the rows of tiny, flashing light bulbs.

"Why the heck didn't they post the rating for this show?" I asked Crystal, running my locket up and down its long, silver chain. "How can they be allowed to show a movie without a rating?"

She looked up to read the blinking marquee with me. "Maybe ancient movies like this one never had ratings in the first place," she suggested. "Just come on, Mack. It's a super old show from when our parents were kids. How bad can it be?"

" _Night of the Living Dead_ ," I read the title out loud to myself. The city's downtown movie theatre was showing revivals of vintage horror movies all weekend in the advent of Halloween. I'd been hoping to see one of those really old and campy films like the original _Frankenstein_ , or maybe the silent movie version of _Nosferatu_. He was my kind of vampire – bald and ratty, not handsome and romantic – just creepy and parasitic. But neither of those films was showing until after Jeff was scheduled to take me back home to the monster-free safety of Upton, later that night.

"I'm sure it'll be okay. They probably show scarier stuff than this movie right on television nowadays," Crystal assured me.

I shivered on the sidewalk in the dark, autumn night. It had been cold and windy ever since the sun had set. We needed to make up our minds to go inside or move along to somewhere warmer. Crystal was probably right about the movie. "Okay then. I'm trusting you," I warned her.

Maybe Crystal felt the weight of my trust and that's why she paused in front of the ticket window to question the cashier. "This movie's not really scary or gross or whatever – is it?"

From behind the glass of her ticket booth, the cashier laughed at us. "Maybe it was scary back in the 60s. No, it's all filmed in black and white. And they say all the blood in it is really just chocolate milk syrup, if that makes you feel any better." The cashier saw me peeking around Crystal and bent her head to call out to me. "You're not scared of some spilt chocolate syrup, are you honey?"

"Maybe a little," I admitted. But I stepped up and paid the admission anyway.

The cashier smiled at me in an almost motherly way as she handed me my ticket. "They don't even say the word 'zombie' anywhere in the whole show," she crooned.

Inside the theatre, the lobby was decorated with cottony, fake spider webs and rubber dungeon animals like rats, bats, and giant, hairy insects. The usher who tore our tickets wore a wrinkly satin cape, a scarlet cummerbund, and clenched a set of plastic fangs between his jaws. "Enthoy da thow," he tried to tell us.

Even in the dimness I could see that Crystal and I were the only females in the entire theatre. I should have recognized it as a bad omen. We sat in the very best lit spot – near the wall, under a funky plastic lighting sconce that had probably been hanging there since _Night of the Living Dead_ was originally released.

"Aw man," I said, bobbing back and forth on the crushed, orange velvet of my chair. "Can you trade seats with me, Crystal? I can't see anything from here but the back of that guy's head." I gestured at the person sitting two rows ahead of us.

Crystal squinted through the low lights. "I know the back of that head," she said. "Hey," she whisper-yelled. "Move your massive heads!"

"Crystal!" I chided her as the heads whipped around to face us. But I wasn't embarrassed for long. I should have known the heads belonged to Darren and Wayne.

I could see the white of Wayne's teeth as he turned, grinning, and said, "We're not moving."

"Come sit up here," Darren offered. "You won't have to try to see through us if you're sitting beside us."

Crystal rolled her eyes but we stood up and moved down the aisle to join the boys anyway. Frankly, I was glad for the safety of our growing numbers.

There was a scuffle as we arranged ourselves.

"Get off my foot."

"Well, get out of the way."

"I'm as out of the way as I can get."

"Stand up like a gentleman then."

"Like a what now?"

I ended up in the seat between Crystal and Darren.

"Can you see the screen?" he asked me.

"Yeah," I answered. "I hope I don't regret it."

Darren smirked. "I've gotta say, I really didn't expect to see you two here."

Crystal leaned forward to talk to him around me. "Why? Because we're delicate little girls?" she raved. "Don't be so sexist."

Darren leaned forward on the other side of me. "Have you ever seen this movie before?" he asked her. I couldn't tell if he was purposely trying to sound ominous – but he did.

"No," she answered.

He didn't say anything more. He just sat back and folded his arms, smugly shaking his head.

When the lights went down and the cliché of the high, orchestral chorus of the opening credits started, I felt a little better. Nothing truly horrifying ever happened on grainy black and white film stock – right?

The first few zombies to stumble out of the projector beam didn't bother me too much. It was clear they were just shuffling character actors in dirty clothes. I wasn't comfortable enough to chuckle at them with the rest of the male audience. But I wasn't slumped against the wall, glassy-eyed and helplessly twisting my hair like the heroine on the screen either.

At the sight of the first pool of fake blood, I poked Darren in the arm, "It's just chocolate syrup, you know," I reassured both of us before Wayne shushed me.

Twenty minutes into the film, everything was still going fairly well. But then a pair of zombie arms darted soundlessly through a gap in a window, snatching blindly at the hero. It happened so quickly and unexpectedly, I shrieked out loud in the theatre. My voice sounded louder and richer than usual and I realized it was because Crystal was screaming too.

We jumped and grabbed at each other's arms in the dark. A few of the men in the audience cheered as if our high, girl voices were special new additions to the movie's soundtrack deliberately designed just to improve their cinematic experience. Of course, Darren and Wayne were openly laughing at us. And I realized how relieved I was to have made my terrified jump in Crystal's direction and not toward the boys.

Crystal and I let go of each other and fell back into our seats, laughing at ourselves now.

"This is totally horrible," I groaned.

"Maybe it'll get better," she ventured.

"Look at the time. We're nowhere near the climax," I reasoned. "It can only get worse from here. Right Darren?"

"Definitely. They haven't even introduced the cannibalism plotline yet."

"What?!"

"Stop talking, you guys," Wayne hissed from the end of the row.

"Crystal, I gotta go," I said. "Darren, for heck's sake, move your feet."

"You're leaving?" Wayne asked as I crammed myself past his knees. "As if. The movie's so much more enjoyable with screaming girls around."

"Yeah, well you're welcome to do the rest of the screaming yourself. See you later," I said. I didn't look back as I marched up the slope of the theatre aisle. Behind me, the zombie moaning was getting louder. As I reached the exit, I saw Crystal's smooth, brown hand pressing against the long bar of the door handle alongside my own hand.

"That was so cool," she said as we moved past the velvet ropes and phony spider webs in the lobby.

"What? That awful movie?"

"No, getting up and walking out of it," Crystal beamed. "I've never done that before."

I shook my head. "I don't have to do it very often. But sometimes..." I finished with a shudder.

"I mean, I feel so powerful," she continued. "Why have I sat through so many terrible movies in my life? I totally have the right to leave when I don't like something, right?"

"We don't just have a right to leave," I explained. "We have a responsibility to leave."

"Oh, I get it," she nodded. "This was a Mormon thing, wasn't it?"

"It was a 'me' thing," I corrected her. "Sure, the Church backs me up when I act like this. But the decision I made to get out of there – that was truly what _I_ wanted to do."

"Me too," she said. "I'd way rather sit in the Upton Cemetery talking about your resurrection than sit through – that." She turned and waved her arm back toward the dark corridor leading into the theatre.

I glanced back too. That was when I saw Wayne and Darren coming out of the darkness themselves. "Well, you ruined it for us," Wayne grinned.

"We've already seen that movie anyway," Darren added. "We just came tonight because we had nothing else to do."

"And nothing in that film can compare to those awesome screams we heard out of you two," Wayne continued. "I haven't heard Crystal shriek like that since elementary school."

Crystal punched her brother in the bicep. I folded my arms and leaned back. "Glad to hear we amused you so much," I said as he tried to dodge his sister's punch.

"Sure," Wayne replied, stepping forward to hold open the glass doors at the entrance to the building. "We'll pay you back by walking with you all the way to the house. It's really dark outside now and it seems like you're both kind of spooked."

Crystal and I said it together this time: "Don't be so sexist."

***

Our Sunday School teacher was late again. If he didn't hurry, he was going to miss our regular opening discussion – the one where my classmates went over the highlights of the latest Upton Rockets high school football game.

It was still strange for me the way so many people in my new town took an interest in high school sports. Even people who didn't have any children on the teams would go to the games and keep on talking about them even when they were over.

Or maybe I just had the wrong impression. Maybe my Sunday School class was a special case. After all, our teacher did volunteer as one of the assistant football coaches and both of the boys in my class played on the team. The girls in my class were Tawny and Melanie. And I was never really sure if they were just being polite or if they were sincerely as captivated by the Upton Rockets as they seemed to be when talking to the boys.

While the kids in my class talked about yards and plays I sat by the window, opening and closing the latch, wondering if this would be one of the weeks when our teacher wouldn't come at all. On days like this, the Sunday School president would usually open the door, toss a copy of the Church magazine meant for teenagers into the room, and tell us to read it to each other for the next half hour. I was still thinking about it as the Sunday School president finally appeared.

"No teacher today?"

"Nope," Tawny answered.

The Sunday School president did a quick head count. "Okay, you can all come with me this time."

He led me, the football team, and their cheering section out into the hallway. "We'll put you with the seventeen-year-old class for now. A lot of folks have gone away for American Thanksgiving so there's plenty of room in their class today."

The class we were meeting with was Jeff's class. Outside their door, I smiled at the idea of sitting with someone who cared as little about football as I did. The Sunday School president opened the door and there they were: Jeff, the pretty blonde girl I knew to be currently reigning as Miss Upton High School, and Ben Jones.

There was a flurry of setting up folding metal chairs as we stepped into the room. The football team took care of themselves while Ben Jones and the Sunday School president began racing to set up chairs for the three new girls in the room. I guess they meant it to be chivalrous, or something. But it was actually kind of embarrassing when I laid my hand on a chair and Ben Jones snatched it away from me and set it up himself. He glanced at me with his polite, solar eclipse manner when he was finished. He saw me long enough to know I was standing there, my hand still formed into the shape of an invisible chair-back, looking a little stunned. Then he was embarrassed too.

"Here," he said, nudging the chair into line with the others. "This is for you, Parakeet – if you want it."

And then he took a seat beside the empty chair he'd assigned to me. Parakeet? I didn't have turquoise wings or scaly, pink feet like his family's pet bird. Why would Ben Jones call me 'parakeet'?

I wanted to ask him. But all I said as I sat down was, "Thanks."

The Sunday School president was about to start teaching us in the place of his missing teachers with American husbands and wives who'd traveled south to start their holiday seasons. He was just opening the lesson manual when he paused to ask one the football players about the Rockets' chances in the regional championships. And I knew the classroom conversation was doomed to be lost in football for a few minutes more.

Ben Jones knew it too and he sat back in his seat, sighing noisily. "So you've missed the last two Mutual activities," he said to me.

Actually, I had missed the last three activities. I cleared my throat. "Yeah. But I didn't miss them because of work," I hurried to explain, as if it was important. "I was at home studying. I'm still trying to figure out my new math class and salvage my grades. That's important too, right?"

Ben Jones shrugged. "I guess. Still, it's not healthy for you to do nothing with your time but work and school, is it?"

I was about to argue that I'd just gone to a zombie movie with friends in the city a few weeks before. Then I decided it would just make the need for me to go to Mutual activities more glaring. It was true. I did need to make time for more than just earning money and fixing my grades. Everyone knew that – Mum, Dad, Jeff, Ben Jones – even I knew that. I needed a more balanced life – one with time set aside for difficult but necessary things like crafting some sort of social life in the town where I lived.

"Oh, I know," I confessed, a little sardonically. "I know I should tear myself away from work and school and go have big fun at Mutual with all its sewing machines and hot glue guns."

Ben Jones laughed. "There were no sewing machines here last week. It was a social dancing lesson."

I cringed. "Let me guess: they assigned dance partners by lining everyone up according to height."

He frowned as he tried to remember. "Right–"

"Which means," I interrupted, "that I would have ended up paired with some poor, embarrassed, sweaty-palmed, twelve year old boy for the whole evening."

Ben Jones laughed again.

"It's not funny. And I'm right," I said. "It would have been nothing but awkward. Trust me. When it comes to attracting awkwardness, I'm actually quite talented."

"Oh, come on," Ben Jones argued. "You could have made it work. And if you don't come to stuff like that, how are you ever going to learn to two-step?"

"Two-step? What's that?"

"It's a partnered dance done to country music. You know – slow, slow, quick, quick..."

I had no idea what he meant. "Slow, slow?"

"Yeah. It's pretty standard around here."

"Yuck."

"Come on, Parakeet. Play nicely. I know it's painful. But stop fighting everything all the time—"

"Fighting? Parakeet? Quick, quick? Jones, what are you—"

But the Sunday School president was talking over our voices now. "Okay, okay," he was saying as if Ben Jones and I were holding up the class with a lot of useless chatter, "this week we're learning about marriage." He looked around the room, surveying the class. "Look at you guys, sitting boy-girl-boy-girl already. That's the right attitude."

There was some jittery laughter. I looked down at my hands. How did adults know how to make the topic of marriage seem so dang uncomfortable all the time? Beside me, Ben Jones was still grinning, just a little, as he examined the end of his necktie.

The lesson went on, moving away from the scripture references and prophets' quotes in the lesson manual and into the Sunday School president's own nostalgia and sense of romance. The lesson was heading straight into that awkward territory for which I had such a natural affinity.

Our time in the class was almost over when the Sunday School president said, "When the moment comes to choose your companion, you'll just know. One day, you'll be with someone special and you'll turn and look deep into their eyes and – you'll just know."

I'm not sure how it happened. I really have no idea. But just as the Sunday School president gave us this weird, vague advice, I started to laugh – just a tiny bit. It was rude and I was trying to hide it so the laugh came out as more of a breathy smirk. And for some reason, as I started to crack up, I turned my head, lifted my eyes and looked right at Ben Jones – Jeff's brainy math buddy, the serious boy from my school, the guy acknowledged as unattainable and un-dateable, the one everyone agreed didn't even bother to flirt with girls.

I looked at him right on the Sunday School president's cue. And the strangest thing about it was that when I raised my eyes, Ben Jones was looking back at me. He wasn't peeking at me with his peripheral vision, the way he usually looked at me. He was staring right into my face. And he was smiling too. We'd just been given some very odd courtship advice. We both knew it. And to bring home how silly it was, we were acting it out together, spontaneously. Just like we'd been told to do, Ben Jones and I turned and looked deeply into each other's eyes.

It was supposed to be funny – and for an instant, I guess it was. But once I was actually looking into Ben Jones's eyes I forgot for a moment how to exhale properly. Even from behind his glasses, I could tell his eyes were large for his thin, pale face. They were shiny and brown – brown and lit up like the brook we used to hike along in the trees above our house back on the east coast.

It was too much. I bowed my head and finally remembered to let out my breath. I sat fidgeting in my chair and snickering a little too loudly.

"Heather?" the Sunday School president asked. "You want to add something?"

"No," I said. "Sorry, it's nothing. Sorry."

For the rest of the class, Ben Jones and I did not look at each other again. We sat on our cold, metal chairs looking straight ahead, like we were passengers riding a bus together.

After church, I sat in the back of my parents' car on the way home, squashed between my sisters. In my lap, I held out my index finger pointed sideways, like it was a perch meant for a tiny bird with warm, pink feet. I tipped my head back, looking up at the upholstery on the car's ceiling, mouthing a word to myself. It was the word Ben Jones had called me by twice that afternoon. I didn't understand why he'd done it – but I was pretty sure I liked it anyway.

"Parakeet."

***

For the rest of that autumn, Mum worked her civilized, sit-down job at the college while Jeff and I made fast food, and Dad kept stacking bales of raw wool in a dark little warehouse by the railroad tracks. As high school students, unskilled, physical work was all Jeff and I could hope to find. But it pulled my heart apart to see my clever firecracker of a father breaking his back all day. The way he stuck to the warehouse job despite the low wages and rough conditions was a lesson for all of us. Every prayer uttered in our home that fall contained a word or two about Dad being able to find a better job – and soon.

Eventually, the miles and miles of grain and hay around Upton was all cut to stubble and covered with a thin coat of dusty, windblown snow. Not long after, Dad sat us all down on the yellow velour furniture in our grandparents' living room to make an announcement. He'd finished the long, rigorous screening process and had finally been accepted to the training program for Canadian border guards. The work would be steady, challenging, and even though it wouldn't pay as much as we used to earn on the east coast, it would be far more lucrative than his warehouse wages. It was a real career with a promising future. Dad would be leaving for the training centre right after Christmas.

With Dad's new wages, in a few months Mum and Dad would be back on top of all their bills. At the sound of the news, Jeff let out his breath in a noisy gust. It felt as if he'd been holding it in ever since things went wrong for us during the summer. Mum hooked her arm around his neck, pulled his head into hers, and cried a little bit.

The family's short term plans still required that Jeff and I work, so we did – driving over the tracts of dry, blowing snow between Upton and the city at least three times a week.

The TacoTown dining room had just been decorated with stringy, foil garlands and coloured Christmas lights the day Sandy came through the kitchen door bareheaded. She held her uniform hat upside down in her hand and waved it under my nose.

"Pick a name," she ordered.

I stuck my hand into her hat and pulled out a small slip of paper. "It says 'Bert,'" I told her. "Now what?"

"Now you have to bring a present for him to the staff Christmas party next weekend. It's no big deal. The price limit's ten dollars – or two packs of smokes," she teased me.

Since I certainly was not going to buy Bert cigarettes at Christmas or any other time, I had to go to the discount department store across the street from TacoTown to find something he might not hate to get as a present. And there it was, in the toy department – the perfect gift. It was a stuffed toy made to look like a puppet character from a children's television show we all knew. Of course, the character was also named Bert. Crystal laughed when I brought it to her house to show it to her.

She'd drawn Sandy's name out of the hat and bought her a pre-wrapped, fancy basket of fruity smelling lotions and soaps. "It's totally lame, I know," Crystal apologized as I read the labels through the cellophane wrapping. "I'm sure Sandy would have rather had one of the daytime staff ladies draw her name. You know, someone old enough to go Christmas shopping in a liquor store."

I grimaced. "Nasty. Well, if she's that thirsty she can always drink the pomegranate lotion. It's probably less harmful for her than booze anyway."

Crystal laughed. "And it says on the label it's full of nourishing fruit extracts."

"Yummy," I snickered. "I sure hope I don't end up with any Christmas alcohol to pour out in a snow bank on the way home. Oh well, at least I'd get to keep the bottle deposit. Hey, do you know who got my name in the Christmas draw?"

Crystal coughed and twitched her shoulders. "Uh, yeah, I do know."

"And?"

"It was Wayne. But he traded. So now Darren has your name." She blurted it out like a confession.

Her nervousness made me nervous too. "That's kind of funny," I said.

"It wasn't Wayne's idea to trade," she said, hanging her head like she was in some kind of mild pain. "It was Darren's."

I raised both my eyebrows. "That's even weirder, isn't it?"

Crystal stood up and looked both ways down the hallway outside her bedroom before she closed the door. "Not really, no," she said. "Darren – well, you've never seen him at school but he's really shy there. He kind of lets Wayne have all the personality for both of them. So he's never had a girlfriend – plenty of crushes but no real relationships."

"What's any of that got to do with me?" I felt like my hair was starting to stand on end.

"Well, you're really nice to Darren. I've never seen him more comfortable with a girl – besides me, of course, but I'm just like his sister so we could never go out." She actually shuddered.

"Go out?"

Crystal looked at her feet. "Go out, like together."

I coughed. "Crystal, I know it sounds snotty and elitist and all that stuff, but I don't date guys who aren't Mormons. Remember how all my misgivings about seeing that zombie movie were totally right? Well, this is the same kind of thing. It's important to me. It keeps me happy."

She didn't seem to hear me. "I know Darren's not super good looking –"

"That has nothing to do with it," I interrupted. "Look at me. Do I look like someone who's hung up on physical appearances?"

Crystal was still ignoring me. "– But he's tall and clean and it's not like he's vile or anything. Come on, Mack. You guys seem to get along so well."

She was right. Darren was smart and funny and I enjoyed spending time with him whether it was storming out of a movie or just standing over an industrial sink full of dishes at work. The sight of his overly prominent Adam's apple didn't even bother me anymore. I was starting to suspect that, if Tom had still been around, he might be calling Wayne, Crystal, Darren and me the quadruplets by now. But none of it changed the strong notion I had that Darren was outside my chosen dating pool. Even when we lived in a much smaller Church community in a much bigger city on the east coast, the only boys to ever take me on dates there were the few Mormon boys living in the area.

Crystal was still talking. "I wasn't going to tell you this but Darren and Wayne have already been out shopping for your Christmas present and..." She didn't finish.

"And what?"

She folded her arms over her middle. "All I'm saying is – you should probably _brace_ yourself."

I pounced on Crystal. "What did they get me for a present?"

She pushed me away but I had already clamped my arm around her in a head-lock. It wasn't very scary. She was just laughing at me as I shook my fist at her. "Get off me, Mack. I'm not telling you anything else. I'm already going to be in trouble."

With one decisive shove, Crystal broke my weak hold and I let myself be knocked over. I tumbled off her bed with a thud, sending her cat, Taffy, darting for cover underneath it. The racket even caused her gloomy mom, down in the living room beneath the floor of Crystal's bedroom, to look up from her video-taped soap opera and call up the stairs. "Crystal? What's going on up there?"

Crystal threw a rolled up pair of socks at me as I lay trying to stifle my laughter on the floor. "Nothing, Mom. I'm just disciplining Mack."

Her mom seemed to have lost interest in us by the time Crystal answered and we didn't hear anything more. I sat up on the carpet and tossed the socks back at Crystal. "I really don't think your mom likes me."

"Sure she does," Crystal sighed. "She's just afraid you're going to try to make me into a Mormon."

I faked an ominous laugh. "Oh, but I am."

Jeff came to pick me up after he finished work. Between its balding tires and its rear wheel drive, the station wagon got stuck in the icy gutter in front of Crystal's house – like it always did when there was fresh snow. I had to get out of the car, lean against its bumper, and push until it slid free. Back in the car, I sat in the front seat while the slush from the gutter melted through my shoes. I watched the empty, black landscape pass outside the windows as we drove back to Upton. The twins must have misunderstood Darren's Christmas shopping, I told myself. What could Darren possibly do within Sandy's ten dollar price limit that would be powerful enough for me to need to brace myself for it? In a few days, the whole thing will blow over and everything will go back to normal. Won't it?

A few nights later, I stowed Bert's wrapped present under the tiny, artificial Christmas tree propped in the corner of Sandy's office. It wasn't the first package to be deposited there so I took a moment to gingerly snoop around beneath the wire branches, looking for a parcel addressed to me. While I was looking, Darren himself walked into the office.

"Hey, no peeking," he scolded.

"At what? There's nothing under here for me anyway," I answered, pretending to be ignorant as I straightened myself up. "Whoever drew my name must have decided I don't deserve any Christmas presents."

Darren shrugged, reflecting all my false ignorance right back at me. "Yeah, probably. Maybe it's one of those people who think Mormons don't celebrate Christmas and they didn't want to offend you with a present."

I yelled out a scoffing laugh. "No Christmas? As if. Well, I hope you find that person and set him straight," I said as I pushed past Darren, standing in the doorway. He didn't get nearly far enough out of my way.

***

Jeff came into my bedroom re-tying the necktie he'd taken off and hung on his doorknob after church earlier that afternoon. He stood in the doorway smirking as he tucked the tie back underneath the collar of his rumpled Sunday shirt. "You're not getting out of it this time," he told me. "None of us is. She's coming right up to the front door of the house to get us in ten minutes."

I sighed hard and sat up on my bed. "Why does she even care if we go or not?" I complained. "It's like she thinks we're all in some heart-warming old movie and she's going to save me from a life of loneliness and debauchery by getting me to sing in her Christmas youth choir, or something."

Jeff pushed the knot of his tie into place. "It doesn't matter what her reasons are. She's convinced Mum and Dad this is important and they say we're going."

The "she" we were talking about was Sister Giles, the music specialist from church. She was psychotically happy and harboured the insane belief that the answer to every situation – good, bad, or totally pointless – was to sing. She'd done her best to live her whole life as if it was a light opera and now she was trying to make the town's urbane young newcomers part of the cast. Jeff clearly thought the whole thing was too ironic not to be hilarious. He looked down at me where I still slouched on my bed, and he laughed right into my sour little face.

"How can you be enjoying this?" I bawled at him. "And will you please get out of my room now? I need to put my nylons back on before she gets here."

I had barely finished dressing when a horn began tooting musically in my grandparents' driveway. Moments later, Jeff, Carrie, and I were trudging through the cold darkness to a huge passenger van. It was already half full of other teenagers. Sister Giles was rounding up a crowd of young, lacklustre performers for a rehearsal of the town's annual Christmas concert.

She burst with an exaggerated gasp as I stepped up to the van. "It's Miss Heather. We've got Heather. Now everything will be perfect."

Melanie and Tawny sat near the front of the van and smiled a little painfully at me as I ducked through the door. Sometimes goals about being nice to new people can be so hard to keep. But tonight, I spared the girls my company and tried to punish Jeff in the process by falling into the seat I thought he would have preferred to sit in – the one right beside his good friend, Ben Jones.

I didn't look at Ben Jones as I let my face sink into my scarf, all the way up to my nose. I heard him chuckle beside me anyway. "Come on now. It's not that bad," Ben Jones said to me. "There won't be any country music at the Christmas concert – not this time."

I smirked inside my scarf. "Promise?"

Ben Jones tugged at the fuzzy gray edge of my scarf, pulling it down so he could see the expression of my mouth. "Definitely," he promised. "We just do a few traditional Christmas songs. It's nothing tacky – except maybe that part where she gets us all to snap our fingers when we sing 'ha'penny'."

I groaned and sat up, out of my scarf. "I really do hate singing. Is that so wrong? And I'm not trying to be edgy or rebellious when I say that. I despise singing. Honestly, it makes me feel like I'm getting a little bit sick after a while – and I'm terrible at it."

"Maybe you're just singing the wrong part," Ben Jones suggested. "Try the alto line instead of the soprano part."

"But my speaking voice is so high," I squeaked.

"Then don't sing in your speaking voice, Parakeet," he laughed. "Would you ever have guessed from listening to me talk that I sing best as a bass?"

"Hmm," I mused. "I never thought about it. Say something else."

"Like what?"

