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Theo during break. She can’tmeet us for lunch.”
    “You didn’t see what’s under the tissue paper,” he said.
    I tentatively lifted the thin, crackly paper to find an envelope with Whitford’s letterhead on it, from which I extracted three tickets to the premiere of Exposed   at the Cannon Film Festival, followed by a panel discussion with Sharon Blake, Shane Sands, Paul Wolf, and...   Danny Masters . I dropped my jaw and looked at Georgie, who looked as if he was ready to shriek like a fifteen-year-old girl at a boy band concert. No doubt I was wearing the same look.
    “Wha...how...how did you get these?” I stammered. “It was pure luck, let me tell you. I managed to get ’em online mere seconds after they went on sale. And they sold out in like five minutes. You do know that the other tickets are for me and Theo, of course. Poor Marcus has to work. And you can have Danny; I’m all for Shane.”
    “Marcus is OK with that?”
    “He’s got his own crushes.”
    I stared as if I were holding the last Golden Ticket to the Wonka factory. “I don’t know what to say...thank you doesn’t even begin to cover it.” And then it hit me: “My God, Danny Masters is going to be in the same room as me. OK, so it’s a big room, with a stage, and he won’t even know I’m there. But still.” Then I squealed and hugged Georgie. “I can’t believe you did this for me! All of you!”
    Georgie’s bright blue eyes sparkled and he smiled widely after our hug. “You’re welcome,” he said. “And we’re coming over tonight to watch your stupid Gen-X movies  with you even though you’re totally germafied. We’ll do the Must Talk then.”
    He was lying about the movies being stupid. I knew he loved them even more than I did.

    Georgie, Theo, and I sat in my bed, huddled under the thick comforter, separated by pillows, and snitchingpopcorn from two enormous bowls I usually reserved for Super Bowl parties (I was relegated to “thegermafied bowl”). I had wanted to do a marathon of   To Catch a Thief ,   Charade , and   The Philadelphia Story , but Georgie and Theo won the coin toss, as did John Hughes, and we were in the middle of   Sixteen Candles , to be followed by   Ferris Bueller’s Day Off   and   Pretty in Pink . We rarely made it to the end ofthe second movie when we planned these marathons, but still insisted on lining up all three. The nighttable beside me was littered with Kleenex, Nyquil, Tylenol, Ricola lozenges, a digital thermometer—everything but a prescription pad. Along with a classic princess phone (restored and painted baby pink,

    and working), a stack of novels occupied the other table, the top one half-read, the others waiting in anticipation. One of the perks of working at Whitford’s was the 30 percent discount. There was something about the smell of crisp pages, the weight of the cover in my hands, the bending of the spine that just couldn’t be duplicated by any technological marvel. I liked counting the pages to see how far