"Oh, I know. Let me hear the lowest note you can sing."

Ben Jones just laughed and looked down at his gloved hands. I could tell he wasn't seeing me so I looked at him – really looked at him. When I thought about Ben Jones when he wasn't around, he appeared in my memory looking mostly like he was made all of angles and corners. But sitting here beside me in real life, there was a softness to him. And I'd never noticed before how dark the lengths of his eyelashes looked resting against his cheeks, behind the lenses of his glasses. I'd seen it before, when I'd overwhelmed him and he had to look away from me, but I hadn't appreciated how sweet it was until now. The vulnerability of his modesty made him kind of cute – unattainable and uninterested, but cute.

He looked up from his hands. "My lowest note – I don't think so," he said.

"Come on, show me," I cajoled, bumping my arm against his. "Let me hear your bass voice and it might totally change my whole attitude about the possibility of me singing alto at this Christmas concert thing."

"You want me to sing a super low note? Right here in the van, _apropos_ nothing, with everyone listening?" Ben Jones's charming vulnerability started to fade when he began speaking in Latin phrases.

Still, I insisted. "No one's going to be listening to you but me. Right Jeff?"

"Huh?" Jeff called back from the seat in front of us where he was chatting rather woodenly with Miss Upton High School. I guess I'd been mistaken about him preferring to sit by Ben Jones.

I waved my hand at the back of Jeff's head. "See what I mean, Jones?"

He shook his head but then Ben Jones cleared his throat. "Okay then," he said, beckoning me closer so I could hear. I leaned my face next to his and listened – only I didn't hear anything when he opened his mouth. "So what did you think of that?" he asked after he closed his jaws.

"Of what?"

"Of my lowest low note, of course," he grinned. "Didn't you hear it?"

"No!"

"Well, I'm not surprised," he said, sitting back in his seat. "It's so low only elephants and whales can hear it without special microphones."

I batted his arm through his heavy coat. "That is totally cheating."

"What? It's not my fault it's out of the typical parakeet hearing range."

Something quivered at the edge of my smile. "Hey, what's with you calling me a parakeet?"

"Hm?"

I wasn't going to get any farther. All meaningful social interaction ended as Sister Giles started the rehearsal while still driving the van, singing vigorously from behind the steering wheel about "wassailing."

We arrived at the big, brick Pioneer Memorial Auditorium at the end of Upton's main street and filed out of the van as Sister Giles sang on the sidewalk. Advertisements for the Christmas concert hung on both of the heavy, wooden auditorium doors. In spite of Sister Giles' mad rush to the backstage area, I lingered long enough to be able to read the details from the poster. I was in luck, I thought. I had a completely legitimate previous engagement. The concert was scheduled for the same night as the TacoTown staff Christmas party. It would be the perfect excuse for missing Sister Giles' concert – and that almost made me feel like singing.

***

When Mum came into my bedroom the next night, I immediately closed my math books and started rooting for my wallet on my dresser. But she hadn't come for a money order this time.

"So your boss called here tonight," she told me.

"Sandy called? Why? What did I do?"

Mum laughed. "Nothing, nothing. We didn't even talk about your performance at work. And she actually sounded quite fond of you. I think that's probably why she wanted to be sure we both knew there's going to be alcohol available for the adult staff members at your Christmas party this Saturday."

I winced. Crystal had told me people would be unwrapping gifts of alcohol but she hadn't said anything about them cracking the bottles open and dumping the contents into their paper cups of cola right there at the party.

"Dang," I said. "Stupid alcohol. I honestly didn't know that, Mum. But you know there's no way I would ever touch alcohol, right? It's not like I'm stupid."

"I know," Mum hurried. "I know that. And Sandy said they'd do whatever they could to make sure none of the under-aged kids drink any of it. But I'm not stupid either and..." Her voice trailed off as she decided to let me lead the conversation. This was important.

Though I'm not sure how well they understood it, resisting alcohol was an area where my parents could trust me completely. I don't know what it is about me, but I have no desire for alcohol. As far as temptation goes, alcohol is as beguiling to me as trying to commit some kind of elaborate investment fraud scheme. I don't see how either broken promise could leave me feeling anything but sick and confused. I hoped Mom believed that about me. But even if she did, I still felt unsettled about going to the party.

I sat on my bed while Mum waited. "You don't think I should go to the staff party," I said for her.

"Would you feel safe around people who are drinking?" Without agreeing yet, she was leading me closer to the answer I knew she wanted.

I thought about it. "It's hard to say." I shook my head. "I guess I don't know. But I do know I don't even want to find out."

Mum let out her breath. "So you'll willingly stay here with us in Upton on Saturday night instead?"

"Sure," I said.

Unfortunately, staying home also meant singing in my new alto voice in Sister Giles' youth choir. The thought left me cringing. And since I wouldn't be at the staff party, I would have to brace myself for a few days more before getting Darren's mysterious Christmas gift. Worse than that, Crystal would be disappointed to be at the party without me. But, without question, I would be safer and cleaner if I simply stayed away from it altogether.

Crystal moaned into the telephone when I told her I wouldn't be going to the party. "As if, Mack. Sometimes this Mormon best friend thing is a huge pain."

I rushed to clarify what was happening. "It wasn't a dogmatic decision. It was a personal decision. It's a _me_ thing, remember? My parents didn't force this choice on me – no one did."

I could almost hear her eyes roll from across the phone line. Maybe she wasn't exactly sure what 'dogmatic' meant – or maybe she just didn't believe me.

When Saturday night came, Crystal and the rest of my friends were at the staff party without me. And I was backstage at the Pioneer Memorial Auditorium, dressed in a black skirt and a red sweater, just like Sister Giles ordered. I had to borrow the red sweater from my mom's wardrobe. It wasn't a colour I would have chosen for myself, no matter how festive the occasion was supposed to be. Mum's sweater was too big for me and I felt awkward and restless inside it. At least it smelled like her. All that was left to complete my transformation into a jolly, singing elf was to tuck my silver locket inside the sweater and replace it with a sprig of faded plastic holly pinned onto me like a prickly little corsage.

While my neck was still bent, trying to see the pin as I worked, I heard Ben Jones beginning to speak behind me. The sound of his voice – one of the few Upton voices I considered genuinely friendly – usually brought me a flash of relief and comfort that was a lot like happiness. But tonight, there was something peevish and cool about his voice.

"So you're here with us after all," Ben Jones observed, still standing behind me where I couldn't see him. "And I thought the biggest event of the Upton Christmas season would be no match for the allure of tonight's TacoTown Christmas fete."

Why did he have to talk that way – all formal and full of disdain for everything?

From behind me, Ben Jones could only see the baggy back of my sweater and long curtain of my hair hanging over it. My face was out of his sight so I let my features tighten with the anger I felt at his words. Tonight, even more than usual, my nerves were particularly tuned to be offended by that smug, amused approach people in Upton often took towards my job in a city fast food restaurant. They acted like work was some kind of funny, misguided hobby of mine instead of a vital spoke on the wheel of my family's day-to-day finances.

Of course, I wasn't about to explain the true nature of the situation to them. It was none of their business why I worked – especially since the reason was kind of humiliating for my dad. But I thought Ben Jones understood better. The last thing I wanted to do was satisfy him now with an explanation about how the staff party was too boozy for me. It would just have fuelled that enraging attitude I often encountered when people in Upton asked me about Crystal and my other friends from work. It was the attitude that my closest friends were sub-standard company. They weren't. They were just kids like the rest of us who were trying to do their best with the knowledge and values they'd been taught in the families where they'd been born.

I didn't turn around to answer Ben Jones. I just glanced quickly over my shoulder before looking straight ahead, into the wall. "Yep, here I am," I agreed as I walked away.

It was more like wandering than walking. Backstage at the Pioneer Memorial Auditorium, I had nowhere to go and nobody to talk to. Maybe I'd give Melanie a chance to be nice to me. "Why does this thing look so stupid on me?" I asked her, tugging at the plastic holly drooping from a pin jabbed into my borrowed sweater.

"Oh, come here," she frowned, pulling at the pin. "I can fix it."

"Thanks a lot. I'm so bad at this kind of thing."

She shrugged. "It's just the same, traditional stuff here every year. After all this time, I could pin on my holly and perform this concert in my sleep. Oh, be sure you give the sprig back at the end of the night or they'll hunt you down for it. Ben's a nice guy, eh?"

I shook my head as if I was waking up. It was embarrassing to realize I'd been looking at Ben Jones from across the crowded backstage space but it was positively mortifying to realize Melanie had noticed me doing it. I hoped I hadn't been glaring at him.

"I guess he is," I capitulated.

Melanie leaned a little closer to me. "I try to invite him on at least one date every four months – just to be sure he gets out. He's not much of a dater, obviously."

Fortunately, there was no time for me to react. Sister Giles was bustling around waving us all into position. I fell into line and stepped onto the stage, standing in the front row with the short girls – most of whom were way younger than me at about thirteen years old. As I droned the harmony for the sopranos, I could hear my Carrie holding her own with the other singers. My little sister was making this work. Maybe being two years younger was a big advantage when it came to fearlessly paddling between the dragons and adapting to a new world.

Amid all the solid, confident voices of the boys in the chorus I thought I could hear Jeff bravely hacking away. As usual, he was switching between the tenor and bass parts, trying to stay within the five note range of his voice. I didn't know the bass version of Ben Jones' voice well enough to guess which one of the rumbles from the back row belonged to him. Maybe I did need a special microphone to hear it after all.

The audience was invisible behind the brightness of the footlights. But I trusted they were out there, waiting silently like sea monster swimming under the surface of a calm ocean – sea monsters threatening me with nothing but the promise of a polite applause.

How did I get here? I wondered. Sister Giles' heart-warming Christmas concert storyline was moving toward the exact opposite place from where she had intended it to go. I wasn't sure if anything could have made me feel more like Upton's official hopeless misfit than standing on the stage in that chorus at that precise moment in time.

"Where are you going?" Jeff asked when the song was over and he saw me abandoning my artificial holly sprig on a backstage table. Since our number was finished, I was just about to crack open the rear exit and slip away. "If you leave now, you'll miss the finale," he reminded me.

"It's okay. I'm jumping overboard," I answered. "I'm going home."

"You're walking? With nothing on your feet but those skimpy dress shoes?" He frowned.

It wasn't like Jeff to notice what I was wearing and it made me smile in spite of my mood. I turned my ankle, looking down to the flat, pointed-toed show on my foot. "I'll be fine. No one will miss me. Don't forget to tell Mum and Dad they don't need to wait around for me."

The sidewalk outside had been scraped clear of snow before the concert. But as the night grew colder, the concrete was becoming covered in frost crystals. They were newly formed from the moisture in the air freezing solid and clinging to whatever was closest to it. I minced along the sidewalk, taking small, precarious steps in my silly, slippery shoes. Maybe I should have waited until the whole family was ready to leave at the end of the concert, after all the performers were brought out on stage to sing one final carol together. It would have been "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" – the inane verses about "figgy pudding" included, of course.

My toes were starting to ache with cold inside the tips of my shoes. I slowed down on the sidewalk. I wasn't even a full block away from the Pioneer Memorial Auditorium when a car pulled up to the curb beside me, driving as slowly as I walked – gliding beside me like an unwelcome life boat. The sight of it made me sigh and I turned to wave the car down the street.

"I'm fine," I called as the driver cranked the window down. "I don't mind walking." But as the frosted glass sunk into the door, I realized I knew the driver. Inside the life boat was Darren.

I stopped. "What the heck are you doing here? Why aren't you in the city, at the staff party?"

He opened the passenger door of the car. "Get in. It's freezing out there," he called.

I clambered into the little car – stunned and relieved to see a friend. I kicked my shoes off, pulled my feet up onto the seat, and started to warm my toes with my hands. "How the heck did you find me?" I asked.

He was pleased with himself and grinned at the windshield. He hadn't started driving again and we sat parked against the sidewalk in front of the dark windows of the Harbin Gardens Chinese restaurant. "Well, Crystal told me you'd be at the auditorium so I was waiting over there. I thought I might go in and hear you sing, or whatever. But when I saw a girl making a break for it out the back door, I knew it had to be you. It was too perfect."

I scoffed. "You were stalking me?"

Darren scoffed right back. "I was looking out for you. And it's a good thing too or you would've frozen your toes off in those shoes." He tossed a pair of gloves at me. "Put these on your feet like socks."

"Thanks but I'm fine now," I said, slipping my feet back into my shoes. "And you still haven't explained what you're doing out here in Upton tonight. You're missing the staff party right now."

Darren coughed. "Well, my assignment for the party," he began, "was to give you a gift. But you're not making it easy for me."

I swallowed. Here it was: Darren's Christmas present to me – the one I'd been bracing for. Only, I wasn't going to open it in the phony Mexican ambiance of the crowded, raucous TacoTown staff Christmas party. He was going to get me to open it here – alone, privately, without the safety of other people watching us. My pulse beat in my throat and I glanced out at the closed sign in the restaurant one more time.

"You could have just left it under the tree in the office," I protested. "I'm coming in on Tuesday night, as usual."

Darren shrugged. "Whatever. I'm already here."

He flicked the handle of the glove box and it banged open above my knees. Inside was a small, rectangular package wrapped in shiny red foil that glinted in the glove box light. I saw it. I knew it was meant for me. But I didn't touch it.

"Take it your present," he pressed.

I pulled in a deep breath and moved the box onto my lap, clicking the glove box closed with my other hand. I delicately tore an opening at one end of the package and slid out a blue box embossed with the name of a jewellery store. When the lid came away from the box, I found a short length of twisted gold braid lying on a bed of white cotton batting inside.

"It's a bracelet," Darren said.

"Yeah," I agreed. "Wow. Thank you. I can't believe you found something this nice for ten dollars."

Darren laughed. "Well, I kind of interpreted Sandy's ten dollar price limit as being more of a guideline than a rule. It's made of real gold so, uh..."

He wouldn't say it but he's spent a lot of money on it. The chain shimmered even in the dim light of the streetlamps on Upton's main road. The bracelet was beautiful. No one had ever given me anything so beautiful – not even my silver locket. "You really shouldn't have," I said – sincerely, even though that tired old expression always sounds insincere and canned.

"I can afford it," he said, trying to sound flippant. "All the money I make at TacoTown is disposable income for me. My mom covers my essential expenses. But you – I know you help your parents a lot and I was afraid they might not be able to show you how great you are this Christmas. You deserve it. So wear it."

I was skeptical. "You did this to take the holiday pressure off my parents?"

"I did it for you." Darren looked down at the steering wheel. "You're – special. You should have something special for Christmas."

"Everyone's special these days, Darren –" I began, my comfortable old cynicism rising up to protect me.

"–So the word doesn't mean anything anymore. Yeah, I know," he finished.

"But – but thanks anyway."

I finally reached into the box and pulled out the bracelet itself. The metal was warm from the heat vents in the dash. The chain was closed with a clasp but its diameter looked suitably wide so I rolled it onto my hand like a bangle.

"Is it too big?" Darren fretted.

"Nope, just nice and loose," I answered.

"Let me see it."

I hiked up the sleeves of my coat and my mother's sweater and held my arm in the glow of the orange light coming through the windshield. Darren reached out and placed one of his hands on either side of where the bracelet sat on my wrist. "It looks great," he said. "I told Wayne you had cute wrists."

His arms started to bend, drawing me toward him from the passenger seat. It was slow, like warm water rising and closing over my head. I was lonely, awkward and misunderstood at the concert that night. Right now, even Crystal was annoyed with me for not going with her to the party. I was famished for some acceptance – some assurance that I didn't need to be lonely. I was so close to him already. It would have been easy to let Darren's hands move me even closer, to rest my head on his shoulder, and feel an arm close around me. He smelled as clean and well-laundered as the treasured only-child he was. And what's more likeable than knowing someone really, really likes you?

The beams of a pair of blazing pickup truck headlights tore through the inside of Darren's car. We both jumped and my arm came free of his hands. I coughed. "Look at the traffic," I said when I found my breath again. "The concert must be letting out."

Darren cleared his throat. "Yeah."

"My family knows I left early and they'll panic if they get home and I'm not there yet –"

Darren raised an eyebrow. "They'll panic if you go missing for a little while – in Upton?"

"Yes, they will. Big city parenting habits die hard, apparently," I said, pulling my sleeves down over my wrist. "So are you going to drive me the rest of the way home or should I hop out and try to run there myself?"

Darren frowned as he steered the car into the street, following my directions to my grandparents' house. "See you Tuesday," was all he said as I pushed open the door to leave.

I wondered how he was going to report the whole story to Wayne – something he was certainly going to do one way or another. I would have liked to hear him explain it – because I wasn't really sure what had just happened myself.

***

Darren was right about Christmas being lean in my parents' household that year. He wasn't the only one who anticipated it either. A week before the high school's winter holidays started, a package arrived at the Upton post office for me. It was from my long lost Heather – my best friend from my old life in our old city. Even though I didn't need to wear her silver locket every day as protection anymore, I still missed her terribly.

I sat at my grandparents' kitchen table, holding the gift-wrapped present she sent me. I pressed it right up to my face as if I was trying to absorb some of the mature, comfortable love of our friendship through the pretty gold paper.

"A Christmas gift travelling to us all the way from the east," Dad smiled. "That's fitting, isn't it?"

"Yeah, HG is still awesome," I beamed. My favourite Heather and I referred to each other in initials to avoid confusion among all the non-Heathers around us. "Well, I won't open it now," I decided aloud. "I'll save it for Christmas morning. Then there'll be one less present for you guys to feel like you have to buy for me."

Mum made a pained face. "It's not that I don't love Christmas shopping for my big girl," she said, "but that would actually be really helpful. Thanks, honey."

Mum looked so sad. It made me want to keep talking.

"Sure. You really don't need to worry too much about gifts for me this year," I told my parents. "I'm way ahead of the game. Check out what I got in the gift exchange at work."

Mum snatched at the wrist I waved in front of her. Her hand gripped the place where the gold bracelet was clasped. "Who gave you that?"

I hadn't expected her to react so strongly. And I certainly hadn't expected her to know to turn the thickest part of the closure over to where the number 14K was stamped into the soft metal. It wasn't until then that I was suddenly struck with how strange and inappropriate it all must have seemed to my parents.

"Heather." Mum's voice was firm. "Are you dating someone?"

"No!" My protest was made in earnest. Darren might have been up to something but I hadn't consented to any of it. "A friend of mine at work gave it to me after he wound up with my name in the gift exchange. He's kind of like a brother to Crystal and I've got to know him fairly well lately. He knows a bit about how we're broke right now and he felt sorry for me, I guess."

Dad groaned.

Mum let go of my wrist. "With an investment like that the boy isn't saying he feels sorry for you. He's saying he wants to date you."

"Mum—"

"Does he go to the same church as your Crystal?" Dad interjected.

I was confused. "What do you mean? Crystal doesn't go to church."

"Exactly," Dad finished in a dry voice. "And when it comes to Crystal, that's fine. You need to have some friends who don't go to church. But with guys and dating – that's different. That's dangerous. It's not smart, Heather."

I sighed like I was disappointed that he was right – because I was disappointed that he was right. "Are you going to make me give the bracelet back to him?"

My parents both looked at me and then at each other, as if they were surprised. It was another one of those funny moments when I got the inkling that they were just inventing parenting as they went along.

"Do you want us to make you give it back?" Mum offered.

"I don't think I do," I replied, a little slowly.

"Fine," Mum allowed. "We won't 'make' you do anything. But don't let that boy get carried away. You know you should never date someone you can't marry, even if you're just sixteen and marriage is nowhere in the picture yet."

I don't know why I did it but I started to argue with her. "Well, what about Aunt Tammy? She married Uncle Dave and he didn't get baptised into the Church for years afterward – but he did get baptised."

"Aunt Tammy?" Mum repeated with a scary slowness. She grabbed the phone and spun it around on the countertop so the keypad faced me. "You go ahead and call your Aunt Tammy and ask what that was like for her. Or maybe you can call your father's cousin Lisa and ask her how many years she stuck it out going to church by herself before she just decided to spend her Sundays golfing with her husband. Or maybe –"

"Fine," I blurted. "You're right. Of course you're right. I'm sorry I brought it up. I honestly don't plan on ever dating Bracelet Boy. It's not an issue so we don't need to torture all three of us by talk about it. I'm sorry. Can I please go now?"

Dad nodded. "Yes, you can go. But stop worrying so much about money," he called after me. "By the time I get back from border security training school, in March, we should be fully back on our feet again."

I stopped at the top of the stairs and turned back to look at the two of them standing in my grandparents' kitchen. And it crashed over me again – all the sympathy for my dad that I carried around like a little tsunami in my heart. He was so optimistic and hard-working. I knew it hurt him every time he had to rely on Jeff and me to get the family's bills paid. When their marriage started, Dad never expected Mum to have to bring money into the household, let alone his kids. But here we were with our duffle bags full of greasy uniforms and hardly any spare time to enjoy our teen years. I felt like my compassion for him might make me start to cry but instead I forced a smile.

"Yeah, I know we will be," I said. Dad needed my confidence more than he needed my sympathy. And maybe I did believe him when he promised me it would all be over soon. But at age sixteen, three more months is a long, long time to wait.

It was awful for all of us when Dad left for border security school. Mum took him to the airport in the city while we were all at school. There was only one place in the entire country where new border guards could be trained and it was two thousand miles away from Upton. From that distance, he would be gone for three months straight without a single weekend visit. Mum tried to be chipper but it was a gloomy January for everyone. The one bright spot was the promise of report cards at the end of the long, dark month. Nothing cheered me up like a computer print-out showing in black and white dot matrices that I had a talent for schoolwork.

I stood by my locker on report card day, smiling down at what was undeniably a fabulous slate of grades. Even my math mark had come up from a C minus on that first review sheet to an A for a final mark of the semester. As I read over the soulless, computer generated teacher comments, something brushed against my back, tipping me slightly forward.

"Congratulations," I heard Tawny Reynolds say as she passed.

I looked up, confused. She had gone by so quickly it was too late for me to call out any thanks or, more to the point, to ask her what she was talking about. Weren't report cards kept confidential in Upton High School? How could she already know how well I'd done?

With my report card stashed in my school bag, I started for the exit at the front of the school. I was slowed down by the crowd gathering by the doors, hovering around the glass case where the names of the honour roll students were displayed. Over the heads of the other keeners I could see Ben Jones, tall and uncharacteristically slack-jawed, standing directly in front of the glass.

Someone clapped him on the shoulder. "Well done, Dude. As if there was ever any doubt it would be you," I heard someone tell Ben Jones.

Jeff was standing on the periphery of the crowd, uninterested, and lazily waiting for Ben Jones to snap out of his stupor.

"Do you have any idea what they're doing over there?" I asked my brother as if the other students weren't standing all around us.

"They're checking the honour roll rankings," he said. "It looks like Jones is going to be the class valedictorian this year – officially."

"Well, we knew that was coming, right?" I asked. "Wasn't he crowned valedictorian of his class back in kindergarten? How come he looks so stunned?"

Jeff shrugged. "I guess he's really not faking about being a modest person. And he was kind of afraid that, after all these years, the school would switch from purely academic criteria for valedictorian to something more well-rounded and, you know, give the award to the student body president, or something."

I watched Ben Jones standing at the head of the honor roll crowd for a moment more. "He looks like he might need to sit down," I said to Jeff. "Go get him."

Jeff shook his head. "I'm not going near it. Help yourself," he said, disengaging from everything as he cranked a pair of ear-buds into his head.

I stepped away from Jeff, pushing through the crowd toward Ben Jones.

"Oh, here she is," I heard someone say as I slid sideways through the other students. I ignored it – because that's what I always did – and took hold of Ben Jones's arm. "Jones – Dude," I called as I shook him.

His head jerked downward at the sound of my voice. "Heather," he said. "We did it."

"I heard," I smiled. "You and Jeff – you studied hard enough to make you into the valedictorian. But I think you're the only one here who's surprised about it."

He pulled his eyebrows together. "Jeff? No, you." He seized both my arms and spun me around to face the glass cabinet. "Look."

I glanced through the glass. "Yeah, I'm on the honour roll again. So is Jeff. So are lots of these people. I'm always on the honour roll. But you're the valedictorian of your class. It's awesome."

"Right. But look," he repeated, pointing at the glass. "You're at the top of the eleventh grade honour roll – you. If it was your class was graduating this year instead of mine, you'd be their valedictorian."

My own mouth fell open. I turned back to the cabinet and saw my name printed at the top of the sheet of paper listing the eleventh grade honour roll students. It appeared above all the other names – including Tawny Reynolds' name.

"Being the top student in eleventh grade is seen as a really important benchmark here," he explained. "And it's an upset."

"So – so the names – the list – it isn't just printed in alphabetical order?" I asked him.

He laughed down at me. "How's that for the smartest girl in the eleventh grade?"

A few more people slapped him on the back with their congratulations. Someone behind me pushed me toward him, mashing me into the side of Ben Jones's arm. "You two should hug or something," a voice suggested.

I glanced up at Ben Jones as the comment was spoken. Had he even heard it? Just then his younger brother was coming through the crowd, grinning and hopping, and Ben Jones looked much more inclined to hug him. I stepped back and stumbled out of the mass of people, looking down the long hallway for any sign of Tawny. The door of her dad's classroom was still closed. She was probably inside with him – and I genuinely hoped she was all right.

"Melanie," I called, grabbing her sleeve as she sped by me with her head down. "Is Tawny okay?"

She stopped and she almost smiled. "Tawny? Yeah, she'll be fine. The second ranked student is supposed to give the class history at the graduation ceremony and – well, you just got here so you wouldn't be the best choice for that, would you? It would be a disaster to have a new girl as a historian. Tawny will see it's for the best – once it all sinks in." Melanie started to move on.

"Wait," I called, lunging to grab her arm again. "It's not final yet. Tell her I'm sure she'll get her grades ahead of mine by the end of twelfth grade. The valedictorian award is still hers, like it's always been."

Melanie looked at her shoes. "I don't know. Tawny's never studied harder than since you came to the school. Her marks are higher than ever – but yours are just higher. There's probably nothing more she can do." She shook her head. "Don't feel bad, Heather. You didn't do anything wrong. Everyone knows that."

"That's really nice of you to say," I croaked. Maybe these girls had been inspired to be nice to me by formal goals they'd set. But why should that make any difference to me? Essentially, they tried to be my friends just because they're good people – and I had failed to be gracious about it. And now, when it was time for them to be gracious, here was Melanie telling me to go ahead and be happy about my success.

"Tell Tawny," I called after Melanie as she moved toward Mr. Reynolds' closed classroom door. "Tell her I don't play piano at all, and I sing awful, and I can't make a three point shot, and – and I'm a total jerk."

***

Sometimes I wondered why the band of slick, entrepreneur brothers who owned all three of the TacoTown franchises in the city bothered to keep the restaurants open during January. That month, our shifts were long, uneventful, and dark. Since there were hardly any customers, the evenings were full of tedious make-work projects like cleaning the insides of fluorescent light fixtures. I stood beside Darren while he pulled down the large sheets of translucent plastic that covered the lights above the counter, waiting to carry them back to Bert who would spray away the dust and grime and dead bugs.

"I can't believe you don't need to use a chair to reach those," I remarked.

Darren smiled up into the ceiling. "Is that a compliment?"

"I don't know." I was on my guard now. "It's disbelief, incredulity, awe – whatever."

"Cool. I'll take it."

The wind lashed into the restaurant through the front doors. We hadn't served a customer in nearly an hour so we both turned to look. The snowy hulk of a large, clumsy creature slumped over the threshold and slid down onto the tile floor in a heap as the doors closed behind it. I knew it must have been human. But at first sight, it reminded me of something else. It made me think of a walrus.

"Wayne!" the snowy walrus yelled up from the floor. "Darren – triplets! Where are you guys?"

Darren cursed. "It's Tom."

I squinted at the mound of chilly humanity lolling on the floor. "No," I said. "That can't be right."

Wayne appeared behind the counter with us. "Tom?" he called back.

"There you are," the walrus was looking more and more like it was Tom yelled back at us. It was even rolling up into a sitting position on the floor.

Bert was standing beside us now too, holding a clean plastic lighting tile. "Who is that guy?" he asked.

"The proverbial disgruntled former employee," was Darren's explanation.

I started to move away from them, toward Tom. "Is he hurt?" I asked. "Tom –"

But Darren caught my wrist, holding me back. "No, he's not exactly hurt," he assured me.

"Whatever he is," Bert said, "I don't think he could get any drunker."

As soon as I heard the words, I knew Bert was right. And it made me feel sick. I was about to knowingly meet a drunk person for the first time in my life and it happened to be someone I cared about. I shook off Darren's hold anyway.

"Well, we still can't just leave him lying there like that," I said.

But I didn't step any closer to Tom. My desire to help him myself had been eclipsed by a funny little fear. This person on the floor wasn't the Tom I knew. Until the effects of the liquor wore off, he was someone else – if only very slightly. And I wasn't sure I could trust him.

Tom had pushed himself up the wall by now and was standing again, leaning heavily against a large, orange garbage bin. "Oh good. There's Crystal," he hooted. "Crystal, you are so pretty – even if you do look like –" His voice became garbled as he started to slide down the wall again.

Wayne sighed. "Come on, guys," he said to the other boys. "You two stay here," he said to Crystal and me.

"Having a bad night, Tom?" I heard Wayne begin.

Tom surveyed the three boys as they stood over him. "You." He waved at Bert who stood there with his confident cowboy posture, looking down on Tom as if he was some kind of sick livestock. "You're the new me," Tom told him. "The blond, buff, better me."

Bert laughed. "Whatever you say, buddy."

"Hey Darren – did you get that little Mormon chick for yourself yet?" Tom slurred. "I see her, hiding over there. She won't come close enough to let me check if she's still wearing that halo under her TacoTown hat. Come on over, little Mormon. Being drunk's not contagious, you know. You don't hafta worry about me –"

"That's enough, Tom," Wayne interrupted.

Tom tried to straighten his stance against the wall. "I don't take orders from you anymore," he said to Wayne. "And I'm not leaving."

"That's fine. No one asked you to leave," Wayne reminded him.

But Tom would not be diverted from the drama he'd been rehearsing in his head all night. It was still real to him even if the rest of us weren't playing along. "I said I'm not leaving. You're gonna hafta call the cops and get me thrown out of here."

Tom managed to hook his arm over the back of a chair and hefted himself onto the seat, landing with noisy groans both from the wood and from himself. He pounded his foot against the floor. "Come on out here, Crystal. Sit with me. Warm me up –"

"That's enough, Tom," Wayne warned again.

"Why are you still standing here?" Tom bawled at him. "Go call the cops. Call them right now."

"Settle down, buddy," Bert interjected. "No one wants to call the cops."

"And no one wants to throw you back outside either," Wayne added. "Look at you. You're too drunk to be out in the cold. You're probably half frozen to death already and you don't even know it."

I hadn't thought of that. We all knew alcohol made people more likely to be injured by the cold – something about changes in blood flow. It's the kind of scary story visiting policemen used to regale us with in our junior high school classes. It looked like Tom must have forgotten their warnings. The hair on the back of my neck began to rise. Maybe Darren was wrong about Tom not being hurt.

"Look, he's been wandering around out there without any gloves," Bert observed. "You'd better let us take a good look at your hands, buddy."

"Why?" Tom tried to sound defiant as he said it. But his curiosity was irresistible and he held his hands out and looked at them himself. His flesh was nearly white and both his hands looked like parts of them had been sculpted out of wax. Tom swore. "Wayne," he croaked. "Wayne, what did I do? Crystal, I wrecked my hands."

That was when Crystal and I broke out into the dining room and ran to where Tom sat. I gasped at the sight of his poor hands. Bert was reaching for them. "No!" I yelled. "Don't touch them. Help him to the back instead," I said. "Crystal, go fill the sink with warm water – warm, not hot."

She ran into the kitchen while Bert and Wayne carefully raised Tom to his feet.

"Darren, go call an ambulance," I said. He trotted off into the office. I turned and tried to smile at Tom. "Come with us, Tom. It looks like you've got some frostbite on your hands."

"I can't go with you," Tom protested. "I don't work here anymore. I'm not allowed behind the counter." Despite his protests, he didn't resist Wayne and Bert as they each took hold of one of his elbows and led him toward the sound of the running water.

"Tom," I said loudly as we reached the sink, "this is going to hurt at first but you really need to warm up your hands, right away. Understand?"

He looked scared. "But – they don't even feel that cold to me," he stammered, his voice starting to sound teary.

"Come on, Tom. Do what she says," Crystal told him as she cranked the taps closed.

Bert and Wayne stood on either side of him and plunged both Tom's hands into the sink, soaking the cuffs of his sleeves. The howl Tom loosed as the water washed over his frostbitten flesh was like nothing I'd ever heard a person make before. Bert looked on calmly but grimly, with a face not unlike the one he probably wore in the springtime when he and his father branded calves. Wayne kept his head down and stayed uncharacteristically speechless.

Tom looked up from the sink as he ran out of breath for any more screaming. "Where is she?" he rasped. "The little Mormon chick – why do you people listen to her?"

Wayne was shushing him as Darren came back from the telephone. "Okay, they're coming." He glanced at where Tom stood panting into the sink. "What did you guys do to him? Even the operator could hear him yelling."

"It was just a little first aid," I answered. "I think he frostbit his hands pretty badly. Poor Tom. Now he thinks I'm the devil."

"The water's cooling off," Wayne reported. "Should we add a little more to warm it up?"

"I guess so," I said even though I never wanted to hear that sound Tom made ever again. Where was the ambulance?

Tom was trying to pull his hands out of the sink. "They're fine now. They're fine – I swear. I'll just put them in my pockets," he was pleading.

We all yelled "no" in unison. "If you rub anything against them you might rub your skin right off. Frostbite's a lot like a burn that way," I explained.

Finally, we heard the sound of metal clinking in the dining room. Darren clipped out to meet the paramedics and bring them to Tom. I heard one on them talking into his radio while another lightly wrapped Tom's hands in a special bandage as he sat on a stretcher:

"Seventeen-year-old male; intoxicated; mildly hypothermic; frostbite to left and right hands. Civilians administered appropriate first aid on scene..."

Tom lay back in the stretcher and let his head roll to one side as the paramedics wheeled him away. He said one last thing to us before he disappeared through the doorway.

"Crystal – Crystal, I think I'm gonna puke."

***

It was a cold, windy Thursday evening at the beginning of one of those school-kids-only long weekends. I had the night off work, and it looked like I was going to have to spend it stuck in Upton. I really needed to figure out how to parallel park properly so I could pass my driver's license test. That's what I told Darren when he called to see if I was going to be in the city that night.

"No problem. I'll come get you and bring you back myself," he offered.

I scoffed. "You'd come all the way to Upton?"

"Sure. Why not?"

An hour later I was skating down my grandparents' driveway toward Darren's car. He had thrown the front door open from the inside and I climbed into the empty seat beside him. "Hi," I said, before I turned to greet the twins in the backseat. But the car was empty except for Darren and me.

"Where is everybody?" I asked.

Darren shrugged behind the wheel. "In the city," he answered. Before I could question him any more about the twins, he'd backed out into the street and changed the subject. "Oh, by the way," he said, "there's a huge flower arrangement sitting in the TacoTown back office for you."

I frowned. "For me?"

"Well," he admitted, "the card is addressed to the entire staff but it's meant mostly for you."

"Darren, what the heck are you talking about?"

He grinned. "Tom's mom was pretty grateful for what we did for him the other night. She made him come in and apologize to Sandy this morning. They say his hands were still all bandaged up and everything. Anyway, the doctor told his mom he could have lost a few fingers if we – if you hadn't known what to do for frostbite."

"Or if you guys had lost your cool and thrown him out of the restaurant," I added. "It definitely wasn't just me who helped him. It took all of us to do it. The poor, stupid guy – I'm glad he's going to be okay."

"Where did you learn that first aid, anyway?" Darren asked. "All I know is the stuff about drowning that they taught us in swimming lessons."

I shrugged. "First aid is something we're taught at a church activities every once in a while."

Darren laughed.

"Seriously," I said.

"What's first aid got to do with god?" he sneered.

I punched his arm through his coat. "Are you kidding me? Haven't you ever heard of the Good Samaritan?"

"Yeah. I guess I have."

"Well, that story's got loads of first aid in it – and it's right in the Bible. Think about it. How can Christians expect to be able to help people and take care of each other if they've never been taught how to help?"

Darren shook his head. "That's a weird church you've got there. Helpful, but weird."

"It's the best," I testified.

"Whatever you say, Mack," Darren allowed.

"So where are we all going tonight?" We were at the city limits. It was time for me to ask.

"Are you hungry?" It was sort of like an answer.

I'd eaten a tiny bit of the noodly, soupy casserole Carrie had made for dinner that night – just enough to keep from seeming ungrateful to her. I wasn't exactly hungry but at sixteen years old, I could still eat whatever and whenever I wanted without much consequence. "I think I could eat a little something," I answered.

Darren pulled the car into the parking lot of a nice Italian restaurant I'd never been to before – the kind of place meant for fully grown-up customers. I opened the car door to find him skidding on the slippery soles of his shoes, leaning on the hood to keep from sliding underneath the car on the January ice.

I laughed. "Darren, what the heck are you doing now?"

He forced a laugh of his own. "I was trying to get over there to open your door for you. But you're too impatient – and fast."

I looked down at the door handle. "Why do you have to do it? Is there a trick to it? Is the door broken?"

Darren found his feet, walked over to me, and pulled the door out of my hands. "No. It works fine. But trying to act like a gentleman isn't just for Mormon guys, you know," he said.

I coughed. "Quit goofing around. They're probably waiting for us," I said, meaning the twins, naturally. "If you hurry up, you might be able to open the door to the restaurant for me."

The inside of the restaurant was dim and lit by votive candles burning in cut-glass lanterns set on each table. I squinted through the candlelight, looking for Crystal and Wayne. They still hadn't arrived.

A man in a clean white shirt led Darren and me to a table. He seemed so confident and authoritative about where we sat that I didn't question him about the tiny round table he assigned to us. "I don't know how we'll all fit once Crystal and Wayne get here," I remarked to Darren after the host left us alone in a dim corner.

"Don't worry about it," Darren began as I opened the menu. "Look, the thing is – Wayne and Crystal aren't coming. There's really no place for a brother-sister duo on a date."

My head jerked up from the menu. "Date?" I repeated. "This is a date?"

Darren shoved his own menu aside and leaned over the table, clearly exasperated. "Of course it's a date. I drove all the way to Upton in the snow to pick you up – alone. I took you to a restaurant with waiters and cloth napkins and everything. And when we're done, I'm going to pay for it all myself. That's a date, right?"

I sat back, my eyes darting around the room. Crystal and Wayne were not coming. Now that I knew it, I felt tricked – tricked into dating someone outside the Church for the very first time. But – what was that other feeling – there was something else I felt. It was – flattered. Someone had a crush on the ugliest girl in my junior high school. It was something like a miracle. And even as I fumbled for an escape, I couldn't help but feel a little pleased about it.

Whether I was pleased or not, it was time to end it. I tucked one edge of my long, yellow hair behind my ear. "Look, Darren –" I began.

He wasn't listening. He was reaching across the tiny table to touch my wrist with his fingertip, rolling the gold bracelet he'd given me along my arm. "You had to have known what I had in mind for us," he said, "when I traded with Wayne to get your name in the Christmas gift exchange and then went out and bought you gold jewellery instead of a ten dollar gag gift like everyone else got each other –"

"But – but you did it because we're friends and my family's broke, right?" I stammered.

Darren laughed, even though I knew he couldn't be finding my shock at his confessions amusing at all. "And then there was that time in my car, in Upton, when you almost let me kiss you."

"I did not," I hissed. Was that where his hold on my wrist the night of the Christmas concert had been heading? "We are just friends."

He shook his head. "Friends?" he said. "No, not really. Be honest with me, Heather."

"Heather?"

"You're wearing this bracelet nearly every time I see you. So it must mean something to you. It has to."

I raised my hands to my forehead, moving my arm away from his fingers. "It just means I'm poor and I don't have many beautiful things of my own," I murmured. "Darren, you know what Mormons are like. It's not that I don't find you sweet and funny and cute and all that. You're awesome. I just don't date people from outside my Church."

"But you're not like other Mormons, Mack," he argued. "That's what's so great about you."

"No, that's what's wrong with me," I countered, starting to get loud under the quiet, shadowy roof of the restaurant.

Darren swore quietly to himself and sat back on his own side of the table. "Okay, Mack, here's what we'll do," he said, recovering the same smooth, low voice he'd been using before. "This doesn't have to be a date if you don't want it to be. We don't have to call it that if it bothers you. We're just eating together. We've done it a million times before when our dinner breaks overlap at TacoTown. We'll finish here and go find the twins and hang out like we always do for the rest of the night, if that'll make you feel better."

I let out my breath. "Finding the twins would make me feel better," I said. Then I looked up at his face, a little shyly. "So are you still paying?"

Darren laughed and opened his menu. He sounded like himself again – just a smart, funny guy from my circle of friends; the best friend of my best friend's twin brother. Maybe everything could go back to the way it was before tonight. Sure.

As promised, Darren drove us to the twins' house after dinner. I saw the slats of the blinds in their living room widow crack open as we started up the walkway to the door, as if they'd been watching for us. Crystal and Wayne were both behind the door when it opened, their brown eyes bigger than I'd ever seen them. They were surprised to see us here this early – and, I thought, they were a little disappointed.

"Dang it," I thought as I read their faces, "they _knew_."

I jumped at Crystal like she was a life raft and started chattering to her about – anything. But out of the corner of my eye I saw Wayne look up at Darren and raise his eyebrows, asking. Darren held up one hand and rocked it back and forth like a see-saw. It's a motion I learned as a third grader in French class. We always made it whenever we said, " _Comme ci, comme ça_." The English translation would be "so-so." And when Darren made the motion for Wayne that night he meant to say that even though our date hadn't made me his girlfriend, he was still hopeful.

When the boys finally started to get caught up in their own talk, I grinned stiffly at Crystal and spoke between my gritted teeth, like a ventriloquist. "How could you let me get set up like that?" I asked.

"You mean, with Darren?" she replied in a whisper.

I nodded, still grinning joylessly. "You should have warned me he was about to make a move like that."

"I thought it was nice. I thought you'd like it," she rasped back at me. She flicked the gold chain closed around my wrist with the tip of her finger. "Everyone thinks you like him. Don't you?"

I closed my lips over my teeth as I shrugged. "It doesn't really matter. He's not someone I could go out with the way things are right now. I thought I told you that months ago."

It had started snowing hard outside the windows of the little downtown house where the twins lived with their mother. As always, the fierceness of the weather didn't arise from the amount of snow falling but from the wind that blew so fiercely the dark sky outside seemed white wherever light cut through it. Taffy, the twins' fat yellow cat, was asleep on Crystal's lap. The house smelled like the popcorn we'd made and the whole scene would have been perfectly mid-wintry cozy if the spectre of a dangerous drive back to Upton wasn't looming over it.

Darren peered out the window to where his mom's car sat parked on the curb, somewhere behind the wall of flying snow.

"It'll clear up soon," I chirped.

But we were only half finished watching a movie on the VCR when the phone rang. It was Darren's mom and she wanted him home where he – and her car – would be safe from the blizzard right away.

"Stop being so _over-protective_ ," he whisper-yelled into the kitchen phone loudly enough for all of us to hear him from the living room. "Over-protective" was one of those expressions Baby Boomer parents hated in those days, for some reason. We all knew that to utter it was to make a particularly potent attack on them. But Darren's mom still wouldn't budge. He was red-faced and huffy when he came to tell the rest of us he needed to leave and I would be stranded in the city for the night.

I sighed. "I don't blame your mom one bit," I said. "If you were my kid, I'd tell you the same thing."

"And don't worry about getting Mack back to Upton tonight," Crystal told him. She tried to keep her voice light but everyone there knew she was desperate to make the evening less of a disaster for Darren. "She can sleep over here. Can't you?"

"Of course I can," I hurried. "Just let me call my mom. She's probably starting to freak out at the idea of me being on the highway tonight anyway. Don't worry about me."

Wayne stood by the front door as Darren stomped out of the house.

"Bye," Crystal and I called after him.

"It's just as well," Wayne said as the door slammed shut. "I need to leave and run over to Heather V.'s house to say good-bye, anyway. She's flying off on that service project to go build an orphanage in Guatemala tomorrow morning."

"Well, they sure picked a nice time of the year to do some good works down by the Equator," I observed, a little cynically.

Crystal snorted. Wayne rolled his eyes at us and reached for his heavy coat.

"Hey, won't your mom be mad about you driving around in the storm too?" I asked.

There were a few seconds of silence while Wayne and Crystal exchanged grim looks before breaking into bitter laughter. "What? It's not like I'm taking her car out in the snow," Wayne said, "so what should she care?"

"No, Mum won't mind at all. That's one of the reasons why he's going out," Crystal explained. She flicked her eyes up the stairs to where we could hear a small television set playing in the master bedroom. "He's testing her to see if she'll go all motherly on him in the face of danger and try to keep him safe at home, or whatever."

"Mom!" Wayne called up the stairs. "I'm going out."

"Uh-huh," was his mom's answer.

He smiled broadly at us – satisfied in some masochistic way – and turned to open the door.

It was too awful. "Wayne, don't go out in that," I said.

He rounded on me. "Mack, if you can't stand to see me leave without you, just say so."

I raised my hand to my throat to cover the red flush I could feel mounting there. What was wrong with me? And what was I going to say now?

But Crystal was on her feet. "Just go," she said, advancing on Wayne where he stood in front of the door. "Go if you have to, so you can come back before it gets any worse out there." She pushed him outside.

"You two, shut the door," their mom called from up the stairs.

The door slammed and we lost sight of Wayne as he trudged down the drifted snow filling the walkway on his way to his little tin can of a car.

"He'll be fine," Crystal assured us both. "He just got new tires and he drives like a careful old granny even in good weather."

We sat back down to the movie we'd all been watching but neither of us was enjoying it and Crystal was yawning so we went to bed. I slept in Crystal's clothes, pulling the drawstring of her pyjamas pants as tightly as I could and rolling up the cuffs. Crystal was a gifted sleeper and never seemed to have any trouble drifting off despite having me crammed into her single bed with her. She kept sleeping ever after Taffy came to crowd us.

"Taffy – please, no," I groaned to the cat in the dark quiet. I pushed his furry back away from my sleeping space but he just lolled right back into place. He turned his head toward me and slowly blinked his luminous eyes but otherwise he totally ignored me. I didn't really know how to behave when faced with all this cat-titude. Our family had never had a pet – not even a small, unobtrusive pet like fish or a hamster or a...

"Parakeet," I whispered to myself over the sound of Crystal's breathing.

All at once, there were goose-bumps rising on my arms. I shook my head and sat up in bed. I was thinking about a different kind of animal than cats – a much more confusing and frustrating kind. I was thinking about boys. Here I was, finally getting chased by a boy – by Darren. But he wasn't from the right circle of boys. And the right boy – well, so far I could only think of one person even close to that description and he seemed to consider me little more than a feathery pet.

I sighed so loudly Taffy turned his head to look at me again. I really didn't have much of a right to complain to the old cat. He slept with Crystal every night. It was me who had invaded Taffy's territory, after all.

"Fine." I relented and turned to the wall.

I lay in the dark wondering if the gap between the wall and the bed was wide enough to put me in danger of falling down it. I was just starting to move toward an uneasy sleepiness when a sharp, spitty sound shook the bed. I sat up.

Chee! Chee!

It was Taffy. He was sneezing down in the hollow between my feet and Crystal's. It was too much. I shook Crystal by the arm as she slept. Her breathing didn't even waver from its deep, regular pattern. With a lifetime full of nights of good sleep to her credit, it was no wonder the girl was so strong and healthy. She didn't stir but Taffy raised his head and looked at me with his keen nocturnal vision. I couldn't tell if he was smug or just bored with me.

Chee!

It was hopeless. I picked up my pillow, climbed to the end of the bed, and crept out the bedroom door. There was a lamp still lit in the living room at the bottom of a creaky flight of stairs so I descended toward it. Away from Taffy, everything was quiet. I wondered if Wayne had managed to sneak back into the house without us noticing. My wristwatch was upstairs, somewhere in Crystal's room, and the VCR clock was just flashing midnight on and off so I had no idea how much time had passed since we'd gone to bed. I dropped the pillow on the couch and pulled my coat off the banister to use as a blanket. Underneath my coat, I curled up on the couch in the tiniest, warmest, most unobtrusive ball I could make out of myself.

That was when the door opened. Cold rushed into the room. Feet were stamping on the rug in the hall, and someone swore quietly at the weather raging behind him. It was Wayne. There was a rustle and stomp as he threw off his winter coat and shoes. I lifted my head slightly but he still didn't see me until he'd let himself fall onto the couch, sitting almost on top of my feet.

"Mack!" Wayne nearly shouted as I pulled my feet away.
"Shh!"

"What the – heck – are you doing down here by yourself, hiding under your coat?" he stammered.

"Trying to get some sleep. Did you know your cat has a cold? He's up in Crystal's bed sneezing his catty little face off," I reported.

Wayne grinned. "Taffy? No, he's not sick. It's just his winter allergies."

"Oh, well, why didn't anyone say so before? I can sleep through sneezes as long as they're just allergies – no problem."

"Nice girls aren't sarcastic, Mack," he scolded.

"Oh right. Sorry. I forgot you're an expert on nice girls." I thought it was a fitting thing to say to someone who'd just come from a long, private visit with Heather V.

But Wayne's smile faded to nothing. He sighed into his chest. "Apparently not," he said.

I cleared my throat. "So how is Heather V.?"

He sighed again and rolled his face up from his chest. "Great – excited, packed for Guatemala, learning Spanish – you know."

"Well, you stayed over there saying good-bye until it got pretty late. That must have been a special _adios_." I was trying to lighten his mood.

"It sure was," he agreed. "It was a permanent _adios_."

"Oh no."

"Yep. She broke up with me," he said. "She tried to give me that, 'we've grown apart' – um – garbage." It was sweet of Wayne to remember to choke back all the swearing in which his poor, beat-up heart would have liked to indulge. He was censoring himself for me but I knew swearing wouldn't have made him feel any better in the long-run anyway.

He looked down the length of the couch to where my face peeked over the collar of my winter coat. "I'm glad you're still awake, Mack. I didn't really want to be alone right now but those two..." He gestured at the upper floor where Crystal and his mom were sleeping.

"There is no possible way to wake up Crystal," I finished for him.

He nodded and rubbed his arms briskly with his large, brown hands. "Hey, do you want some hot chocolate? I can't get warm. On top of everything else, it looks like the heater in my car broke down just now."

Wayne went to the kitchen while I waited underneath my coat in the living room, a little surprised to be experiencing something like a nurturing side to him. He came back with two warm mugs and settled onto the far end of the couch. I watched as he pulled at a fleck in his sweatshirt until a long, golden Heather V. hair came loose from between the fibres – like a magic trick. He sighed again and dropped the hair onto the carpet.

"Don't get too sentimental," I chided him. "It could have just been one of my hairs."

Wayne smirked and blew into his hot chocolate. "Hey, that reminds me. It was a pretty bad night for Darren too, wasn't it."

I groaned. "Don't blame me for that. I was totally shocked by the whole thing. Darren likes me – _likes_ me. Where the heck did that come from?"

Wayne rolled his eyes. "Girls. They only see what they want to see."

I made a scoffing sound. "I don't see how guys are any different when it comes to that. And it's not that I don't admire Darren. He's a great person –"

"Spoken like a true Heather," Wayne interrupted. "I think I heard this speech once already tonight."

"I totally mean it," I protested. "It's not an excuse – and it's not personal. It's the church thing..."

My voice broke a little and Wayne turned to look right at me, all brown-eyed and earnest, for once. "The church thing," I repeated. "It's _real_."

I saw his throat move as he swallowed. "I believe you," he said. "But don't people change religions for their loved ones all the time – if they have to?"

"I guess. But that's an enormous step," I answered, sounding grave. "And it certainly doesn't always work out well – or at all. I mean, if Darren ever became a Mormon it would have to be genuine. I wouldn't want it to have anything to do with a relationship with me. You're his best friend; do you honestly think there's much chance of that happening?"

Wayne turned to look straight ahead of himself, into the dark kitchen beyond us, as if he was trying hard to imagine Darren standing there on the linoleum, as a Mormon. "No," he replied. "I can't see it. You guys will always have all those rules. He's too strong willed for that kind of lifestyle."

I sat up. "Oh, and I'm not strong willed?"

"That's not what I meant," Wayne hurried. "You're will is awesome, obviously. But I can't see Darren changing his whole life for a church unless there's also something cute and blonde in it for him."

Now I was sighing. "Well, that's really too bad," I said. Wait – had Wayne just called me cute?

"But don't expect him to give up on you yet," Wayne warned me. "He's used to getting spoiled by his mom and his grandma and, like we all saw tonight, he's not very good at taking 'no' for an answer."

I hummed into my mug. "Maybe I'm sick and selfish but I don't really have a problem with him not giving up. I mean, it's very pleasant, being treated so well – just as long as he can accept never actually having me as a girlfriend."

Wayne winced. "Not nice, Mack."

"I know. But – but just let me admit it for once. It's just the two of us here so let me be brutally honest," I said. "I know you appreciate both brutality and honesty."

"I do." Wayne grinned. "And you know that about me."

"Yes."

"Because we're friends now, right?" Wayne was looking deeply into his hot chocolate.

I almost laughed. "Well, we don't hate each other anymore. So – sure."

He shook his head. "What I mean is, I'm not just Crystal's brother to you. I'm your friend too – yours, like, independently of other people."

I shifted underneath my coat. Something about the atmosphere in Wayne's living room was making me feel restless. I stopped squirming and forced myself to look at him. His face was turned toward me now. I usually liked looking at him. He was pretty – like nice scenery in human form. But sometimes Wayne's way of looking at people freaked me out. It was as if he wasn't afraid of other people enough to know that he shouldn't look directly at them for too long. He didn't know – or didn't care – not to glare or stare. And now he was sitting at the other end of the couch, just looking at me as we sat almost alone in the quiet house.

I couldn't stand it.

I nodded my head hard enough to drop my hair over the sides of my face. "Of course we're friends," I said. "And that's especially cool because I don't have a lot of friends anymore. I mean, you don't know what it's like. All day, every day I walk around like I'm a total weirdo in Upton. Everybody's nice to me but nobody – hardly anybody – actually likes me. I don't know if you guys realize how much it means to me to feel so welcome and accepted and – normal – around you."

"Stupid Upton," Wayne said as he shook his head. "Still, Darren might end up wearing your resistance down, in time."

I shook my head. "No."

Wayne pivoted toward me on the couch, leaning slightly forward. "So," he began, "so you'd really never ever date a guy who wasn't a Mormon – never?"

It was a simple question. I thought I knew the answer. I'd always known the answer, hadn't I? The answer had to be, "Of course I wouldn't." But, for some reason, it was hard to say at that moment. I tossed my head instead.

"Why the heck are we sitting here talking about my life?" I deflected. "Here I was all ready to help you work through what happened with Heather V. tonight and you've hardly said a word about it."

Wayne sat back and drained the last of his mug. "I never wanted to talk about that in particular. It is over. That is all. I just wanted to talk about whatever. If we'd ended up talking about professional hockey stats or something that would have been fine with me too. Really, I just couldn't stand the idea of going upstairs and lying awake going over it and over it." He looked at me again. "Thanks."

I smiled as I turned away. "It's the least I could do."

Wayne was reaching for the television remote control. "Wanna watch the news? I'll go up and take Taffy away when you're ready to go back to bed."

I yawned and leaned against my pillow on the arm of the couch. "Sure, I'll watch with you for a bit," I agreed. And I listened with my eyes closed until the television voices stopped sounding like words. Instead, they were ebbing and flowing with a rhythm, like tides – like a whole ocean full of uncharted, dangerous water.

***

It had been a dry winter and the ground was already dusty and ready to be airborne by the time the wind started blowing down on the prairie from the Rocky Mountains. It was March which meant the wind was like a hurricane every afternoon. That's what the day was like the Saturday we planned to celebrate the twins' seventeenth birthday. I worked a short, four hour dayshift and by the middle of the afternoon I was sitting at the TacoTown staff table wondering what I'd do to pass the three hours left before Wayne, Crystal, and Darren were finished work for the day.

So far, the twins' birthday wasn't going very well. Wayne had come home the afternoon before with a small, innocent-looking bandage fixed above his upper lip.

"He got his mole removed!" Crystal railed at me as they came through the TacoTown doors on Saturday morning.

I gasped. "His signature twin mole? It's gone? No way!"

I leaned close to Wayne's face and gawked at the tiny plaster left in the spot where his flat, brown mole used to stand on his face like a drawn-on beauty mark. Crystal still had hers, in exactly the same spot, lingering like a ghost of his.

"Crystal, come on," he said, looking past me. "I already explained this to you. I cut it open with a razor just about every time I shaved. It's not my fault that I grew up and our mole doesn't work for me anymore."

"But it was our trademark..."

"The sign of your twin-ship..." I added.

Wayne groaned. "No one should have to bleed from the face every morning in order to maintain a relationship with his sister. Sorry, but it's asking too much."

He was probably right. But Crystal spent our shift sulking anyway. It was a good thing there were three more hours for her to get used to Wayne's new face before we all started trying to enjoy ourselves for the evening. The twins had invited Bert to come to their birthday party too and he sat with me at the staff table, smoking another cigarette. Crystal and Wayne walked by the kitchen door as Bert and I waited.

"Of course I didn't arrange to get it removed on the day before our birthday on purpose," Wayne was saying. "That's just when the doctor could fit me in. He picked the time, not me. You don't honestly think..."

Bert ground out his half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray. "Come on, Mack," he said. "I don't have much of an appetite left for listening while they sort this out."

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"We're going to the farm so you can help me work on my car," he told me.

Bert's car was a drab white Mustang made during the doldrums of the car's production years. He was constantly patching it together. Even I could tell that the car needed work – body work. Both the front and rear bumpers were crushed at the corners and one fender was marked with a long, blue scuff.

"Been in a few accidents, eh?" I remarked.

"Yeah. But," Bert said, throwing the car into reverse and backing quickly out of his parking spot, "it's not that I'm a bad driver."

"It's not?"

"Let me just say that if you looked as stupid in glasses as I do, you'd try to get by in life without wearing them too – even when driving." He wheeled the car between the narrow rows of parked vehicles in the TacoTown lot. I squeaked like a leaky balloon as my side mirror nearly grazed the trailer hitch of a huge pickup truck as we passed it.

"Don't be afraid to shout out anything you think I might not see. Your instincts are probably right on," Bert instructed.

"Stop sign! Stop sign!"

Bert laughed as he stomped on the brake with one of his big, lion paws. "Atta girl!"

Somehow, we made it more or less safely all the way through the city. I called out alerts for pedestrians, red lights, oncoming cars, and whatever else I'd rather not see smashed. Finally, we reached the city limits where the traffic thinned and the roads widened into highways, heading into the country. We were on the opposite side of the city from Upton, in country I'd never seen before. As we drove faster and faster on our way to Bert's family farm, I flipped open the glove box. Between the stacks of police accident reports, I found a bulky, brassy pair of eyeglasses like the ones my dad used to wear when I was a little kid.

Bert glanced at them. "So you found them, eh? Check it out. That's what you get when your mom goes and buys you non-refundable, clearance-priced glasses frames while you're off at school," he explained.

I opened the yellow arms and perched Bert's glasses on my own face. The view was instantly distorted and wobbly like I was looking out through a carnival mirror, not a windshield. "Bert, you are totally blind!"

He looked sideways and roared out a laugh at the sight of me wearing his enormous grandpa glasses. "Well, they still look better on you than they do on me," he grinned.

I scoffed. "How would you know? You can't even see me." I turned in my seatbelt. "Hold still," I warned as I slid the arms of the glasses behind his ears until the lenses properly covered his eyes.

Bert blinked, squinted, and then shuddered from behind his glasses. They were definitely dated but they looked better to me than a car crash. "It's too late to bother with that anyway," he said, flicking the glasses off his face. They landed on the floor somewhere. "We're already here."

He yanked on the steering wheel and veered into a gravel driveway that bent along an avenue of tall Manitoba maple trees. The old trees told the farm's story. This was a part of the country where the native vegetation was hundreds and hundreds of miles of grass, not trees at all. It was shocking for me on first moving here from the coast to realize that the land was flat and open not because someone had cleared and groomed it but because that's just what the earth looks like on the Great Plains in the centre of our continent. In this part of the land, trees only grow in river bottoms and where humans plant them. Some human must have been afoot planting trees along this gravel road years and years ago. Bert's home wasn't a new, modern factory farm. It was an old settler's farm that had been worked by Bert's tough, sunburnt family for generations. But there was no gambrel roofed red barn, no white picket fences set in pens around perfectly preened flocks of chickens, no quaint green meadows. This was a real, gritty, working family farm.

We drove past the little house flanked by long grass no one ever had time to mow. Finally, we lurched to a stop inside a vast, steel shed lit with hanging trouble lights and crowded with decades of tools and machinery.

Bert stepped out onto the dirt floor of the shed and wrinkled his nose. I didn't know then that farm kids are often self-conscious of the smell of their yards when they bring visitors home. The spring wind whistled and rattled through the arching steel walls. On the flat wall near the doors was a large cork board covered with 4-H emblems, award certificates, blue and red ribbons, and a photo of Bert holding the tether of a pretty, young calf. Apparently, he had been some kind of super-star in the local 4-H Beef Club.

"So we won't try anything too fancy on the car today," he said, pulling the lever to pop the latch on the hood. "Just an oil change. You must have helped you dad with those a hundred times before, eh?"

"My dad change his own oil?" I laughed. "Never."

"Your brother then?"

"Nope. Only you can teach me."

Bert shook his head and muttered something about townies. He zipped a set of dusty blue coveralls over his clothes. "Here." He tossed an identical coverall to me.

I caught it and held it up, expecting it to be much too long for me. To my surprise, it wasn't. "Why does it say 'Harm' on the front?" I asked, reading from the oval patch stitched below the right shoulder.

"Because Harm is my dad's name," Bert growled.

"Cool name. He must be pretty short though," I said as I pulled Harm's coveralls over my shoulders.

"Only because he had polio when he was a kid," Bert explained. "He spent Christmas in an iron lung when he was ten years old. But he hasn't lain down at all since then."

I couldn't tell if Bert was bragging or complaining.

He jerked his chin toward the back of the shed. "The grease pit's over there," he said. "I'll hop down into it and you can drive the car over me."

Of course, this proposition sounded shocking to me and the oil change had to be delayed while Bert explained there was a hole dug into the floor so people could get under a car to work on it without needing to use a hoist. Still, I was nervous as he ducked and waited for me to run over him. Once the car was in place – the wheels straddling the pit, the oil pan accessible – I sat in the dirt in Harm's coveralls and kept Bert company while he narrated what he was doing as if I'd remember it all later. I passed him wrenches and rags and waited while he sat underneath the car watching the dirty oil drain out of his engine.

"It's so cool out here, on your farm," I told him. "You're cool out here too – with your prize ribbons and tools and animals and this land. Where are all the animals anyway?"

"You don't want to see them," Bert called from underneath the car. "They reek."

"They just smell the way they're supposed to," I reasoned.

"That's true," he allowed. "But they're busy. So are we."

"Right. So, like I was saying, it's as if you're living a double life. There are two Huberts. There's Bert, who comes to work at his lame restaurant job in the city. And then there's Hu, who operates heavy machinery and bullies livestock out here. Like, I bet your family wouldn't even recognize you in a tacky uniform, wiping tables at TacoTown."

Bert looked up at the oil pan and started to talk. I heard his voice. But I couldn't understand anything he said.

"What the heck was that?" I asked.

"Dutch."

"You're bilingual? Why didn't you tell me? That's amazing!" I raved. "That takes having a double life to a whole new level. What did you say just now?"

"I said 'just like you,'" Bert translated. "You must have a double life too."

I startled. "What do you mean?"

"Well, sometimes you're Heather – the smart girl, newcomer, outcast in Upton. And then, at other times, you're Mack – Crystal's little friend, service industry labourer, and TacoTown hot-girl –"

"Bert!"

"Sorry, but it's true. And I bet those people in Upton would be shocked to know it," he said.

"Shocked is right. Look at me," I demanded. "There must be something wrong with the water at TacoTown. Who in their right mind would ever think of me as pretty?"

"It's not always prettiness that makes people attractive," Bert explained, impatiently, as if it should be obvious to me. By now, he was wrenching the cap back onto the bottom of the oil pan. "It's also how you behave and how you make people feel about themselves. Even with me, you make me feel like I really do want to quit smoking. But all of that's nothing compared to your effect on those other two."

I pulled my eyebrows together. "Which other two?"

"Can you go get the jugs of new oil out of the trunk? We should be ready to refill now. The trunk release lever's right inside the driver's door," was Bert's infuriating answer.

"Come on, Bert, I only count one guy with a crush on me at TacoTown." It was true even after I went over the teenaged members of the other evening crew. I'd worked with all of them a few times when the schedule got jumbled or someone's shift needed covering. There was Ian, the slick guy bound for business school next fall; Danny, the scruffy party-dude who always managed to be cheerful despite his chronic hangover; Guillaume, the French-speaking flirt from Quebec – they were all pleasant enough but it didn't make sense that any of them could have a crush on me.

Bert looked up at my confusion and laughed at it from underneath his car. "Whatever you say, Mack. I shouldn't have mentioned it. Now go get the oil – please."

I crossed my arms. "As if. You can consider yourself trapped under that car until you explain yourself."

Bert wasn't afraid. He leaned on his elbows at the edge of the grease pit in a leisurely, unhurried way and grinned up at me from ground level. "Go get the new oil. I'm going to have to wait here while it seeps all through the engine so we might as well get it started."

"No new oil for you until I get some clarification," I maintained.

"Fine," Bert agreed. "Darren likes you, of course. That's pathetically clear. But so does," he passed me one last wrench, "his twin brother."

I nearly dropped the wrench into the dirt. "That is ridiculous."

"My new oil?" Bert reminded me.

I opened the trunk and carried the jugs to the front of the car. "Look, Wayne used to hate me. Then he learned to tolerate me, and then he became my friend. It's a miracle we got that far. If it wasn't for Crystal, it never would have happened. There's no way our relationship could possibly go any further," I shouted to him through the machinery under the hood as I stood pouring the new oil into the engine.

"Oh, come on," Bert called back. "The whole I-hate-you-but-now-I-love-you relationship path is so common it's a cliché. You see it on TV all the time. Are you using the funnel?"

"What funnel?" I was already twisting open the second jug of oil. "And I wouldn't know anything about TV clichés. I don't have time to watch TV anymore," I said. "I don't suppose Wayne himself ever actually told you he liked me."

"Maybe not – but he doesn't need to," Bert insisted.

I wasn't convinced. All this talk about Wayne's imaginary crush on me was just Bert trying to amuse himself during a bit of routine car maintenance. Naturally, Wayne didn't think of me as a real girl at all but more like a member of his family – a kind of second string sister who was a lot easier to beat in an arm wrestle than his real sister.

When the last of the new oil was poured into the engine, I came back to sit by the space where I could see Bert's head beneath the car. "Well, it's a good thing you're Mormon so you won't be going out with either of them," he observed. "Drama like that might have been the end of their 'twin brother' days."

"Can we please talk about something else?" I pleaded. "Something rooted in reality, maybe? Like, tell me about the Beef Club."

"Mack, you wouldn't date either of them, right?"

"I'm going to go check the oil level. We've waited long enough now, right?"

"Mack?"

"Fine, Hubert, fine," I burst. "I won't date Darren. And I certainly won't date Wayne. I just won't date anyone. Are ya happy? I'll sit out there in the bleak half of my double life – in Upton – surrounded by all those Mormon boys who think they're too good for me–"

"Oh, come on," Bert interrupted. "I'm sure there's someone – at least one person – in Upton who you connect with."

I was about to scoff. I would have done it if a tiny barn swallow hadn't swooped out of the high, dark apex of the shed and soared out the open door. I watched the bird fly away, all alone, into the blue sky outside. It was about the same size as a parakeet. I gulped back the sadness that had suddenly risen in my throat – a feeling like I wanted something that didn't want me.

"Almost," I answered. "But not quite. And that's okay. I'm sure, in time, I'll come to terms with spending my life alone. Dipstick?" I said, thrusting the car's dipstick far enough into the grease pit for Bert to be able to read the oil level.

He nodded at it. "Don't be mad at me, Mack. And don't be sad either. You know that's not what I meant. I'm not trying to make you unhappy. I'm trying to help."

How can anyone stay mad at someone they've got trapped under a car?

I let myself smile at Bert. "I know. I know. And thanks, I guess. Now duck your head," I warned him, "and I'll roll this thing off of you."

***

I picked up a pair of latex gloves from the desk at the front of the laboratory and began to make my way to the bench under the large windows at the very back of the room. After weeks and weeks of classroom lecturing, it was finally time for my chemistry class to move into the lab.

"The usual lab seating plan, please," the chemistry teacher called out over the buzz of the classroom.

I stopped in my tracks. Usual? What the heck did he mean by that? Why didn't anyone ever bother to properly explain anything in this town? I stood looking lost between the rows of high stools long enough to hear someone whisper-calling, "Hey. Hey, MacLean."

I startled and spun around. No one in Upton ever called me by my surname alone. MacLean, Mack – had my two lives finally collided?

"Hey," the voice came again. "Heather. Hea-ther."

I found the source of it this time. It came from a pretty, brown-eyed girl already seated at a lab bench, gesturing at the empty stool beside her. Even though she'd been in my class all semester, I'd never spoken to her before. But my small-town collective consciousness was somehow well developed enough to know that her name was Tannis and she was supposed to be a shy girl.

"He means he wants us to sit in alphabetical order. It's how Mr. Henderson assigns lab partners every year," she explained as I approached her. "And my last name is Morgan so..."

"Oh, okay," I nodded. "Sure, that sounds right. This place still takes a little de-coding sometimes."

Tannis Morgan smiled at me. She didn't seem very shy to me as she nodded and said, "Yeah, no doubt."

Our lab assignment was to do some kind of crazy chemical titration, plying delicate instruments until the clear fluids in their glass tubes and vials changed colours. It was all rather fussy and our teacher made sure anxieties stayed high by regularly reminding everyone how much money we'd each owe the school board if we broke any of the expensive glassware. Tannis and I wound up dealing with the tension by laughing a lot.

"Everything all right there, Heather?" the chemistry teacher asked after one particularly loud outburst from our lab bench.

I hurried to assure him we were fine.

"You're getting me in trouble," Tannis snickered. "I never get in trouble. I kind of like it."

"You like it? What is the matter with you?"

Tannis shook her hair out of her face. "A million years ago these people here," she jerked her elbow outward, in the direction of our classmates, "they decided I was quiet and boring. And I'm sick of it."

"Well, I harbour no such preconceived notions about you," I said, carefully swirling fluid inside a volumetric flask.

She set down a plastic bottle of distilled water heavily against the tabletop. "You don't think I'm boring?"

"Dude, you just about stained my whole hand permanganate purple a minute ago. It was the most harrowing moment I've had all week."

Maybe it was all those chemicals or maybe there was just something special about Tannis but I came out of the lab with the distinct impression that we were getting along, as my grandmother would say, like a house on fire.

As we stepped out of the lab together, an announcement croaked out over the Upton High School public address system. The next block of classes was cancelled and in its place, a school-wide pep rally was about to begin in five minutes. I always interpreted those announcements as permission for me to excuse myself early from school.

"What? You can't leave now," Tannis protested as I moved toward an exit.

"Why not? I've been at this school for six months already and in that time I haven't set foot in a pep rally even once." I was totally bragging.

Tannis faked an exasperated sigh. "How are you ever going to learn to sing all the words to 'Sons of Upton' if you keep skipping all the pep rallies?"

"Somehow, that's just never bothered me," I laughed.

Outside the gymnasium, another girl had come to stand beside Tannis – a wide-eyed blonde girl who seemed to be trying not to look too alarmed that Tannis was talking to me.

"Tannis," she beckoned to her. "We're all heading inside the gym now so..."

Tannis turned her head toward the gym doors. "Okay. Save me a seat, Joelle." Tannis looked back to me. "Are you sure you're not coming?"

"Positive," I said. "Give the basketball team my fondest regards, will ya?"

I veered out of the crowd milling its way into the gymnasium and quietly opened the door of a little-used emergency exit beside the school's mechanical room. Outside, I tucked my chin into my chest, partly to preserve my anonymity from any stragglers left to look out the school's windows but mostly to protect my face from the high springtime wind blasting at me over the yellow football field.

The wind broke a little as I crossed the street and passed into the blocks full of old poplar trees, split level houses, and saggy backyard trampolines. It wasn't until I reached the quiet of this scruffy windbreak that I heard a voice calling behind me.

It was Ben Jones. I stopped and waited for him to catch up, tossing my head until I found the angle where the wind would blow my hair out of my face and straight behind me, like a tattered flag.

"Heather MacLean – you must have a very important appointment to be leaving school right before an Upton Rockets' pep rally gets underway." Ben Jones grinned, even though he knew I had no excuse for leaving school except a chronically bad attitude.

I laughed. "Not exactly. What about you? It's not like you to miss a chance to pay tribute to our oh-so deserving high school basketball team."

Ben Jones snickered. "No, but I do have an appointment, actually. I'm going to the optometrist. See?" he showed me the note, written in his mom's neat, feminine handwriting, instructing the principal to please excuse Ben Jones for the rest of the afternoon.

I pulled the note out of his hand in mock awe. "Wow, a legitimate excused absence," I raved. "I've heard legends about these."

"Do you seriously skip a lot of school?" Ben Jones asked, taking back his mother's precious note and folding it into his pocket.

I shrugged. "I guess I do. But it's mostly just so I can get my homework done. It's hard to find time for schoolwork in the evenings, what with my job and church and my dad being away at border security training school and all that. The principal's pretty good about just looking the other way."

Ben Jones smirked. "Well, it's not like they can make one of those grave phone calls to your parents to complain truancy is hurting your grades – jeopardizing your bright future, etcetera."

I shrugged again, remembering what Tawny had told me in the back of the grain truck at the beginning of the school year about the prospect of mayhem if an outsider new girl became the valedictorian of Upton High School. "I'm not sure anyone would mind if my grades started to slide."

Ben Jones looked straight ahead, down the length of the cracked concrete sidewalk. "Tawny must have been a good tutor if you got your math mark up so fast. Now you're a threat to her academic supremacy in your class. Is that irony?"

"It might have been if I'd let Tawny help me," I said. "But I got caught up on my own."

He raised his eyebrows. "Impressive."

I didn't want Ben Jones to think Jeff was stupid for needing his help when I didn't need Tawny's. I quickly added, "Of course, it's totally different for Jeff. I hear eleventh grade math just isn't as tough as it gets in the twelfth grade. It's great, what you're doing for him."

Ben Jones shook his head. "At this point, Jeff helps me every bit as much as I help him. He's really bright. And it's been good getting to know him – the both of you, really. Sometimes, I feel like I know you guys better after seven months than I know some of the people I've gone to school with my whole life."

"Aw, thanks," I said. "You too." I didn't drop my eyes from his face right away. I felt the same small, internal tremor that always shook me when he said things like that. It was really too bad Ben Jones was so far out of my league.

He cleared his throat. "So, since we're friends and everything – I hope you don't mind if I talk to you about something personal."

"Sounds ominous," I said.

Even with the wind in my ears, I heard him swallow. "Well, Jeff says some of the guys you work with are kind of..."

"Trying to date me?" I finished.

"Yeah," Jones said, squirming inside his jacket. "Just like I told you they would, months ago."

I remembered him saying it now. It was in our basement, the morning before Crystal came to visit me in Upton for the first time. I nodded my head.

"Now," Ben Jones continued, "clearly, I don't know anything at all about teenaged romance –" He was embarrassing both of us and I groaned and rolled my eyes. "– But I do know about people, and good and evil, and what might really be at work here."

"A-ha," I said. "So someone is finally going to explain to me why after a lifetime of grossing boys out I'm suddenly getting some male attention at TacoTown?"

"If you're interested," he stammered.

I rolled my eyes again. "Sure. Let me have it."

"Well, first off," Ben Jones began, "never underestimate the power of long blonde hair."

I knew he was just trying to smooth over the awkward start of the conversation with a little flattery. But I didn't like feeling out of harmony with the only real friend I had in Upton so I played along and restricted my protest to simply coughing out a harsh little laugh. "Hair? Seriously?"

He nodded. "Definitely."

"That's just stupid," I insisted.

Ben Jones shrugged and reached out to catch a finger-full of my flying, windblown hair as it streamed behind me. "Maybe so," he allowed as he tried unsuccessfully to tuck the strands behind my ear before snatching his hand away and burying it in his pocket.

"Secondly..." I prompted, smoothing back my hair myself.

"Secondly, you're a toucher – as in, you touch people, like, with your hands. Most everyone in Upton is a toucher. I think it comes from living in big, affectionate families with lots of little kids in them. Thanks to that, I'll bet we're used to getting more incidental physical contact during a day than most other people," he explained. "A casual touch might not mean as much to you as it would to someone with a different kind of family life."

It was an interesting observation. "Hmm," I said. "Yeah, most of these non-member guys at work, they have small families and fathers they haven't seen since they were toddlers. One of them is even an only child."

Ben Jones picked up the thread. "Right. A guy like that could conceivably go for days without ever touching another person. Can you imagine what that must be like?"

I shivered a little, taking in a realization about a part of Darren's life I'd never considered before. "Sad," I agreed. "Is that it?"

"No, the biggest reason for all the attention is this," Ben Jones stopped walking and turned to face me on the sidewalk as if he didn't even care if Sister Lowe might be looking out her window to watch us. The wind rushed past, racing toward the east, tossing the bare poplar boughs over our heads. The air was moving and alive and I knew I was about to see the heavens open and watch something reveal itself. But all I saw was Ben Jones's face and all I heard was his voice.

"You are good," he said, clearly and firmly. "And all of creation craves goodness." He glanced up at Sister Lowe's picture window and started walking again. "I think it's especially true for young people, whether they understand that about themselves or not."

"Goodness," I echoed.

"You're clean," Ben Jones continued. "Your language is clean. You try to be kind to people. And most of all, you have the right spirit about you. The people you work with can feel that, even if they can't say what it is they feel. Naturally, they want to feel it all the time. And when they don't know how to get it, they can confuse that longing with wanting something else, something they can see and touch like —"

"—Me." It was all ringing true. That explained it: a simple case of mistaken identity. "You know, it always bothered me," I began, "when I'd hear people imply that people outside the Church try to date us because they're on some kind of evil anti-mission to lure us away from the right path. I mean, there may be some of that going on but you're saying –"

"That they're not attracted to you because they're bad, but because they're basically good," he finished.

I smiled into the wind. "That's great," I said. "But then again, it's not. What the heck am I supposed to do to protect myself from this noble but misguided search for goodness? Should I cut off my hair, keep my hands in my pockets, start swearing my face off?"

It was a glib question but Ben Jones wasn't smiling. "Of course I don't mean for you to downplay your best qualities. You know that's not the answer." He stopped on the sidewalk again. We were shaded from the windows of the house beside us by another one of Upton's huge caragana hedges. It's one of the few types of hedges strong enough to live through the town's horrible cycles of cold and drought without much fuss. Even without its leaves, no one could see us through the hardy hedge and maybe that's why Ben Jones risked reaching out and taking hold of my sleeve.

At the touch, I looked up at him. In the hard spring light his pale face was lit up above me, the freckles on his nose and cheeks glowing like faint, golden constellations beneath the rims of his glasses. And I realized what none of the other Upton girls might ever know. Ben Jones was beautiful – in a sublime way that had so much more power to it than what could be seen in his physical features. He was beautiful – too beautiful, of course, to ever want someone like me. I had to look away.

"Heather," he said, his fingers still clasped around the fabric of my sleeve. "All I really mean to say is – don't give in."

***

"Heather."

I didn't even look up when I heard the name. I was at TacoTown, two-thirds through a Tuesday night shift, wiping tables in the dining room. It was a place where no one would have ever called me anything but 'Mack.' And anyway, people named Heather don't have the typical reflexive response to the sound of their own, ultra-common name. It's used to refer to far too many other girls.

"Heather." The name came again but this time I recognized the voice and raised my head, alarmed. It was Jeff. He was stomping across the dining room wearing his Pizza Paradise visor along with a red apron, dusty with white flour underneath his jean jacket. Somehow, I knew when I saw him here like this that it was time to be afraid.

"What's wrong?" I said.

"Carrie – she just called an ambulance to the house to come take Mum to the hospital." He took hold of my wrist. "We've got to get back to Upton. Right now."

"Crystal!" I called across the empty restaurant.

"Yeah?"

"I have to go," I said as Jeff towed me toward the exit. "My mom just went into the hospital. Tell Wayne I'm sorry to run out before my shift is over but..."

Crystal came sprinting out to the parking lot with my duffle bag as Jeff was turning on the ignition. I opened the door to take it from her. "Thanks," I said. "And sorry."

She waved her hand. "Don't worry about us. Good luck with your mom."

We were on the highway, Jeff sweating behind the steering wheel. We drove faster than we'd ever travelled on that road before. Jeff told me what he knew about Mum's crisis. "Carrie heard a crash upstairs and she found Mum lying on the floor in her bedroom, all buried in the clean laundry she'd been carrying. She was still awake but she was barely able to talk."

I covered my mouth with my hand and spoke from behind it. "Why? What's wrong with her? She was fine when we left."

He shifted in the driver's seat. "Carrie said they figure it's some kind of a woman thing – a bleeding thing. No one wants to talk to me about it."

Minutes later we were trotting past the silk plant arboretum inside the Upton Hospital foyer. Jeff leaned over the admissions desk and told the clerk Mum's name. "She came by ambulance," he added.

The clerk nodded. "Looks like she's still in surgery," she told us.

We both gasped.

"Have you kids got a father?" the clerk continued.

"Not for thousands of miles," Jeff moaned.

I jabbed Jeff with my elbow and pushed past him, leaning over the admissions desk myself. "He means, our dad's away on business right now."

"Right," the clerk nodded into her computer screen. "That makes you guys next of kin, for now. We'll have the doctor come see you when he's done with your mom. Are either of you eighteen yet?"

Jeff waved his hand.

"He is," I interpreted.

The clerk waved us to a pay phone on the other side of the foyer. I didn't know who to call. Until I got home and rummaged through Mum's purse to find the phone number for Dad's dorm in Quebec, there was no one to report to. I called my grandparents' house anyway. Carrie was still awake but she'd got all the little kids to bed. She sounded vaguely comforted to hear we were at the hospital with Mum but a little anxious about not being there herself. I promised to call her again when we knew what had gone wrong. I'd wait until I had the whole story before telling Carrie about the surgery.

Jeff sat slumped in a vinyl covered chair along a wall painted in what was meant to be a soothing shade of pink. It just looked like bare skin to me. I closed my eyes, slouched over in my own chair, and waited.

"It's the MacLean kids," a voice sang out in the hospital corridor.

I flung my eyes open and there was Brother Timms from church, known here in the hospital as Dr. Timms.

Jeff was on his feet. "Can we see Mum?"

"Sure, she's still a little groggy but well enough to chat."

"I need to know what she's doing here," I said.

"Right," the doctor smiled. "She'd developed fibroid tumours inside her uterus. They're not uncommon and they're usually not a problem. But sometimes they can cause excessive bleeding, like they did with your mom."

"Tumours?" Jeff repeated. "Like – cancer?"

"Oh no," Dr. Timms boomed. "No, not like cancer at all. They're usually harmless on their own – especially for women not trying to have kids anymore. But the bleeding can become unmanageable, like it did in your mom's case. There's nothing to worry about anymore, though. We got them all removed when we did an emergency hysterectomy just now – that's when we take out, uh –"

"Her uterus," I finished.

"Exactly," he smiled again. "She's recovering nicely but we did have to top up her blood supply. She lost quite a bit of blood while she tried to just wait it out."

"Top it up? You mean you gave her a blood transfusion?" Jeff asked.

"Not a big one," Dr. Timms assured him.

"But – you didn't even ask any of us for our blood," Jeff stammered.

Dr. Timms pounded him affectionately on the back. "Well, no. Even with a rare type like your mom's, we don't usually have to approach family members about donation. That mostly just happens in the movies."

Jeff hung his head. I couldn't tell if he was relieved or disappointed.

"Come see your mom," Dr. Timms commanded. "You'll feel better once you talk to her. She's still weak and heavily medicated but she's just fine."

We found the hallway of the hospital's only acute care unit. The door to Mum's room was open and she lay dozing on the bed under a stiff, yellow sheet. "Mum?" I said softly, moving toward the bedside.

"Kids," she said. Her voice was quiet and woolly. "My two big kids. I just gave up my uterus. But I got some pretty good mileage out of it, didn't I?" She drawled through the drugs as she reached for Jeff's hand. "Look at all the nice people it made for me."

I glanced up at the bags – one full of clear fluid and the other swollen with deep red blood – hanging from a wheeled pole at her side. The bags drained through long, thin tubing into her white arm.

"Has anyone talked to Dad yet?" I wanted to know.

"Oh sure," she said. "He's worried, of course. But he trusts you two and he told me he was glad to know the family was in such good hands while he's gone and I'm sick." She gathered up my hand and piled it on top of Jeff's. "We never would have asked for this – the whole terrible year we've had – but we agree that it's making our kids into great people. Still," she paused, "I'm really sorry about all this, you guys. So is Dad."

"We know, Mum," I rasped. "Carrie has all the kids in bed at home. Everything's under control. Don't worry about us."

She closed her eyes with a slow smile. Jeff pulled his hands away from her. "Get some sleep, Mum," he said even though she already appeared to be drifting off without any coaching from him.

We drove home to where Carrie sat glassy eyed in front of a late night television talk show. I followed her to her room and sat on the edge of her bed while she told her part of the story.

"I've never called 9-1-1 before," she rushed. "It was just like on TV – one of those lady operators asking 'Police, fire, ambulance.'" Carrie wanted a medical career someday and she'd been intrigued by the professional side of Mum's 'rescue.' It was actually a brilliant coping strategy for not being overcome by the personal side of it. "I tried to roll her into recovery position while the ambulance was on its way but she was awake enough to tell me she didn't need it. I kept an eye on her though. Her pulse felt scary weak." This was where Carrie had to pause to clear away the lump in her throat.

I rubbed her shoulder. "It sounds like you handled yourself really well."

Carrie nodded. "Yeah, I guess I did. But I hope I never need to call an ambulance to my own house ever again." She swallowed noisily again. "You should have seen her, lying there, white as a ghost. It was totally awful. I tried my best to keep the other kids from seeing her like that but –"

It was beautiful that she was so concerned about the little kids. Last summer's move had changed everything about Carrie's life too. It was something I didn't remember nearly often enough. She may not have had to take on financial burdens, like Jeff and I had done. But Carrie had become inordinately responsible for the house and the younger kids who needed someone to take care of them while the rest of us worked.

When she and Jeff were both in their own beds, I let myself into Mum and Dad's bedroom. It wasn't a tiny cubicle like the rest of the sleeping quarters in the house, but a real master bedroom finished in a way that would have been luxurious in the 1960s, when the house was newly built. I scanned the room in the lamplight and noticed that Mum had been sure to make their bed that morning. She'd used her usual, meticulous tucks and folds even though she'd been secretly bleeding almost to death all the while.

It didn't seem right to crawl into the perfectly made bed so I sat down on the floor beside it, facing the small cabinet where my parents kept their CD player. Most of their CDs were unlistenable, in my opinion. But I found what I was looking for in a dark yellow case inscribed with ornate, brown lettering – 1970s vintage lettering. At that moment, I wanted to see my Dad more than anything else in the whole world. But it was two o'clock in the morning two time zones away, where he was – not that he'd be sleeping tonight. He was a fretful person, like me – the kind who stays awake worrying in the darkness, getting angrier and angrier at himself for not being able to relax and fall asleep. And I still hadn't found the number for the communal phone he shared with the whole floor of his dormitory at the government security training college.

Instead of talking to him, I slid my favourite of all my dad's CDs into the player. The record was made the year before I was born. But somehow, it spoke to me and to my dad in exactly the same way. I sat with my knees pulled up to my eye level, my back against the side of the bed, and listened while the old man sang about promises and changes of plans. I mouthed the words along with him as I bent my neck forward until my head rested on the caps of my knees. And finally, I cried.

I woke up in the morning on top of the covers on my parents' bed, wrapped in my mom's bathrobe instead of a blanket. I stood up, smoothed out the wrinkles in the bedspread, and headed into the hallway. It was Wednesday, a school day, so I roused the other kids. I explained that Mum was safe and happy but not strong enough to come home right away. There was a chorus of tortured little moans but the girls still let me launch them into their normal routines. Somehow, we all knew it was the very best way to cope.

I caught Jeff just as he was opening the garage door to leave me to send the little kids off the school on my own. "I'm going over to the hospital, to see how her night was," he said.

"You're missing your morning classes?" I raised my eyebrows. Jeff did not share my weakness for skipping school so this was an unusual choice for him.

"Jones'll cover for me," was all he said as the car door closed behind him. I stood in the dimness of the garage for a moment, wishing I had a Ben Jones of my own waiting to cover for me on a morning like this one.

I was making my way around the breakfast table pouring milk into cereal bowls when a particularly jaunty knock sounded at the front door – almost like music.

"Well, it's Miss Heather," Sister Giles said as the sticky wooden front door jerked open. "Just the girl I wanted to give my emergency lasagna." She sailed into the house with a large foil pan and carried it right up the stairs to the kitchen full of bleary-eyed, functionally orphaned children. "Just leave it defrosting in the fridge until after school and bake it for an hour at four hundred degrees."

I smiled as I thanked her – a warm, genuine, grateful smile.

"It's my great pleasure," she beamed. "And I'm glad to hear your mom's going to be all right. What terrific kids you all are to take such good care of each other while she's away."

I didn't even think to wonder how she already knew about Mum's problems. Sister Giles worked the room, circulating through the ranks of my gloomy younger sisters, smoothing their hair and squeezing their shoulders, cajoling them into good spirits in spite of everything. And she did it all, thankfully, without any singing.

"If anything else comes up, Miss Heather," she said, treading down the stairs toward the door, "Sister Giles is always ready to pounce. Remember that."

She bustled out of the house just as cheerily as she had come in. The girls at the breakfast table ate a little more heartily. I stepped back up to the kitchen counter and resumed packing all those bag lunches, trying to remember which of the kids liked their sandwiches cut in rectangles and which would only eat triangles.

I was the last member of the family to leave the house that morning, pulling the door closed behind me without locking it, of course. When I turned to step away from the front step, I nearly walked face-first into the bony chest of a very tall boy.

"Darren!" I staggered backward.

He grabbed my arms both to steady me and to detain me as he apologized. "Sorry. I didn't mean to scare you," he said.

"Well, for future reference, stalking behaviour is always scary," I ranted, shaking off his hold. "Why are you lurking in my grandparents' juniper bushes this early in the morning? Aren't you supposed to be at school in another town right now?"

"Yeah, but you left this at work last night," he said, holding out my blue canvas wallet. "I thought you might need it, especially if you were in the middle of a family emergency, or whatever."

I took my wallet from him. "Thanks." I had noticed that I'd need to buy more milk before tomorrow's breakfast. "You're right, I do need it and I wouldn't have been able to come to town tonight to get it myself."

He seemed pleased and took a step toward me, closing a hand around each of my arms again. "I want to help you. I like to help you. Let me help you."

I looked at our feet. "We're pretty self-sufficient here – Jeff and Carrie and me. And someone already brought us something to eat for dinner tonight." I raised my wallet. "But thanks for this. See? You already helped me."

"How's your mom doing, anyway?" Darren asked. He had turned me around, facing the street, and draped his arm across my shoulders. I let myself be pushed along the front lawn, toward his car.

"Oh," I choked. "She had some surgery and a blood transfusion last night and she's going to be fine in a few days."

"Well, that's good. Now let me drive you to school."

"Seriously? The school's just over there. I can see it from our back porch," I protested, stepping out from underneath his arm.

"Then I'll walk there with you."

"So you'll be even later getting to your own school?"

"I don't care about that. I care about making sure you're okay."

I sighed. "Fine. You can drive me to school."

We drove around the long town block, past the seniors' lodge and the Seminary building. "Stop here," I said as we reached the edge of the Upton Rockets' football field.

Darren stepped on the brake. "You want me to stop way back here."

"Yeah."

Darren gave an unhappy laughed. "You're ashamed of being seen with me in front of the Upton people. Nice."

I sighed hard. "That's not it at all," I said. "I'm facing a day full of questions about my mom's health crisis already. I'm tired and I'm bummed out and I don't think I could stand it if I had to answer a bunch more questions about the strange guy who dropped me off at school this morning."

"They wouldn't even notice –"

"They _would_. They notice _everything_ that deviates from their little script. And when they can't find an explanation they like they just make something up." I was starting to yell a little bit.

"Okay, okay." Darren was finally trying to placate me. "It's not like I came here to make you mad."

I held the bridge of my nose between my fingers. "I'm sorry, Darren. I'm not mad at you. I know you're just trying to be sweet. But I'm late. I have to go."

Darren leaned across my lap and opened the passenger door. "Fine. Go ahead. But remember I'm just waiting for you to think of something else I can do for you."

I stepped out of the car and headed across the football field. I knew I needed to hurry but I couldn't bring myself to run the rest of the way to school. I remembered the bag of blood hanging over Mum's bedside and wondered if maybe it had been mine after all. We had the same blood type – B negative. It looks just like everyone' else's but they say it's rare anyways. And I was so tired this morning I felt a little like I'd been secretly drained dry during the night.

As I walked, my mind turned to something we did need that I couldn't get done on my own. We needed someone from church to give a healing blessing to my mom. But, as things currently stood, that someone could definitely not be Darren. I'd have to talk to Jeff about it. He knew who to talk to at church to get that kind of thing done better than I did.

The Upton High School hallways were almost empty by the time I got inside. But still, a boy I hardly knew was hovering around my locker. He paced the width of the hall in a black, wool trench coat, his long bangs hanging low over one of his ironically shiny blue, son-of-the-pioneers eyes. He was one of those boys who worked hard at being serious and gloomy. That was all I knew about him – that and the fact that his name was Aaron.

"Heather MacLean, how are you?" Aaron asked more seriously than anyone had ever asked me that kind of question before.

"Pretty tired, actually," I answered. What did he want from me? Had I finally become tragic enough to imprint on the histrionic, contrived darkness of his consciousness?

Aaron nodded behind his bangs. He looked both ways down the school corridor before he bent his mouth close to my ear – close enough that I could sense his smell. If I hadn't been so tired, I might have jumped away. I might not have heard him whisper, "Look, the Bishop called our place this morning to tell my dad – to ask him, us – to ask us to tell you to let your mom know we'll be at the hospital at six o'clock tonight to give her a blessing. Okay?"

I bowed my head and nodded into my locker. It was the only response I could make. If I tried to use my voice to answer him, I knew I would start sobbing – right there in the hallway of my high school. In my mind, I repented for thinking so little of Aaron's character when I first saw him waiting for me. It was exactly the kind of prejudice I usually assumed people were levelling at me – and it couldn't have been more wrong. It was the light in Aaron – not the darkness – that had moved him to reach out to me. My shoulders started to shake.

I worried I might be embarrassing Aaron with my poorly controlled emotions. But when he reached down and lightly squeezed one of my shoulders with his thin, white hand, I knew he understood and he forgave me. His own voice was husky as he told me, "It's going to be okay."

I nodded again, fiercely. If he said one more word I would certainly be crying. Aaron spun away from me, his long coat swirling around him, and stomped down the hallway. As he headed one way, I went the other, feeling for the doors leading to the outside of the building. I gave up on getting to my first class on time. Instead, I sat down on the base of a bike rack in the sunshine, wiping my eyes, and breathing deeply. My feelings were out of control as I tried not to be so overwhelmed by the love I felt – high, holy love for a heaven that saw me and knew me and stooped to respond to my needs.

The door of the school was creaking open. At the sound, I ducked my head so my hair fell in curtains on either side of my face, hiding my teary, streaky complexion from whoever was coming outside. A pair of Doc Marten shoes stepped out the door and stopped on the concrete right in front of me.

"Hey," a voice said from high above the black shoes. It was Ben Jones.

"How did you know I was here?" I asked the shoes.

"My whole physics class knows you're here. They're all sitting right inside that window." He gestured behind himself.

I glanced up long enough to see the rows of pained faces gawking their sympathy at me from their desks behind the dusty glass pane. "Dang," I moaned.

"Come on." Ben Jones held out his hand. "Let's see if Jeff's here yet so he can take you home."

I looked up at the clean, pale hand he offered me. "Jeff's not coming to school this morning. He's at the hospital with Mum."

Ben Jones crouched down in front of me, shielding me from the view of the physics class. "Then I'll take you home."

"Thanks." My voice was hardly a whisper. He was going to see my teary face eventually so I turned it toward him and tried to laugh off my crying. "Look at me, Jones. Isn't it awful? I get all red and splotchy whenever I cry."

He frowned. "Not this time. You're not red at all. You're white – really, really white. Did you eat anything yet today?"

My thoughts came slowly as I tried to remember. Maybe I'd been so busy making breakfast and packing lunches for the younger kids this morning that I'd forgotten about myself. "I guess I never did get around to eating."

Ben Jones held out his hand again. "Your blood sugar is probably super low by now. We really need to get you home. Let's go inside and get your books."

I put my hand in his as I rose to stand beside him. My nerves had barely registered how thin and cold his fingers were before he'd already let go of me. Even though my fingers couldn't snatch at him and force him to hold onto me, I could fix my eyes on the back of his head. Everything around him seemed to turn with exaggerated slowness as he moved to open the door of the school for us. The entrance was actually a wheelchair ramp with a handrail running alongside it, bolted at waist level to the school's brick wall. I walked behind Ben Jones, gripping the railing with one hand, then with both hands. I was moving forward slowly, toward the point where the railing ended as it met the open door. My mind was unmoored – drifting – and I knew I could only keep moving as long as I could he him walking in front of me and feel the railing between my hands. Once I reached the end, I'd have to somehow make the leap across the gap between the railing on the wall and the handle on the door. Here was the end of the railing now. I reached out – but not far enough. The bricks, the concrete, the sunlight, the neat brown hair on the nape of Ben Jones's neck in front of me – it was all dissolving into blackness, somewhere at the backs of my eyes.

"Letting go," I think I said before the darkness closed over me.

A voice called back, faraway and muffled but alarmed. I thought I heard it say something to me – a word – was it "parakeet?" And then there was nothing – a few dim, quiet seconds of nothing.

But the world flowed right back in after its ebb, returning my senses with it. There were waves of jumbled voices in my ears before my vision lit up again and I saw that I was no longer standing but sitting on the concrete, leaning against Ben Jones's outstretched arm. My eyes fixed dazedly on the knees of everyone in the twelfth grade physics class who'd come running outside to see if I had dropped dead.

"Aw man," I said. "I didn't just pass out, did I?"

"Yeah, you sure did. But try not to worry about it," Ben Jones said, still holding me tightly. "And don't try to stand up yet," he added, pulling me back as I moved to clamber to my feet. I suppose it made good first aider sense for me not to stay sitting. But my urge to get off the ground and out of sight couldn't have been any stronger.

Someone set a plastic chair down next to me and I used both my hands to climb onto it. "Thanks," I murmured though I didn't know who I should be thanking for it.

The physics teacher crouched in front of me, filling my field of vision. "Are you okay now?" he asked much too loudly.

I nodded. "I'll be fine."

He returned my nod and stood up. "You're sure you've got everything under control here, Ben?" he asked as he started to herd his class back inside the school.

"Yeah, I'll take her home," he answered. "Heather's a good friend of mine."

"Well, don't let her stand up until I send someone down from the office with some juice for her to drink," the teacher said before he left us.

Ben Jones crouched in front of me as we waited, leaning on the edge of my chair. He tried to look relaxed and friendly but he was probably spotting me in case I started to topple over again.

"I fainted – in public," I slurred. "It was not a great moment in Feminism, was it Jones?"

He laughed. "It happens to everyone eventually – men and women, right?" he said, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. "In the next few days you'll be inundated with everyone else's story about when and where they were when they fainted."

"So what's your fainting story?" I asked.

He shrugged. "I'm still waiting for mine to unfold, I guess." He began to raise his glasses back over his eyes.

Everything was still a little cloudy and slow for me. Maybe that's why I was surprised to see my own hand holding back Ben Jones's arm, keeping his glasses off his face for a moment more.

"You are the very best one," I heard my slow, cottony voice telling him. My hand let go of his arm and came up to hold his chin between my thumb and fingers. I wasn't trying to look deeply into his eyes – not this time. Instead, I was turning his head from side to side as I squinted at him. "There's not a single dragon scale on you, is there?"

Ben Jones's cold fingers curled around against my wrist. "Heather?"

"No. That's not what you call me," I said. "You call me Parakeet. Remember? And you don't bring me gold. And your eyes are nothing like Johnny Depp's. But you're still the best one."

The door opened behind him and the school secretary stepped outside with a tiny box of apple juice for me to drink. She seemed to startle a little at the sight of Ben Jones with my hand instead of his glasses on his face. He shook his chin free and quickly propped his glasses onto his nose.

"No, I'm not the best one," Ben Jones corrected me. "Mrs. Sharpton is the best one. Look, she brought you some juice."

***

Mum was out of the Upton hospital and back at home in just a few days. Jeff left school early to pick her up and bring her home to sit – still white and wan – on the living room sofa. We had to explain to little Ashley, over and over again, that she must not climb on top of Mum before her incision healed. In another week, we didn't need any more casseroles from church ladies. Mom was ready to go back to work at the college. In truth, the college offices were quieter places to spend a day recuperating than our noisy, busy household was anyway.

Despite her recovery, I still didn't want Mum to have to worry about my fainting spell. I knew it wasn't rooted in an ongoing, serious health problem so I was content to let it fade naturally out of town gossip. Ben Jones had already bullied me into seeing Dr. Timms about it. The doctor diagnosed my faint as a plain old stress reaction – a little low blood sugar, a little low blood pressure, a lot of stress, and no cause for great alarm. And all the while, Mum stayed at home, getting well, and never hearing anything about it.

Even after she went back to work, it took several more weeks before I could see Mum moving around the house, taking care of everyone and everything, without being hit with pangs of gratitude and relief that she was well enough to be with us again. And in one more month, Dad would be back at home too. He'd have a shiny, brass border guard badge and a brand new, promising career to go with it.

By the time Mum was settled back at home, I was tired of being the half of my and Crystal's friendship that was in crisis. It might sound mean but I was perfectly ready for a change when Crystal leapt into an emotional upheaval of her own. While I was stuck in Upton doing my share of taking care of my parents' family, Crystal got caught up in her high school's spring fever and found herself a boyfriend. His name was Dan – a tall, lean, volleyball star from the twelfth grade. I never would have chosen him for her myself but I guess he spoke to Crystal's athletic side. It was a part of her personality I admired and cheered, but couldn't quite meet on its own terms.

"Dan's perfect for us," I told her. "He's so different from me he doesn't compete with me at all."

Unfortunately, Dan didn't agree with my ideas about their suitability for each other for very long. Two weeks after they started dating, he left Crystal for the assistant captain of the girls' volleyball team. Crystal was devastated, of course. And I was furious.

"You can't just sit here feeling bad about it," I said, pacing on the rug in her room while she sat on the bed with her face buried in Taffy's furry coat. "That's no way to get over this."

I lunged at her CD player where a Swedish lady was singing about how something was "over no-o-ow." I pecked frantically at its power button. "For heck sake, Crystal, let's listen to something else."

"Sorry. Do you think I'm depressed?" she asked. "Do I need to go to the doctor?"

"No. As if. Depression is for people who are moping around for no reason. This is just sadness – a normal reaction to something bad that happened to you. If having your boyfriend cheat on you didn't make you sad, I'd be worried about you being some kind of sociopath. No, you're healthy but sad."

"Oh. Okay," Crystal sighed. "Thanks, I guess."

"Still, we need to get up and shake this off," I persisted.

"That's what Tina and Lauren said too," Crystal moaned into the cat.

"Really?" I was surprised to hear good advice coming from Tina and Lauren. They were Crystal's 'friends' during the day, at school while I was busy in Upton. They were kind of like an evil version of what Tawny and Melanie were to me. They kept Crystal in their social circle because she served some vague and poorly understood function – but they never actually liked her and she really didn't like them either. But unlike Tawny and Melanie, these two girls were often cruel. I couldn't help bracing for the worst as I asked, "So what did they suggest?"

Crystal hummed, unsure of whether to tell me their advice. "They said I should give Tina's older brother twenty bucks this weekend and send him to buy us all some beer."

I scoffed. "That would just make things worse."

"How would you know, Mack? You talk like you know all about it but you've ever even tasted–"

"Here's what we'll do," I interrupted. "I've got a different approach–"

"Let me guess." She was interrupting me now. "Upton style?"

I beamed at her. "That's it exactly. Get your coat."

A minute later we were out in the street. It was dark but still warm enough for us to get to Dan's house on foot.

"We need to stop here," I said, as we came to a drugstore. I pushed Crystal through the doors in front of me. "It's a good thing we don't need to show ID to buy supplies for this."

We left the store with the necessary gear and crept through the city like criminals, inching along the leafless hedges and sprinting through crosswalks, trying not to be seen. Behind a blue spruce tree on the other side of the quiet street where Dan lived, we crouched in the shadows and made our final plans.

"Here's your half," Crystal said, shoving an armful of small, soft cylinders at me.

"Two-ply?" I asked, aghast. "Why did you waste your money buying two-ply for this?"

"I've never done this before. How should I know what I'm supposed to use for it?" she whisper-yelled at me.

"Oh, never mind. It'll still work." I was trying to soothe her. "We're fine. So which one is his car?"

"The awful one." Crystal pointed to a dingy, old economy car parked beside the curb across the street. We couldn't see any lights lit up in the house behind it.

"Looks good," I said. "Are you ready?"

Crystal nodded.

"Go."

We dashed across the street, bent over at our waists. There was a flurry of white activity around Dan's car before we ran back to the spruce tree. We fell onto the lawn underneath it, laughing as quietly as we could.

"Aw, I wish I'd brought a camera," Crystal said, wiping her eyes.

We sat a moment longer, peering across the pavement to where Dan's car sat tangled from bumper to bumper in two-ply toilet paper like a ratty, mechanical mummy.

"That's enough of admiring it," I whispered. "We should go before someone comes."

Crystal's courage seemed to waver. "Do you think he'll know it was me?"

I shrugged. "Does it matter? If he bugs you about it, just tell him some crazy person from Upton did it. But he shouldn't say anything. He knows he deserves –"

Before I could finish, Crystal had seized my arm, her fingers bent into the form of a claw. Across the street, a porch light had just been turned on, throwing an incriminating yellow glow over up the mummified car. Through the screen door we could hear the knob of the inner door clicking and twisting.

Crystal was already on her feet, running. She didn't head down the street, where we would be seen, but sprinted into the backyard of the stranger's house behind us. The small yard was hemmed with a low fence that Crystal vaulted over almost without a pause. It took me a little longer but I managed to clear the fence without Crystal needing to drag me over the tops of the pointy pickets.

We ran at full speed down an alleyway and along the street for two blocks before we let up and stood panting on a corner, waiting for the traffic light to change.

"Do you think we made it?" I puffed.

Crystal nodded. "Yeah. Sorry about the fence. I wasn't sure you were going to be able to make it."

I panted a laugh. "It was close, all right. You almost had to abandon me there."

That was when she put her arm around my shoulders and tipped me off the ground in a rough, sideways hug. She said, "Never."

***

That spring didn't get any better for Crystal. Just as things started to even out between me and my parents, everything went sideways between Crystal and hers.

"Mack?" her voice quavered over the phone line one night.

"What is it?" I was instantly alarmed.

"My dad," Crystal began. "He's not dead after all."

I gasped. "You heard from him?"

"Yeah. He sent my mom a bunch of money. And he sent me a letter – and one for Wayne too."

I waited. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah. I think I am." Her voice was firming up, losing its quaver.

"Do you need me to come into the city – so we can talk about it properly?" I offered.

She cleared her throat on the other end of the line. "I guess not," she said. "Not today, anyway. There isn't much to say, really. It was just a letter. He didn't ask to meet me or anything and he's still gone and –"

"Gone is gone." I finished her favourite adage for her.

"Exactly," she yawned. I didn't know at the time that yawning can be a sign of stress.

"Sure. But if you change your mind and want to talk about it, call me whenever you want," I said.

"Okay."

"Wait!" I yelled into the phone as she was hanging up. "Tell me how Wayne's handling it."

Crystal was yawning again. "I don't know, Mack. He's not here. He must be with Darren, I guess. I'm hanging up for real now. I feel like – I feel like I need to go to sleep."

"You're seriously tired enough to sleep?" I asked.

"I'm exhausted."

"Well, you call me if you can't get to sleep." I used my mother's stern voice to say it.

"Okay."

"I mean it, Crystal. Call me."

Ashley was chattering and pulling on my arm. I covered the telephone's mouthpiece and waved her away.

"Okay, okay," Crystal promised.

Ashley had clamped herself onto my arm again by the time I hung up the phone. "Somebody's at the door for you," she sang up at me.

I was the oldest person at home at the time so it was up to me to answer to the Boy Scouts selling popcorn or school kids gleaning sponsors for walk-a-thons or non-Mormon missionaries out looking for a fight in Upton. The last thing I expected to find when Ashley sent me to the door was a personal caller. But that's exactly what I found. I found Wayne.

"Sorry to bug you," he started, before I could say anything myself. "Did Crystal tell you what happened today?"

"You mean – the letters?"

Wayne nodded and looked down at Ashley where she swung on the end of my arm. She giggled up at him and he tried to smile in return. "Cute kid."

"Yeah, don't encourage her," I said. "I just got off the phone with Crystal. She said she didn't feel like talking about her letter right now. She wanted to sleep it off instead."

He pressed his lips into a thin line and nodded at his feet. "Sounds like Crystal."

I'd never seen him like this before – not even on the night Heather V. broke up with him. "But," he continued, "I'd like to activate my status as your friend and – talk."

"Ashley, honey, knock it off," I told my sister. She let go of my hand and lay hooting on top of my feet. "I'll get my coat," I told Wayne.

I held my coat in one hand and with the other I nudged Wayne backward, out the front door. He started to walk toward his car. "Not there," I called to him, beckoning as I moved through the fence to the backyard. "This way. You need to stay out in the fresh air to think clearly."

He stopped and sighed. "Whatever you say, Mack."

Wayne followed me to the grove of six apple trees my grandparents liked to refer to as "the orchard." When we'd first arrived during the summer, it had been so full of bees and wasps that no one could stand to be near it. But in the springtime, before the blossoms appeared, it was a perfect place to sit and hide close to home. I pointed to a spot where a thick, low tree limb grew almost parallel to the ground.

"Have a seat," I said.

Wayne sat down beside me on the limb. "I am not okay," he said.

I shook my head. "I can't even imagine what it must feel like."

"Did Crystal tell you what he said to us?"

I shrugged. "Only that he didn't offer to meet with you right away."

Wayne tucked his hands under his legs to keep them warm. It was still cold once the sun went down at this time of year – especially on nights like this when there was no cloud cover overhead to hold down the air that had been warmed against the earth during the day. All the heat went flying right back into outer space.

"He wrote to us," Wayne began again, "to apologize."

"Apologize," I echoed.

"Yeah. He's in psychotherapy, or whatever, and his doctor thought it would be helpful if he told us he was sorry."

"Sorry for not staying in contact with you?" I prompted.

Wayne shrugged. "He wrote this list of all the things he was sorry he missed. But some of it was weird stuff – like my 'basketball games.' As if. Why the – heck – does he think I play basketball? Does he have me confused with some other twin son he walked out on?"

"It was probably just a dumb guess," I suggested. "Try to take it as a compliment. Maybe he just really likes basketball himself. Is he tall?"

"How the – heck – should I know?" Wayne mumbled. Then he was digging into the inside pocket of his coat. "He's sitting down in the picture." He handed a photograph to me. It was a department store portrait of a family: a man, a woman, and two little dark-haired girls. "Apparently," Wayne explained, "I have two more sisters."

I gaped at the picture. The little girls looked a lot like Crystal. And looking at the man was like seeing one of those artificially aged photos police artists make for posters of kidnapped kids – if one had been made of Wayne.

"Wow," I said. "I can think of so many reasons why seeing this would have freaked you out."

"Yeah, look at him. He's got a great life now with his new family and everything. The only thing getting in the way of him being perfectly happy is the thought of me – and Crystal. So he's in therapy, apologizing, and trying to get over us." Wayne pulled the picture out of my hand and jammed it back into his pocket. "We were fine the way things were. Crystal had decided he was dead and I had decided that he was no good and we were better off without him. I was happy like that. I think Crystal was too."

The pieces were starting to click together in my head. "So you're thinking that if your dad _isn't_ messed up and he _is_ a good guy then you –"

"– Might be the bad one in the relationship, yeah," Wayne finished.

"Don't think that," I said, borrowing my mother's firm voice again. "Families aren't comic books. It's hardly ever just straightforward good versus evil between family members." I looked up at the lights in the windows of my grandparents' house. "Believe me."

Wayne looked at his knees. "We always had him lurking there in the background – like a boogie man or, like, a reason for everything that's wrong with us, and with Mom. Now I'm faced with the possibility that maybe I can't blame him for everything."

"Hey, even good parents will eventually let their kids down," I said. "Mine are as good as parents get. But look at the year they've put us through. Your dad let you down in a huge way. But that doesn't mean it has to be because one of you is totally bad."

Wayne scrubbed his face with his hands.

"And anyway," I went on, "your family's break-up wasn't about you in the first place. Come on, isn't that the ultimate child-of-divorce cliché?"

Wayne laughed quietly into his chest. "Yeah, of course. This was all just easier to take when he was still a faceless monster."

"Well, whatever he is, he was right to ask for your forgiveness. He was very silly to leave you on your own for so long."

Wayne nodded. "He sure was."

"Still, there must be some good things about you that have come from him. I mean, did you see that guy in the picture? He looks just like you, right down to this." I touched the small scar above Wayne's upper lip where his mole used to be – just like the mole I'd seen on his dad's face in the photo. At the same time, Wayne raised his head to speak to me and the movement of his face brought his lips up beneath the pads of my fingers. My fingers curved slightly inward, and in the quickest of instants, I felt the smooth warmth of his mouth before I dropped my hand – blushing, heart pounding.

"Oops," I mumbled. "Bad timing. Sorry."

What had Bert tried to tell me out at his farm on the day the twins turned seventeen?

"Don't worry about it." Wayne raised his hand to where I had touched him. "Anyway, it would have been nice if my dad could have written earlier and said something about how he manages to safely shave around his mole every morning."

I laughed – eager to relieve some tension.

"I don't know about Crystal but I think I'll write back to him," he said through his fingers. "And maybe someday I'll even meet him – again."

I smiled. "I hope you do."

"Me too. Oh," Wayne seemed to interrupt himself, "I also wanted to tell you something while I was here."

"What?"

"I'm quitting TacoTown."

"What?"

"I found a better job. It's in a store so I won't have to get my hands dirty or work in an apron anymore."

I sat sputtering a little, sitting on the tree limb beside him. The conversation had just taken a sudden, disorienting u-turn. Despite what Bert might have told me or how things might have looked during the first part of his visit, Wayne hadn't come to Upton to try to get closer to me. As things turned out, he had come to tell me a bit of himself was moving on and we were moving farther apart.

"I didn't even know you were looking for another job," I said. "Why didn't you mention it before?"

Wayne shrugged. "Until I actually found a new job, there was really nothing to tell, was there?"

I blew my bangs up off my forehead.

"It's for the best. Sandy will probably promote Darren to my old supervisor job," Wayne continued. "And Crystal can get used to being more independent from me. That needs to happen worse than she even understands. The fact is we're not going to be living together forever."

I shuddered.

"Well, congratulations," I said. "And try not to be too much of a hostile jerk to your new co-workers. I seem to remember your first impression needs some work."

Wayne laughed and punched me lightly on the arm. "My first impression? It's always fine as long as no one gives me any attitude—"

"Attitude?" I scoffed.

"Yeah. I'm always a nice guy as long as I'm treated properly. That bad attitude – that's where you went wrong when we first started working together."

I shoved him on the shoulder with both my hands. "Where _I_ went wrong?"

He swayed backward, laughing at me. "Come on, Mack. I know you remember the good old days when we first met – acting like we didn't get along, don't pretend you didn't love it."

***

It finally happened. I came home from school one day and there was my dad. He was standing in the living room, right where he belonged, surrounded by the trappings of his new job as a Canadian border security agent. The little kids were chasing each other around him like he was a maypole when they weren't scrapping over the honour of wearing his real policeman style hat. He showed me the special wallet with a cut-out in it for his shiny, new badge. Carrie was curled up on the coach, wrapped in the fur-lined Arctic grade parka the government had given him to wear on the worst nights of January. Mum stood draping pair after pair of blue polyester trousers onto clothes hangers.

"This is the best job I've ever had," Dad told us. "I really think this is what I should have done for a living all along."

Naturally, I was beyond happy to have him home again. But as I stepped back from hugging him, Dad's hand clung to my wrist. "Still wearing that boy's gold bracelet, eh?" he said.

I pulled my arm away and tucked the gold braid inside my sleeve. "Sometimes," I answered even though I wore it nearly every day.

"So how is Bracelet Boy?" Dad persisted.

I groaned. Why was Dad ruining our reunion with this kind of silly talk? "I don't know. He's the same as always, I guess."

Dad hummed disapprovingly at my answer.

"Don't worry, Dad," Carrie broke in. There was something menacing about the voice she used. "Heather likes Ben Jones way better now, anyway."

I gasped. "What did you just say?"

But Dad's mood brightened visibly.

"Especially since Ben came to her rescue when she fainted at school. It was classic," Carrie continued, batting her eyelashes dramatically – infuriatingly – from inside the hood of Dad's parka. "See? Look how red she is right now."

"I'm shocked at what you're saying," I scoffed. "That's all. And Ben Jones just happened to be standing right in front of me when I fell down. That was all it was –"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa." Dad raised both his hands. "Heather fainted – at school?"

"Dang it, Carrie," I began. I had planned on telling my parents about my unexpected venture into unconsciousness eventually – but not like this.

Carrie was still telling the story for me. "It's not a big deal. It all happened while Mum was in the hospital. Dr. Timms said it was just stress, right Heather? No one wanted Mum to worry about it while she was sick so–"

Now Mum was interrupting Carrie. "Well, that explains all the weird questions I've been getting around town about Heather's health."

Dad dropped his hands. "How could you guys keep something like this from us?"

"I didn't keep it from you," Carrie huffed. "I just told you all about it."

I heaved a loud sigh and braced for the worst. But Dad wasn't mad. He had drawn one arm around my shoulders and pressed his chin against the top of my head. "Honey, we're a family that helps each other. I love that about us. So don't try to weather things all on your own. You're important in this family for what you need to take from us, not just for what you need to give."

I bowed my head into his shoulder and bit my lip. "Sorry, Dad," I said.

"Well, I'm glad you're okay," Mum said. "Keeping all of this from your parents was not the right thing to do but seeing Dr. Timms about it was."

"Thanks to Ben Jones again," Carrie sang.

"Honestly–" I resumed my protest.

But by now, Jeff was standing at the bottom of the stairs with the keys to the station wagon in his hand. "Come on, Heather. We gotta go."

I muttered a good-bye as Dad let go of my shoulders. Then I trotted down the stairs and out the door behind Jeff.

Going to work felt strange that night. Everything was changing. Dad was back at home with a new career and tonight was Wayne's last shift at TacoTown before he left us to work at the mall. Unlike the incident of the mole removal, Crystal was handling this change pretty well. I don't think Wayne gave her enough credit for understanding that their lives couldn't continue to unfold as mirror images for much longer. After Crystal and Bert went home at nine o'clock, I stayed to the very end of the shift, along with Wayne and Darren, to close the restaurant. It was a quiet evening. No one in town seemed very hungry for tacos. After a long lull, Wayne finally locked the front doors and disappeared into the back office to count the cash register trays full of money for the last time.

"You've got twenty minutes," I heard him tell Darren before he closed the office door and left us alone.

Darren rounded on me almost as soon as the latch clicked into place. "Okay, Mack, what would you say if I told you I was through with you?"

More changes, more revelations – and somehow, I hadn't seen this conversation coming. I had always thought that when Darren grew tired of me he'd just quietly drift away. I assumed I'd look up one day and wonder where all his special attention had gone. But instead, he was forcing the moment into a major turning point I couldn't just ignore. There could only be one reason why: he wanted to create a crisis – make me choose. He was gambling on the chance that I might panic and tell him I wanted to be with him after all – if the only other choice was to be alone. It's true that the thought of a world where I couldn't count on Darren to be admiring and spoiling me all the time was a sadder world for me. But I also knew that it was a far better world for him.

I cleared my throat. "Well, as long as being 'through' with me meant you were still willing to be my friend, I guess I'd say I was happy for you," I answered.

Darren steeled his features. "Would you miss me?" he asked.

"Yeah, kind of," I admitted. "It's nice to be – appreciated. But it's also not fair to you."

He nodded, as if he was agreeing with me. "Okay then. Unless you do anything to stop me, I'm going to ask someone else out."

This was also unexpected. "Oh. Do I know her?" I asked. He wasn't talking about Crystal, was he?

All at once he seemed a little embarrassed as he grinned and nodded into his chest. "Yeah. It's Shelley, from the other evening crew."

"Shelley?" There was a faint note of disgust in my voice. Did he really mean the girl with the over-bleached hair who spent her shifts avoiding work, wandering around the restaurant whistling "Suicide Blonde" to herself? I didn't know what to say. Darren could tell he'd made me speechless and I think he enjoyed it.

"So, are you going to stop me?" he asked.

I finally shook my head. "I can't," I answered. "I really am sorry."

"Fine." Darren nodded again. "So do you think Shelley will have me? I want your opinion – as a girl."

"A girl like Shelley? She'd be crazy not to have you," I answered without any hesitation. But I paused before I asked, "And what about the part where you stay friends with me?"

Darren pushed out a dry laugh. "You don't really mean that."

"Seriously, I do," I insisted. "We have to stay friends – for the sake of Crystal and Wayne if nothing else –"

He shook his head again. "It's always about the twins –"

"Will you let me finish?"

"Oh come on, Mack. 'Let's stay friends' is a meaningless break-up cliché," Darren said, pulling the mop out of the bucket and beginning the final floor cleaning of the night.

"You are not breaking up with me," I reminded him. "You can't break up with me because we were never going out."

"Whatever," he muttered. "How many times this winter have I taken you to dinner, and movies, and bought you things – really nice things?"

After all these months, I was finally frustrated enough to roll the gold bracelet right off my hand. "Take it," I said, holding it up to Darren's face. "Take it back."

Darren made no move toward the bracelet dangling from my fingertips. "What would I do with it?" he fumed. "Shelley's only seen you wearing it every day for the last three months. There's no way I can give it to her."

"What about your mom?" I suggested.

He winced. "Don't be gross. Give it to your own mom if you want to."

"Look. It was a mistake for me to ever accept it," I explained. "And I'm sorry. Do you hear me, Darren? I'm sorry. I can't take it back – but you can."

Darren sighed and held out his hand. I poured the bracelet into his palm. But as soon as the last link of it left my fingers he threw the mop down and lunged at me, laughing, and draped the bracelet over the top of my ear. It hung there for a second before I snatched it off. I waved it in front of me as I chased Darren into the food preparation area behind the cash registers.

"You have to take it back!" I yelled after him.

He reached onto the counter and grabbed one of the giant caulking guns we used to dispense sour cream onto tacos. When he turned around he was pointing it right at me, like a weapon.

"You wouldn't," I hissed. Ever since I started working at TacoTown, I'd seen and heard people threaten each other with the sour cream guns hundreds of times. But I'd never seen anyone actually pull the trigger – until now. The sour cream gun fired and my apron was smeared with long, white gobs of it. I yelled and ran at Darren, slapping the gun away with one hand and grabbing a squeeze bottle full of extra hot chilli sauce in the other.

"Not the eyes, not the eyes," Darren pleaded with me, raising his hands to his face.

But I didn't want to maim him. I just wanted revenge. I painted the front of his apron with the runny, red sauce. I would have emptied the whole bottle onto his clothes if Darren hadn't retaliated with fistfuls of icy cold shredded lettuce. I knew I'd be separating the stringy leaves from my hair for the rest of the night. There was only one way to defend myself: by hurling nacho chips at him as if they were ninja throwing stars.

Darren ran out of the food area in a hail of broken chips. I followed, yelling like a bad Kung Fu movie. It looked like I had him cornered in the dish-pen at the back of the restaurant so I picked up an over-ripe tomato from the box of yucky ones Sandy saved to return to the supplier.

"Are you ready to call a truce?" I offered, brandishing the squishy tomato.

But when Darren ran toward the sink, surrender was the last thing he had in mind. Instead, he took hold of the heavy duty rinsing nozzle and turned around to face me with it. He was just levelling the nozzle at me, getting ready to loose a blast of water, when Wayne came storming through the office door, slipping on hot sauce and cursing. "What the –"

"Don't worry, we're fine," Darren said, aiming the nozzle at me again.

"Put it down," Wayne bawled at him.

I dropped my tomato grenade back into the box with the fruit flies and scooted away across the dirty tiles. When I reached Wayne I swung around on his thick brown arm and stood safely behind him.

"Darren started it."

"Don't think I won't hose the both of you," Darren warned.

"Get off me, Mack," Wayne commanded. "Sheesh, you guys. I'm still your supervisor for the next –" he looked up at the clock " – ten minutes. And I'm ordering you both to knock it off and clean up this mess."

Darren unhanded the rinse nozzle and I stepped out from behind Wayne. I picked the mop up off the ground as Wayne let out a sigh and shook his head. "Talk about a messy break up," he said.

"We can't break up," I called after him as he retreated into the office.

"Yeah, we were never going out," Darren finished.

"We were just friends," I kept calling even though Wayne was gone.

"And we're still friends," Darren yelled too.

I turned and smiled at him. "That's right," I nodded.

After I finished cleaning the floors, I stood on the concrete step outside the back of the restaurant where a huge, steel dumpster sat collecting our daily garbage. I held a dustpan in my hand. Emptying it was my last duty of the night. Just before I tipped all the debris into the dumpster, something caught my eye – glinting and golden even in the dim light of the alleyway. It was a tiny gold bracelet that I hadn't noticed had gone missing during the fight with Darren. Now it was tumbling out of the dustpan with the lint and dust and crumbs of the kitchen floor. It was too late to yank it back from the gravity that pulled it down into the dumpster. Unless I wanted to climb into the filth and stench of the bin after it, the bracelet was gone.

I looked over my shoulder. From the alley I could see Darren through the office window, folding up his soaked apron and packing it into his bag. The delicate, golden shackle that had tied us together since Christmastime was finally gone. And I hoped he was as happy as I was that we had both been made free.

***

" _Romeo and Juliette_ is the worst Shakespeare ever," Melanie said, flipping the pages of a battered Upton High School copy of the play as she sat beside me in our English class.

"I wouldn't know," I murmured back at her. "I haven't read all of Shakespeare yet."

As usual, Melanie forgave the little criticism buried in my comment. "These people in it are just so stupid and frustrating," she went on.

"Don't let it upset you. Remember that some critics say Shakespeare actually meant it to be a funny play," I remarked.

The head of black hair in front of us turned around, until we could see the entire face of Troy Gibson. "Funny?" he repeated. "Even when everyone dies at the end?"

I shrugged. "I guess. It's not my personal theory."

"Well, their lifespans were shorter back then. It would be a big tragedy if all this happened in Upton today. But maybe dying as a teenager wasn't such a big deal in – wherever this story happened," Troy suggested.

"Verona," I supplied. "And that's a good observation."

He narrowed his dark eyes at me. "Seriously? Do you mean to compliment me or are you just making fun of me?"

I sat back. "Why the heck would I be making fun of you?"

"I thought that was just what you did," Troy said, turning to face the front of the room again.

I looked at Melanie but she was still frowning into her book, mouthing the words to herself as she tried to make better sense of them. Our teacher had given up trying to talk to our class about a play hardly any of us had read so he left us alone in the classroom with instructions to read it while he was gone. Things were going as well as could be expected under those circumstances. The room was noisy enough to hide a serious conversation so I poked Troy in the back of his Nitzer Ebb t-shirt, hoping to start one. It seemed to be exactly what he wanted from me. There was something eager in his expression as he turned around again, flicking his long, curly bangs out of his face. He really was lovely. He looked like a member of the band INXS during its prime – and he knew it. Even I couldn't help but appreciate it.

"What would you know about what I do?" I asked him.

"Nothing," Troy admitted. "Just that you think you're too cool for the rest of us."

"I do not. It's you guys who are aloof from me." My protest was sincere but Troy seemed unmoved. In fact, he laughed at me.

"Wrong," he said.

"I'm not aloof," Melanie mumbled beside me.

We both ignored her. "If you're truly not trying to be some kind of snob," Troy began, "you'll prove it by going with me to junior prom next weekend."

"Junior prom?" I repeated. "That's a real thing? I thought it only existed on old American TV shows."

Troy waved his hand at me. "See? Snob."

"You can't ask her to junior prom," Melanie said, finally torn away from _Romeo and Juliette_. "What about Kristy?"

A little of the self-assurance drained out of Troy's rock star face. "We're not together anymore," he said.

Instead of responding with the sympathy I would have predicted, sweetie-pie Melanie just rolled her eyes. "Aw come on, you guys. Not again. How many times are you and Kristy going to break up and make up before your mission?"

"Oh, I understand now," I broke in. "This isn't about you rehabilitating my social life. This is about you finding some kind of counter-culture protest date while you're temporarily split up from your true eternal companion."

Troy shrugged. "What's wrong with taking out someone new?" he asked.

Melanie looked at me, waiting. Troy was right. There was nothing wrong with it. There was actually an awful lot that was right with it.

I sighed. "So do people still dress up for junior prom just like they do on TV?" I asked.

"You can wear whatever you want," Troy answered, even though Melanie clucked her tongue and shook her head in open disapproval of anything less than a formal dress.

"Oh right," I said. "This is a protest date. The less conventional I look, the better, right?"

Troy grinned. "Whatever you want."

"So when exactly is junior prom again?" I asked.

"Next Friday."

That was where my and Troy Gibson's junior prom experiment ended. "Aw man. I have to work that night," I told him.

"Can't anyone cover for you?" he asked.

I sat back in my chair and thought about it. Wayne was supposed to meet us on Friday night, after work. Ever since he quit TacoTown, I had hardly seen him at all. The thought of missing him again made me feel – really lonely. "Sorry," I told Troy. "I have to go into work myself."

He looked back at me, sceptically, and I could see he knew I probably could have freed up that evening – if it had been important enough to me to make it to the Upton High School junior prom.

Melanie closed her book and gaped at me. Clearly, she thought I was an idiot for not quitting my job completely in exchange for one night as Troy Gibson's date. He was hardly ever available to go out with anyone but Kristy. And he'd sure look good beside me in the pictures of junior prom – even if it was just a protest date.

"Fine then," was all Troy said.

"Hey, it's a good thing," I hurried, talking to the back of his head again. "The most counter-culture thing a guy like you can do at his junior prom would be to show up with no date at all, right?"

"Whatever you say," Troy answered, almost good-naturedly. "Snob."

The next hour of the school day was a spare period for me. I usually fled home whenever there was a break in my schedule but today, I found myself sitting in the library, resting my head in my open chemistry book, wondering if I'd made a single good decision since moving to Upton. The library was quiet and nearly empty – except for Ben Jones.

"Well, if it isn't my hero." I greeted him flatly when he finally stood up from his work and he walked by my table on his way to the computer printer.

"I'm more like a damsel in distress right now," he joked with equal listlessness. "This stupid printer paper keeps jamming inside the machine."

I glanced over at the brown box choking on a long, stiff ribbon of white paper. "It looks exactly like the printer we have at work," I said. "Let me see what I can do with it."

In a few seconds, I had the paper properly loaded. "Okay, watch how to do this," I said.

Ben Jones leaned closer to where I was working over the machine.

"The paper," I began, "has to go down under this thing here before you feed it through. Very important. Did you see how I did that?"

When I turned to Ben Jones he was still close, his head right next to mine as I explained the printer problem. His expression was attentive at first. But then he was shaking his head – as if he was trying to clear something away.

"Hey, did you see how I loaded the paper?" I asked again.

He sat back. "Sorry, no. I wasn't looking at – at your hands."

I sighed. "Well, it doesn't matter. It should work for you now anyways."

"Thanks."

In a moment, the printer was screeching out its rows and rows of dot matrices on the paper.

"Jones," I began, over the noise. "Am I wrong about everything?"

He chuckled. "We're all wrong about a lot of things. Be more specific."

"Do I have a completely false understanding of who I am in Upton society? I mean, I always thought I didn't fit in here because people are too narrow-minded and suspicious of me. But maybe – maybe it's the other way around."

"Well, I can't answer that for you," Ben Jones began, "but I can tell you what it is people really think about. They think about themselves. So don't worry what people might be thinking about you – they aren't."

I sat on the edge of the table and nodded toward my knees.

"What's got you worrying about all that, anyway?" Ben Jones asked.

I let out a long breath and told him what had just happened in my English class with Troy Gibson. I left out the part about refusing the date because I would rather see Wayne in the city that night. And I had a feeling Ben Jones was the last person I'd ever tell.

"Well, I must say I like the advice you gave him about going dateless to the prom as the ultimate form of protest," he said when I'd finished.

"I thought you might," I answered. "Or maybe I've just excluded myself so completely from Upton society that I haven't heard who you're taking as a date to your own prom."

"You haven't heard anything because I haven't asked anybody," he said, pulling his printed pages out of the machine. The silence that followed might have been more awkward if it wasn't filled by the sound of him tearing the pages of his report apart at their perforated edges.

There I was, perched on the edge of the table, looking at him again. I wasn't the only one who was wrong. Carrie had made a big mistake when she hazarded her guess about there being something more than friendship between me and Ben Jones. If he ever had any thoughts of asking me to go to his prom with him, he certainly would have taken the opportunity that had arisen between us at that very minute. But he didn't ask me anything. As usual, he wouldn't even look directly at me. The pitch of my disappointment took me by surprise. I could feel blood rising to my face.

"I gotta go," I said, pushing myself off the side of the table before he noticed my red cheeks.

Ben Jones dropped his history report on the floor. "Right away – now?"

"Yeah. The printer's okay now. Just don't touch anything and it should work fine." I was talking to the top of his head as he gathered his papers off the floor.

"Well, thanks for rescuing my history report. We're even now – for the whole – fainting – thing," he said as he sat up.

I turned and walked away. As I left the library, I stopped in the doorway and looked back at him, for just a second. His eyes were on the printed pages in front of him again. I thought of Troy Gibson. It was for the best that our junior prom protest date hadn't worked out. I would have just bored and disappointed him in the end the way I kept boring and disappointing everybody.

From the library doorway, I saw all of Upton in the curve of Ben Jones' shoulders as he sat with his back to me, proofreading his homework. He was neither narrow-minded nor suspicious. Maybe none the Upton people was. Maybe there weren't really any dragons here. But maybe there was something else here – something that made me even less comfortable than dragons would have. Maybe everyone in Upton was like Ben Jones – the boy who was, quite simply, too good for me.

***

While Troy Gibson stood in the dark hallway of Upton High School making up with his Kristy, and the rest of our class danced in the stifling heat of the over-decorated gymnasium, I sat outdoors, in a city park and waited. Across the freshly mown field, Darren was chasing a painfully, artificially blonde girl. He was throwing handfuls of cut grass at her while she screamed and swore and dodged out of his way. It was our first night out with his new girlfriend Shelley – and it was turning out to be a loud one.

"She needs to tone it down before one of the grannies in those old houses over there calls the cops," Crystal drawled from where she lay on her back on the park lawn beside me.

I snickered. "Let her keep screaming, then. Maybe the police will come and take her away."

Perpendicular to Crystal, Bert rolled over onto his front in the grass. "You guys are jealous."

We both scoffed with loud, short laughs. "Hardly," Crystal said.

"But seriously, have you ever seen Darren look so happy?" I mused.

Crystal made the scoffing sound again. "It can't be thanks to Shelley. It must be because of his promotion at work."

Wayne had been right about what would happen at TacoTime when he quit and went to work at the mall. Sandy had given Darren his old supervisor job. Obviously, no one had told Sandy about our food fight.

I leaned back on my elbows, sinking into the dry grass. "The promotion – maybe that's it, Crys. A guy would have to already be deliriously happy not to notice those dark roots of hers."

"See? Jealous," Bert sang lazily. "I love it."

I gathered up a handful of cut grass and stuffed it into the collar of his shirt. Bert yelled and pounced at me.

"Get away," I complained. "Crystal, help me!" I did not want to play rodeo with Bert.

She clamped her arm around Bert's neck – just like she was a real wrestler – and fell backward, dragging him away from me. In an instant, he had easily broken her hold and they were on their feet, chasing each other through the field.

Both of them ran much faster than I could so I didn't even try to follow them. I was now alone and unmatched. I stood up, half-heartedly tried to brush the grass from my clothes, and scanned the empty streets around the park one more time. Like many parks in the city, the trees here were small, sparse, and starved for water. It meant I had a clear view of everything around us. But there was nothing to see.

It was getting late. Maybe Wayne wasn't coming to meet us after all. It seemed he had succeeded in not being a jerk to his new co-workers and had made friends at his mall job already. Maybe his new friends were too sophisticated to run around playing Capture the Flag in a park after dark. Or, I reminded myself, it could be that I'd scared Wayne away. If only he hadn't looked up at precisely the wrong moment that time I touched the scar on his upper lip. Even though he'd said he understood it was an accident when I touched his mouth, everything had been a little strange between us since then.

I'd considered asking Crystal if her twin seemed to have taken a different attitude toward me lately. But when the moment came to ask, I'd been too scared. I thought I could talk to her about anything, but this was different. This threatened to morph into a terrible mess if I disturbed it – so I left it alone.

There was a low, stout fence dividing the gravel parking lot from the grassy area of the park. I hopped up on top of it and began to walk along it, as if it was a balance beam. With small feet like mine, it wasn't much of a challenge. But it was a good diversion from the rest of the ironic exuberance enjoyed by the people around me. I concentrated on my balance and the surface of the rough timber. I didn't even look up from my feet when I heard the sound of gravel grinding against the wheels of a car. I kept focused on my steady, careful pace until I'd reached the end of the rail where I jumped down, back onto the ground.

When I did look up, I saw Wayne, sitting in his car across the lot. He was watching me through the side window with an expression I recognized even though I'd never seen it directed at myself before. It was earnest and a little bit sad and very much like – longing.

"Here he is – finally." Darren heralded Wayne as the rest of the group came to stand beside me at the edge of the grassy field.

Wayne had brought a passenger in his car. He was a boy about our age who panned a languid gaze over us in that vaguely bored, vaguely greedy way boys have of looking at girls – any girls. The new guy nodded and waved at Bert and Darren in an easy, familiar way as they muttered their hellos. He must have met them both before.

"Ladies, this is Barry," Wayne said to the rest of us, "from my job at the mall."

We all nodded and waved.

Barry narrowed his eyes as he studied the three girls in the crowd. "You look just like pretty-boy here so you must be Crystal," Barry leered at Wayne's twin. He squinted his eyes even further as he pointed his finger and wagged it between me and Shelley. "And which one of you blondes is –"

"This is Shelley. And that's Mack," Wayne interrupted, waving at me but looking back toward his car, as if he'd forgotten something.

Barry hummed and cocked his head. "Interesting. Not what I expected."

Bert seemed to understand. "It'll grow on you."

Darren forced a cough that sounded more like a gag.

"You didn't have to wait for us," Wayne said, rushing to redirect the baffling turn the conversation had taken.

"It's all right," Darren smirked. "We kept ourselves busy." He reached down and drew a withered blade of grass out of Shelley's hair. She punched him hard in the arm and swore at him.

Wayne glanced at me – no eye contact, and not a trace of the look I thought I'd seen earlier through his car window. There, I told myself, I must have imagined the whole thing after all.

Darren stopped rubbing the tender spot on his punched-up arm and pulled two squares of beat-up cloth out of his pockets. "Okay, time for Capture the Flag," he began.

We split into two teams and disappeared to hide our flags. I kicked a pile of bark mulch over ours and we all scattered around the park. Ducking under a low spruce tree, I moved to where I could keep watch over the hidden flag, unseen. I stayed crouched in my sentry position until I heard Crystal call out.

"No! No! No!" she was laughing.

I jolted to my feet and stuck my head out of the spiky green boughs to look for Crystal. She was on the same team as me, for once. There she was, bent over Bert's shoulder while he hefted her in a rescue carry away from where his team's flag must have been hidden. It was clearly revenge for the wrestling hold she'd got him into earlier. With Bert occupied, it was a good chance for me to move in on his team's territory and look for their flag. But I had barely struck out from underneath the tree when a hand closed over my mouth and pulled me backward. I screamed inside my throat.

"Don't spaz out, Mack. It's just me."

There was an arm clamped across the front of my shoulders, dragging me further into the greenery. The arms held me against something behind me. It was warm and it smelled really good. When the hand came off my mouth and I turned my head, I saw that it was Wayne.

"What the heck?" I demanded.

"Just – hold still for a second." His arm stayed across my collar bones and his face stayed where I couldn't see it without twisting my neck. I glanced back at him for just and instant and there it was again – the same look as before. It was real. My hair moved as he spoke over my shoulder. "I need to talk to you."

My throat felt hot. I couldn't risk turning around to look at him again. I moved to step out of the sticky, spiny branches but Wayne's arm tightened, holding me back.

"You need to let me go," I said.

"Do you want me to?"

"They're all going to see us here. Darren and Crystal–"

"So what? I hope they do."

"Wayne–"

His arm dropped away from me and I folded my arms in front of myself, like a barrier.

"Promise you'll meet me – by yourself – so we can work some stuff out. Come on, Macke. Don't tell me you don't know what I mean. Please." His voice was firm even when he was gentle. How could this be happening? I had to swallow a lump in my throat before I could answer him.

"Fine. When?"

"Friday – a week from today," he said, almost in a whisper. He was stepping around me, walking backwards, moving into the open space outside the boughs of the tree where I still hid. "I'll come to Upton after I finish up at work and then – I'll see you then."

***

It was another payday at TacoTown. I stood by the staff table, waiting for Jeff, and ranting about how the lofty concept of "no taxation without representation" applied to people like me who start paying income tax when they're still too young to vote. Sandy was sitting, smoking, at the table beside me. She didn't seem at all interested in joining me in railing against the ageism inherent in our supposedly democratic government. A long, white jet of smoke shot out of her lungs as she shrugged her shoulders.

"Sure, Mack. Unfair taxes stink. But whatcha gonna do?" she remarked. But then she sat up straight, shook the nicotine out of her head, and leaned forward in her chair. She was gaping at something she could see through the glass front doors of the restaurant. "What the..."

I turned to look myself. "Oh — my — heck."

A young man was just stepping inside the restaurant. He was dressed in a perfectly pressed, black pin-striped suit, and shiny leather shoes. His posture was impeccable and he was strutting into the dining room looking like lion with its mane combed down.

"Bert!" Sandy greeted him. "What's with the get-up?"

Bert sauntered over to the staff table in his new suit. I fanned the air in front of him with the stub of my paycheque, trying to divert the fumes of Sandy's cigarette. "Don't let the smoke get into the wool," I warned him. "You'll get all smelly."

Bert stopped and raised his sleeve to his nose. "Nah, it still smells like the store where I got it. See?"

He thrust his arm into my face. I yelped and shoved it away. "Fine, I believe you."

"So are you going to a funeral or what?" Sandy persisted.

"No, I'm taking a girl from the Beef Club to her senior prom out in Regent this weekend. Our moms set it up."

"Aw, that's sweet of you," Sandy congratulated him.

Bert shrugged. "Not really. She's a nice girl. It'll probably be kind of fun. And I wrangled cash for a suit out of my mom as part of the deal." He raised his chin and stood up even straighter. "How do I look?"

"Smart," I said.

"Hot," Sandy added. She was so creepy sometimes.

"And check this out," Bert said, turning his profile toward us and pointing to his own face. "It's the very best part." He opened his eyes as wide as he could.

I squinted. "What? What am I looking at?"

But Sandy understood immediately. "You got contact lenses? I didn't even know you wore glasses."

He laughed. "That's because I didn't."

"Even though he's blind as a bat," I finished, slapping Bert's arm through his new jacket. "Well, good. Now you might survive in traffic long enough to live to see your own senior prom."

He hadn't just come to TacoTown to show off. Like me, Bert had come for his paycheque. Sandy rose from the table to get it out of the cash register drawer for him.

"So now you can see properly. That is so awesome, Bert. Hey, how many fingers am I holding up?" I demanded, showing him all five of the fingers on my hand.

"Seven," he answered.

I laughed. Sandy still hadn't come back so I lowered my voice and took a step closer to Bert. "Well, now that you can see what I really look like," I began, "you're probably shocked."

"What? Why?"

"I mean, you must think your buddies here are crazy to like me so much when I look like this." I pointed a finger at my face.

Bert looked down at me through the almost invisible lenses on his blue eyes. "Now that I can see, I think," he said, "that I should have tried a lot harder to quit smoking."

I laughed again and thumped him on the back. "You know, you've been a good friend to me this year. And I really needed it. Thanks."

The soles of Bert's new shoes clicked against the floor tiles as he stepped right up to me. He bent his neck and pecked a quick, dry kiss onto the crown of my head.

I ducked. "Hey!"

Bert stepped back, grinning as he buried his rough, farm-boy hands in the smooth, nylon linings of his suit pockets. "Don't worry about me. That's enough for me. But what are you going to do about the twin brothers?"

I rubbed the top of my head. "Huh? Darren's with Shelley so —"

"So what about the other brother? What're you going to do?"

I stopped rubbing my head. "Nothing."

"What do you mean by that?" Bert prodded.

"I really don't know."

Bert looked over my shoulder, into the kitchen. Sandy had been detained at the cash register by a particularly petulant customer. He dropped his voice. "Mack, you shouldn't feel like you have to settle for something less than ideal when you're only sixteen. Don't do it. Even if you think you're lonely – I mean, _especially_ if you think you're lonely."

Sandy pushed through the door behind me, apologizing to Bert for taking so long to get his cheque.

"You working tonight?" he asked me as he turned to leave.

I let out my breath, relieved to hear him talking in his usual light tone again. "Nah, I'm going on a social call in Upton."

"Mack's got a new friend?" he grinned. "An Upton friend?"

I smiled back at him. "Yup."

Through the glass doors I saw Jeff parking against the curb outside. It was time for me to leave the city and make my way to Tannis Morgan's farm.

"Are you sure you know where to find this place?" Jeff growled as we headed toward the highway back to Upton.

"I think so," I said. "Tannis said to turn south at the Report-A-Poacher sign and take the dirt road until we see a big gray silo..."

Jeff growled again but we did manage to find the neat little farmyard where Tannis stood waving at our car with both arms like she was hailing an aircraft.

"Good," she said as I stepped out of the car and onto the hard-packed dirt driveway. "I thought we were going to have to get started without you."

"Started? What are we doing?" I asked, trotting after her.

"It's nothing much. We've just got some cows to move," she announced.

"What?!"

"It's fine. They're nice cows."

"You mean, like pets?" I ventured.

Tannis laughed, a little darkly. "No," she answered. "Like meat."

I followed her to where her dad stood leaning against a corral in his mucky gumboots. "This must be Heather here," he greeted me. Tannis' brothers milled around their dad with bored but pleasant faces. I waved at everyone. A loud moo blasted somewhere behind the fence and I hoped no one noticed how high it made me jump.

"We just need to get the gals across the railroad tracks and into the next pasture," Tannis's dad said as he creaked back the latch on the fence. Without another word of explanation, the cows were crowding out of the gate, coming toward us. They were a lot bigger up close than they looked when I'd seen them from inside a car driving down the highway between their pastures.

I stood in a near-panic as Tannis and her brothers spread out in firm, slow steps along the roadsides. "Come on," she beckoned me.

"What am I supposed to do?" I asked, linking my arm through hers.

"Get on the tracks," she instructed. "Just stand there on the train tracks so the cows don't think they can get on them and walk all the way to the Pacific Ocean."

I felt my face turn white. "How do I stop them from doing that?"

She shrugged. "Just stand there. They'll get it."

"O-okay," I said, trying to strike what I desperately hoped was an authoritative stance between two railroad ties. "Okay now."

Tannis and her family walked alongside the cattle, quiet and calm, and the huge beasts strolled down the road toward the green meadow. And then the unthinkable happened. One of the cows stopped as her forefeet stepped over the first rail. She raised her enormous brown head and looked west, right through me. I gasped and spread out my arms, taking two high, hard steps in her direction, as if there was something I could have done to stop her. But the bluff worked and the cow swung her head back into line and followed her sisters through the gate.

"Tannis!" I called, running down the railroad toward her. "Did you see that? Did you see how I stopped that cow?"

She scanned the road. "What cow?"

"Uh, the spotted one with the big eyes."

Tannis started to laugh at me. I looked into the pasture and realized what all the cows looked like.

"Oh, she's in the pasture now," I said. "But she was seriously thinking about coming down the tracks. I know she was. She looked right at me."

"She looked right at you?" Tannis was still laughing.

"Yeah. And I stopped her," I said again.

She laughed harder and patted my hand as if I was five years old. "Of course you did," Tannis said, "because you're so awesome – and terrifying, just like everyone at school says you are. And I never want to move cows without you ever again."

Maybe that was when I knew that I finally had a real friend in Upton – not someone I'd poached from my brother's social circle and not someone who secretly had being nice to me written down as a goal to accomplish in her journal. Together, Tannis wasn't boring and I wasn't a snob. We were simply, genuinely, finally friends.

***

It was late, long after my Wednesday night shift had ended. And I was still awake, sitting cross-legged on my bed with a lap full of chemistry homework. I yawned over my scientific calculator but snapped my jaws shut when I heard the sound of a soft knock.

"Carrie?" I whispered.

But the knock sounded like it had been rapped on the hard glass of my window, not the dull wood of my bedroom door. If we'd lived anywhere but Upton, maybe I would have had the good sense to be spooked at the sound. As it was, I wasn't even nervous as I slid off the bed, pulled back the curtain, and came face to face with Ben Jones, waving at me through the glass. I smiled, pushed back the pane, and let the cool night air flood into my bedroom.

"Nice one, Jones. Jeff's room is the next window over," I said, pointing down the length of the house.

"Yeah. I'm – uh – not looking for Jeff," Ben Jones said. "I actually wanted to see if you were okay. Since you weren't at the church for the activity again tonight..."

I rolled my eyes. "Yes, I'm fine. And no, I didn't humiliate myself having another embarrassing public collapse somewhere, if that's what you mean."

"Well, of course not," he grinned back at me. "I would have heard about something as spectacular as that – along with rumours that you had leukemia, or a drug problem, or nervous breakdown..."

I groaned out a laugh. "I despise this town."

"No, you don't," Ben Jones corrected me.

Maybe I didn't love Upton but I didn't really hate it anymore either. That's what I'd told Tannis the night we sat by the irrigation canal on her parents' farm and she taught me to sing the Upton High School Rockets fight song, purely out of irony. Upton wasn't quite as difficult of a place for me to be happy as it used to be. But for some reason, I didn't feel comfortable admitting it to Ben Jones. Instead, I just tossed my head. "I just had to work again tonight. It was nothing out of the ordinary – unlike the sight of you, out roaming the streets after midnight on a school day. That's no way for a valedictorian to behave."

He chuckled as he sat down beside the foundation of my grandparents' house. He folded up his legs and leaned his face into my bedroom. "Well, I can't sleep. Maybe a bedtime story might help."

I laughed and gestured toward the landslide of school books on my bed. "If it isn't a story about balancing redox reactions you're looking for, you'll find me sadly uninspired tonight. I've got kind of a one track mind right now."

"You don't have to tell me a story," he said, further settling into the grass outside the window, despite all the spider webs. "I've got one to tell you."

"Oh, did you finally come up with a fainting story?"

"No," Ben Jones smirked. As soon as I spoke I knew it was a mistake for me to show that I remembered anything about what we'd said to each other the day I fainted at school. The more delirious he thought I'd been that morning, the better. "But since I'm 'the best,'" he continued while I hung my head, "I think I can probably convince you to graciously submit to listening to another kind of story instead."

I shuddered a little. Ben Jones was still thinking about what I'd said on my way out of the haze of unconsciousness. It was unsettling to know I'd accidentally revealed a little too much of my one-sided admiration for him. At that moment, I would have liked to have salvaged some of my dignity and excused myself from the window. But the prospect of hearing the story he'd made this strange night-time visit to tell me had made me curious. I played along, waving my hand at him. "Go ahead. Tell me your story."

"Okay. You remember meeting our pet parakeet, Wazo, right?" he began.

"Yeah." I paused to swallow. "I totally remember. And I've been trying to ask you something about it for the past year. What has your pet parakeet got to do with me?"

"With you?"

"Yes. I haven't just imagined you calling me 'Parakeet' ever since last Fall, have I?" I was smiling like it was all a joke but my heart was beating high in my throat.

Ben Jones sighed. "No, you haven't imagined it. And you're right. It's finally time for me to explain the parakeet's connection to you."

I waited.

Ben Jones cleared his throat. "Wazo is not our first pet parakeet. We had another one before her, named Clovis. He was a green one. And this story is about him."

I nodded. "Cool. So, what happened to Clovis? Something dramatic, I'm afraid, or this wouldn't be much of a story."

Ben Jones cleared his throat again in the dark outside my bedroom window. "Well, Clovis was really well trained. He was affectionate, loved humans, and seemed very attached to all of us, especially me. So one day, on the first warm afternoon since winter had ended, I thought it would be nice for Clovis to get some fresh air."

"Oh no," I interjected.

"Exactly. I took him outside the house. And at first, he was great. He stayed roosting on my finger and we walked him all around the yard. He didn't even seem that interested in the outside world. But then a pair of robins flew overhead. That was it. He whipped his wings and took off with them. We all ran after him but he was just a tiny green dot disappearing into the horizon. It looked like he followed the other birds to a stand of trees so far away I could hardly see them. And by the time we got there to look for him, there was no sign of him at all. We whistled and called and prayed and cried for hours out there. But that was the end of Clovis."

"That's so awful," I said.

Ben sighed into his chest. "Yeah. You see, we had done a pretty good job of giving Clovis everything he could have wanted except for the love and companionship of another parakeet. And when he couldn't get the love he wanted living with a bunch of humans, he took his chances chasing after it with the robins."

I shivered in the cool draft of the open window. "It's the old fool-for-love tragedy only staged with cute little birdies instead of big, stupid people. Jones, that's the saddest bedtime story ever – unless it's possible Clovis could have survived away from home like in some crazy, inspirational nature movie."

Ben Jones shook his head. "No. The night Clovis flew away, the temperature went below freezing almost as soon as the sun went down. His breed's natural habitat is the Equator so, no, Clovis couldn't have survived outside – not even for a whole day." Ben Jones let out a long breath. "Of course, it was really hard on my faith when my prayers wouldn't force him to come back. Like everyone else, kids always prefer miracles to painful lessons. But my dad hugged me and told me that maybe someday there'd be someone who really needed to learn from Clovis' story. Maybe it would be me or someone in the family, or maybe it would be someone we hadn't even met yet – someone who might be lonely enough to forget she's really a beautiful, exotic parakeet. You know, someone who might be tempted to fly away with the robins and compromise her delicate, little self." He punctuated his story by raising one finger and tapping the tip of my nose.

I smiled but wanly. "Well, thanks for the story. But people aren't birds, Jones. People can decide to stop being robins and make themselves into parakeets if they want to. The parable starts to break down in the real world full of real choices –"

"I know, I know," he hurried. "But if the parakeets are willing to follow the robins anyway, why would the robins ever really change? Sure they _can_ change – but the parakeets should probably wait until _after_ they change before they take off with them. Otherwise..."

I swallowed. "Look, it's really nice of you to be concerned about my pathetic social life. And I really do appreciate Clovis' story. Thanks for telling me about it. It couldn't have been easy for you to relive all of that just now." I reached through the window and tapped the end of his nose in return.

Ben Jones bent his head toward the ground and looked away from me. "No promises though?" he probed.

"I – I won't do anything rash," was my feeble offering.

He unfolded his long legs and began to move to standing. "Good luck with the chemistry homework."

"Ben," I called after him.

He hadn't quite finished standing and stopped in a crouch, his hands still pressed to the grass outside my basement window. It wasn't a comfortable position but he stopped at the sound of my voice and held respectfully still, waiting for me to speak. He was so thoughtful – adorable, really. My pulse wobbled a little. But something came tearing into my mind, quick to remind me of his silence in the library a few days before. Boys like Ben Jones did not want me – not even as a last minute, emergency date to the senior prom. There was no way a parakeet like him would ever like me in more than an unofficial-older-brother kind of way. I remembered what he told his physics teacher: _Heather's a good friend of mine_.

I gulped past the lump in my throat. "I mean it, Jones – thanks."

***

I looked at the clock on my bedroom wall – again. It was only six o'clock. There were still three hours before the mall closed and Wayne would be free to leave work and come collect me for the talk I'd promised him. My flesh pricked on the backs of my legs when I thought of it. Was that excitement or dread? What was he going to say? What was _I_ going to say? Instead of making myself miserable wondering about it, I decided to find Jeff and make him miserable.

He was on the other side of the wall, in a cubicle bedroom of his own, hiding from his senior prom. Upton was uncharacteristically full of limousines and satin that night. Jeff had hunkered down in his bedroom as if it was a nuclear holocaust not a ridiculously overdressed school dance that was about to descend on the town.

I rapped sharply on his door, imitating our mom's brisk knock, hoping to fool him into inviting me inside.

The door opened. "Oh, it's you. What is it?"

"You're really not going?" I began as I pushed my way into the musty den of Jeff's room.

He took up a yellow tennis ball and threw it as close to the ceiling as he could get it without knocking off any of the Spackle. "Doesn't look like it."

I sat down on the corner of his rumpled bed. "Someday, you're going to regret it."

"Not likely," he answered, snatching at the tennis ball. "It's too late now, anyway. No date, no prom."

I felt myself getting a little bit angry. I sucked in a deep breath and said, "Don't act like your lack of a date is a result of anything but your own stubbornness."

Jeff caught the ball and leaned forward to point at me. "I asked someone. You know that. And she turned me down."

"Jeff, you asked one girl to go to prom with you: the prettiest girl in town, Miss Upton High School herself, the local beauty queen. As if, Jeff. What the heck were you thinking?"

"She's not really like that. She's nice." He seemed embarrassed at the weakness of his own argument.

"Look," I said, "I didn't say she wasn't nice. But these people in this town have known since elementary school who'd be taking them to prom. She's Miss Upton High School so she's going with the captain of the basketball team – even if he is a total doofus."

Jeff rubbed his eyes in that furious way that always made our mother fear for his eyeballs. "Beauty queens and sports heroes – it's like a lame plot out of a bad movie," he said. "I thought real life would be different. I believe it should be different."

I shrugged. "But in the bad movie you'd show them all and win her over at the end, right?"

Jeff growled. "Not here, and not tonight. You and I – we can't change anything here without a revolution."

I sighed again. "Instead of a revolution, you could have just asked someone from the eleventh grade to prom. I'm sure there are dozens of girls my age who would have been glad to go with you tonight."

"Yeah? Like who?"

"Well, you could have asked my Tannis. She's a sweetie-pie," I suggested.

"Maybe you're right. But it's too late to do anything about it now."

I knew he was right. It was supposed to take girls days to get ready for a prom and Jeff's would be starting in about an hour. Finding a date was no longer a possibility. "Okay. Then I think you should go to prom by yourself – out of rebellion, if nothing else. You already have a suit and, as a guy, that's really all that's expected of you as far as a formal wardrobe goes. Get dressed and get out there, MacLean."

"Easy for you to say. I noticed you skipped your junior prom last week, ya big hypocrite."

I waved both my hands. "We didn't even have junior prom back on the east coast. It's a non-event. Anyway, I had to work." Ben Jones must not have told Jeff about Troy Gibson inviting me to go with him to junior prom – I hoped.

"Well, stop it. You know you don't have to work so much anymore. Mum and Dad are making enough money to pay all the bills themselves now," Jeff reminded me. "We just need to work enough to pay for our own expenses." He was right about that too. I hadn't given Dad any money in almost two months. But how would I ever see Crystal – or the others – without the constant excuse to be in town that came with having a job there?

"Don't try to change the subject," I said as sternly as I could. "Ben Jones is going to the prom on his own, isn't he? That was probably decided in elementary school too," I muttered. "And by now he's so sure he has to go stag that he doesn't even think for a second about asking anybody to go with him."

Jeff tuned in to something like disappointment in my voice. "Hey, you would have gone with Jones," he stated.

I let out a long breath. "Yes, I would have – if he wasn't the last person in town who'd ever think of me as a date."

Jeff tossed the tennis ball at the ceiling. "No, the last person in town who'd ever think of you as a date is me."

In the end, none of my persuading was necessary. By seven o'clock, Ben Jones was at my grandparents' front door, dressed in the suit he wore every Sunday, making up Jeff's mind for him. Maybe Ben Jones didn't want to ask me to go with him to his prom but that didn't mean he couldn't drag Jeff along with him.

"Let's get going, MacLean," he said in a cheerful and faintly military voice. "Don't let the – beautiful people – grind you down."

I didn't make any kind of satisfied fuss when Jeff came out of his room dressed in his own Sunday suit. Mum was standing uncertainly by the door, holding a camera. "You don't want a picture taken of the two of you, do you?" she asked.

Ben Jones laughed.

"Nah, Mum," Jeff said. "Better save it for the ceremony tomorrow."

"Well, at least take this." She snapped off the last bloom of a store bought, potted tea rose someone had given her while she was sick and shoved its stem through the buttonhole on Jeff's lapel. "How late will you be?" she asked as she fiddled with the single flower.

Ben Jones answered for him. "There's a nice, tame party out at the reservoir after the dance. It usually goes until 3 or 4am."

Mum frowned. "I don't know where any reservoir is."

Ben Jones started giving directions in that terrible, Upton way of his. It was all based on obscure landmarks with none of the highway numbers or street names that could help and outsider like Mum to find anything. "...You keep driving 'til you pass the Murffits' old place. There's usually a blue van parked there..." Our eyes glazed over as we gave up any hope of trying to make sense of it.

"Just be careful," Mum said. "There's no way I'll ever be able to find you if you need rescuing."

"Hey, aren't you coming later?"

I looked around. Had Ben Jones been talking to me just now? I felt me face flush. And I wondered if maybe I was angry.

"Me?" I stammered.

"Yeah."

"At your prom?"

"Yeah."

"Jones, I'm in the eleventh grade. I need to be specially invited to go to the prom. But I haven't been."

"Sure you have."

I glared at the banister gripped between my fingers. Why now? Why not until it was too late? "No, I haven't. No one invited me. Who would ever invite me?"

At the bottom of the stairs, Jeff opened the front door. "Just leave her, Jones. She's going out with work people again tonight anyway. Let's get this over with."

My smile was a sarcastic mess as I raised my head. "Congratulations, you guys," I called from the top of the stairs as they stepped outside, "and stay safe."

Ben Jones paused in the open door and looked up, staring hard and unsmiling at me. "Same to you, Parakeet."

***

I stood in my bedroom window, brushing the effects of a windy day out of my hair. Finally, after years and years of heat-curled, teased, gelled, and over- sprayed hair being in fashion, the rest of my silly culture was slowly starting to move back toward the hairstyle I'd had all along – which was really no hairstyle at all.

Through the window, I could see all the way to the end of our block. It meant that I knew Wayne had arrived the moment his car turned the corner. I'm not sure if he knew I could hear the music playing from his car stereo from where I stood behind the window screen. The song was New Order's "Bizarre Love Triangle." I never should have made him that mix-tape.

Instead of risking a big, noisy scene with the whole family in the front entryway, I dropped my hairbrush, skipped up the stairs, and out the door. I barely paused to call good-bye to no one in particular as I dashed out of the house.

Wayne's eyes were on the door of my grandparents' house as I stepped outside. We hardly glanced at each other before I looked down to my feet. I pulled in a deep, therapeutic breath and let it out with a quick, indistinct prayer. This was probably not a good time to rely on my own strength and judgment alone. And then, I climbed into Wayne's car, blushing and fumbling toward the safety of small talk.

"You made it."

"Yeah, Upton's really not that far from the city," he said, even though we'd had this conversation before. "I don't know why I used to complain about it."

"It's a quick drive. That's what I keep telling people."

"Yup. Not far at all."

"Yup. So – how's the new job?" I ventured.

Wayne nodded at the windshield as he drove down Upton's main street. "Good, good – it's going good. It's pretty different from what I'm used to. But I don't miss the old TacoTown uniforms – that's for sure. And I just feel cleaner. I mean, I don't smell like chilli powder half the time anymore. Even my skin seems healthier now that I'm not working with grease. Feel that." He grabbed my hand and swiped my fingertips across his rough cheek. The car demanded to be put into third gear so his hold didn't last long.

I hoped my laugh didn't sound too nervous. "It's hard to gauge your skin's condition through all the stubble," I said.

Wayne answered with a laugh just as uncertain as my own. "Sorry about that."

I cleared my throat. "So this new Barry guy seems all right."

Wayne was nodding again. "Yeah, he's cool. He's known as a bit of a womanizer but he's still a pretty decent guy otherwise."

"A womanizer? And you introduced him to your sister anyway?" I remarked, remembering the hungry look Barry had cast at Crystal when he'd been introduced to her at the park.

But Wayne just shrugged. "Barry wouldn't pull anything with a girl who meant something special to me. That's why I didn't worry about bringing him to meet you two."

It was almost a confession. Wayne realized it and broke into an uneasy cough. "That's enough with the pleasantries, Mack. Where's a good place to sit and talk around here?" he asked. "Someone once told me that fresh air helps with clear thinking."

"Pull over right there," I said, pointing to a wrought iron gate standing in the gap in a caragana hedge.

Wayne squinted up at the words forged on the gate. "Upton Municipal Cemetery? We're going in there when it's already getting so dark?"

"Yeah, it's the only outdoor place we can talk without the whole town gawking at us. It's prom night. Everyone's out ogling each other."

As if he'd been waiting inside the hedge just to prove me wrong, someone came slumping out of the cemetery gates precisely at that moment. It was Aaron, the boy from school who waited to comfort me the morning after Mum's surgery. I could tell it was him by the way he was wrapped in his dark trench coat, wearing his long bangs like a haphazard veil over his face. His posture didn't look at all self-conscious. It seemed like he hadn't noticed us at all.

"Where did that kid come from?" Wayne asked.

I took hold of the car's door handle. "He was just enjoying our perfectly lovely town cemetery – like we would be if you'd get out of the car. I told you, it's a nice spot," I said, feeling a little protective of Aaron – protective and vaguely worried about him too.

Wayne rolled his eyes. "I don't know how you can stand to live here."

"It's really not so bad." I sighed hard as a hundred little things flashed through my memory – like my name at the top of the school honour roll, the cows on the train tracks, and a tiny turquoise bird perched weightlessly on my finger.

"Watch your step on the Texas gate," I warned as we walked up the cemetery driveway.

Wayne stopped in front of the rows of iron cylinders set into the road to keep hoofed animals from coming any further. "Is that what these things are called?" he asked. "I didn't know there was actually a name for them."

"Yeah, there is. And there're dangerous for small-footed people as well as animals." And then, out of some sort of automatic sense memory of how I once hurt my ankle walking over it, my hand came up and clasped Wayne's arm as I walked over the gate. His hand clamped over mine, pressing it between his fingers and his arm.

I coughed and gently pulled on my hand. "Thanks," I said as I stepped back onto the gravel roadway. But my hand did not come free. Instead, Wayne pulled it away from his arm and held it in both his hands as he began to speak.

"Mack, you've been a really good friend to us this year – me and Crystal both," Wayne said. "The way we were raised – well, there wasn't a lot of kindness in it. But you, you've been really kind to us." He stopped, gently squeezed my hand, and laughed at himself. "I sound like a sappy idiot."

"No, you don't," I said quickly. "It's all right to be tender."

He let go of my hand and started to walk. I followed him between the rows of graves.

"That's just what I mean. No one else in my life has ever talked to me that way," he said to his feet. "I think Heather Vander Kaamp would have believed something like that too but – I don't know," he continued. "I couldn't get her to say the things I needed to hear and I sure didn't know how to talk to her. It's all right that it didn't last between me and her. Being with her really just made me feel – lonely."

It was awful. "You don't have to feel lonely. Crystal loves you. So does Darren," I hurried to say.

Wayne stopped walking and turned to face me. "I'm not lonely," he said. "I'm with you."

My heart was beating fast and I could tell the colour had risen in my throat, unseen in the nearly dark cemetery. "But I'm no one," I said.

He ignored the comment. "It was when Heather Vander Kaamp left me that I knew. I remember watching you fall asleep on the couch –"

"By accident, at opposite end from you, with your feet on the floor, and all the lights and the television on –"

"Right. At the time, I was still breaking my heart over Heather V., in my own way. But when I looked over at you all curled up there, just before I went upstairs, I felt sad at the thought of leaving you, even though we'd be in the same house all night long. It was totally unexpected and – weird."

"Weird," I repeated. Then I remembered. "But after that, you still tried to get me together with Darren."

Wayne frowned. "Oh, that," he growled. "Yeah, that was me being a jerk. I didn't plan it that way. It just happened. I never thought you'd go for him but something in me wanted to see him try for my own information – kind of as a low risk trial of how you'd react if a guy who wasn't a Mormon tried to go out with you."

"Low risk for you, maybe. But for Darren – your twin brother–"

He winced. "Yeah, it was pretty sick, but I got what I deserved. Darren really surprised me. He was actually a lot better at chasing you than I thought he'd be. He nearly had you a couple times, didn't he?"

I turned my back to him. "I don't really want to talk about it –"

"Of course you don't," Wayne said. "I know. But you've got to understand how much I hated to see the little triumphs Darren had with you, even though I smiled and acted supportive at the time. In the end, it was me who finally convinced him to give up on you."

"You suggested Shelley for him and everything?" I raised my eyebrows.

I could hear Wayne's smirk as he spoke from behind me. "No, that was his idea. This thing with Shelley is never going to go anywhere. The fact is, someday Darren's going to wind up with Crystal and become my brother for real."

"You think so?"

"Oh yeah," Wayne insisted. "That's what's right for him—only it's way too soon for either him or Crystal to see it yet. Until they figure that out, any other relationship either of them tries is just going to feel wrong. Not like this..."

Wayne was still behind me but I could tell he had stepped closer. Even then I didn't turn around to face him. I was too overwhelmed and breathless to look at him. He stooped to rest his chin on my shoulder as he locked his arms around my waist. "There was never a time," he said, his warm breath moving past my ear, "when I didn't feel strongly about you. Even when I thought I didn't like you, it was always – so powerful."

He inclined his face toward mine and I felt the evening stubble of his cheek against my neck and jaw. I breathed in deeply, filling my whole head with his scent. It was a blend of the nice designer cologne I had helped Crystal choose for him last Christmas and the rich, complicated smell of the real grown up man he was nearly finished becoming. I tipped my head to rest against his and folded my hands over where his were closed around me. We'd been wrong about each other when we first met. Wayne wasn't a dragon. He wasn't a monster of any kind. Maybe nobody is.

He was speaking again. "You must know it too. You need to be with me – no matter what," he said with every atom of his natural gift for authority.

We stood like that on the cemetery lawn, between the hedges planted and pruned into unnatural tidiness and symmetry. We didn't speak anything more. Wayne had already decided what would happen next. He didn't doubt for a second that I would turn my face to his and let him kiss me. What he didn't suspect was that I was actually tormented by my own doubt.

Here was a boy with muscles and whiskers and eyes like Johnny Depp's who wanted to be with me – _me_ , the remnants of the ugliest girl of faraway Hugh Allen Junior High School. Here was the beautiful, unattainable boy who had tried his best to hate me when we first met. But through some miracle, I'd succeeded in winning him over in the biggest way there is to win someone over. Here was living proof that I was loveable – loveable enough to change another person's heart and mind. Here was a guarantee that I would not be lonely. How could I be expected to resist it?

"Hear that bird singing?" Wayne said, his lips brushing the skin of my face as he spoke. "I hear it a lot but I can never tell what kind it is. It's sort of beautiful."

I tilted my head slightly away from him so I could listen to the birdsong too. It was high and clear and melodious – and utterly familiar. At the sound of it, my smile crumbled.

"It is beautiful," I agreed. "And it's a robin."

Wayne maintained the circle of his arms around my middle as I turned to face him. I put a hand on each of his shoulders and straightened my arms, pushing a stiff distance between us. When I finally spoke, I found there was no way I could look directly into those eyes.

"Wayne – I'm so sorry..."

***

I stumbled into the house, not stopping to watch the taillights of Wayne's car disappearing around the corner at the end of the street. I hopped up the stairs in the dark, listening for my parents. It was late and no one seemed to be awake in the house.

I knocked softly on my parents' bedroom door. The only answer was a loud snore from my mom. Dad was working the nightshift at the border and Mum, it appeared, was sound asleep. I moved away from their room, creeping into the basement to knock on Jeff's door.

"Jeff, are you back yet?" I asked as I pushed into his dark bedroom. Just as I expected, the room was empty. He must have gone to the after-prom party, just like Ben Jones said they would.

I sat down hard on the slick, brown carpet of the basement stairs and pressed my fingers to my temples.

_I have to find them_ , I thought.

What were the directions Ben Jones started to give Mum before they left – something about a reservoir? The party was out in the country, even by Upton standards. If I tried to find it on foot it might be dawn before I got there. There was only one option left – and it was not a good one.

"Sorry, Dad," I sighed as I made sure my learner's driving permit was still in my wallet. Upstairs, I slipped the keys to the station wagon off their hook on the kitchen wall, and slunk out to the garage. Dad had carpooled to the border with another officer so the car was still sitting there, safely and legally parked.

"This could be the stupidest thing I've ever done," I whispered as I turned the keys in the ignition and set off on my darkest voyage ever.

I backed the car out of the garage ridiculously slowly. It was partly out of inexperience but mostly to give my mother plenty of time to wake up and come running out of the house to stop me. But she didn't. I steered toward Main Street and headed south. "Drive down Main until the pavement turns to gravel," I remembered Ben Jones saying, "and keep south until you pass the Murffits' old house."

I passed off the paved road and crunched into gravel. When the line of Upton's streetlights ended, I noticed I'd been driving without using the headlights. I turned on the windshield wipers before I finally found the switch for the lights. I was already frantic and rattled by the time I started scanning the dark countryside for the landmarks I half-remembered from Ben Jones's directions to the reservoir.

Unfortunately, I didn't know which of the farmhouses set back from the dirt road used to belong to a family named Murffit. But the gravel road was newly graded and there were plenty of fresh tire tread marks running along it like a trail of bread crumbs left behind by the drivers before me. I followed them until most of the tracks turned a corner. My headlights lit up a blue, aluminum sign as I steered the car east. It read: "St. James Irrigation District – Shiloh Reservoir." I had found the site of the Upton High School's graduation party. And the police had not found me. I was almost there.

Through the willow brush bravely growing out of the hard clay along the edge of the water, I could see the orange light of the bonfire burning on the machine sculpted shore of the reservoir. Under my novice foot, the station wagon lurched to a stop next to all the other vans and pickup trucks. I wrenched off the ignition and sat for a minute behind the steering wheel of what was technically a stolen car. I let out the breath I'd been holding and tried to quiet my pounding heartbeat. I turned my face away from the windshield. My hair still smelled like Wayne's cologne only the scent had gone from charming to cloying when it became dissociated from the boy himself. I threw open the car door, stepping out into the prairie wind.

The crowd of mostly wholesome, celebrating high school graduates did nothing to slow me down as I moved through it. Even if any of the people there recognized me, few of them had any reason to like me or even to talk to me. I only heard one cowboy holler, "Hey, junior prom was last week," as I broke through the gap in the brush.

Keeping to the shadowy perimeter, I scanned the bonfire area. Jeff was there, talking to Miss Upton High School. Her date was busy with the rest of the basketball team preparing what looked like a paraffin wax bomb to throw into the fire. Next to Jeff was Ben Jones, smiling and shaking his head at Miss Upton High School's pretty chatter. I didn't want her to see me. She was a nice girl but things had never been the same between us since word got back to her that I could do a very convincing impression of her high, ultra-feminine speaking manner.

Nudging my way through the crowd around the fire, I approached Ben Jones from behind and closed my hand around his wrist like a manacle. He startled and looked back at me.

" _C'est moi,"_ I whisper-called, withdrawing my hand.

"I'll be right back," Ben Jones said to Jeff, who hadn't noticed my arrival. That was what I preferred anyway. I couldn't be sure Jeff wouldn't over-react to me sneaking the station wagon out of the garage all by my unlicensed self.

Ben Jones rose from his seat on a thick, overturned log and followed me back to the line of willows. In the orange dark, I could see that he'd pulled his eyebrows close together, like he was a little afraid. "Why are you creeping around out here? What makes you think you need to hide? And how did you get here, anyway? Is everything okay?"

I felt breathless. "I'm fine," I said. "I'm – great. But I broke my promise to you."

"Promise?"

"Yeah. Even though I promised you I wouldn't, I went and did something rash."

"Rash?"

"Yeah. I think I might have stolen my parents' car."

"What?"

"Kids do it all the time, right?"

Ben Jones laughed and regained the ability to speak in sentences more than one word long. "How should I know? It'd probably qualify as the lesser criminal charge of 'taking a motor vehicle without consent' or something. It's hardly grand theft auto."

"Phew," I breathed. I didn't bother to ask how he knew so much about the Criminal Code. It was just the kind of obscure, esoteric fact Ben Jones was famous for being able to offer.

"Still," he persisted, "you'd better tell me what was urgent enough to propel you into a life of crime just to get out here."

"Um, I guess I realized I never thanked you properly – for telling me about your lost parakeet, about Clovis. That was a really sad story. It must have been unpleasant for you to talk about it but you told me anyway because – I don't know – you're a caring person, or whatever."

He waved his hand. "Don't worry about it. It was tough but I got over the loss a long time ago. It's okay. And I think you actually did thank me at the time I told you – profusely, if I recall correctly."

I scrubbed my face with my hands. This was not unfolding as I had hoped. With a quick change of tactics, I reached into my hair and smoothed out a thick lock of it and held it out toward Ben Jones. "Smell this," I ordered.

He hesitated.

"It's nothing gross," I assured him. "Just smell it."

Ben Jones stepped closer to me. He closed his fingers around the lock of my hair, bent his head, lowered his eyelids, and pressed the yellow strands to his nose and mouth. Then he straightened up quickly, dropping it back onto my shoulder. "What is that? Aftershave?"

"Cologne," I said. "It's called 'Intensity for Men,' I think."

He took a step backward. "Heather – what are you trying to do to me?" The question was more rhetoric than it was an actual demand. He waved a dismissive hand at me and turned back toward the bonfire.

"No!" I lunged and grabbed for his hand as he turned. I barely caught him, by his thumb. The wax bomb hit the flames and a bright yellow cloud rose over the bonfire – like a hot blast of dragon's breath. For one instant, the flash lit up every detail of every face, every hair on every head in the crowd. Voices cheered and hooted. Beside Jeff, Miss Upton High School let out an adorable little scream. And I saw every freckle on Ben Jones' face.

"The cologne," I persisted over the roar of the fire, calling to Ben Jones as the light faded back into the fire pit. "That's the smell of the biggest, fanciest robin I ever knew. And I wanted you to know that I sent him flying away from me."

Ben Jones didn't speak but he looked down at my hand as it gripped his thumb.

"You were right. I am a parakeet," I went on. "And I can't love anything else – even if there's no real chance another parakeet will ever love me in return before I die."

I thought I felt his hand twitch between my fingers. "Even if there's no chance," he echoed, more to himself than to me.

"Ben..." I turned my palm against his and threaded my fingers through the spaces between his fingers. Ben was still watching his own hand like it was an animal on the end of a leash. I forced myself past the embarrassment of him not returning my hold and kept my fingertips pressed to the back of his hand.

"So let me understand," he began, coolly. "Because the other guys who liked you weren't members of the Church –"

I still clutched his hand as I took a step closer to him. "It doesn't matter who those other guys were," I interrupted. "I'm stupid, okay. And I thought – I still think – that you're way out of my league and I shouldn't even dare to like you this way. I've been fighting it off all year. But I do like you. I like the way I feel like I'm having a revelation when you're talking to me outside in the wind, and the way you're supposed to be a genius but you can't use a computer printer. I like the way you never properly fit in here but you fell in so easily with Jeff and me. I like – just – everything."

Ben stood quietly in the orange night for a moment more before he bent his elbow to raise our intertwined hands. His free hand closed around my wrist before he unlaced our fingers, turned my palm upward, and gently dropped a kiss into it. I bowed my head, so relieved and happy I couldn't even stand to look at him. With both hands he curled mine into a fist and held it.

"Now, before we return your family car to its rightful owners, I want you to come with me," Ben said, tugging on my hand.

"Anywhere."

"Just over to the fire. Come sit by me and let the smoky, burnt poplar smell replace that stinkin' aftershave in your hair," Ben insisted.

"Purification by smoke," I mused. "I love it. It's kind of like something out of the Old Testament."

I heard him laughing softly as he folded his long arm across my shoulders. He pulled me close and kissed my forehead. "Now that's my Parakeet."

***

Look for these Parakeet Princess sequels:

Book 2: Bats in Between

Book 3: Swans in Sight

and

Jandy Branch's new series, Hurricane Hana

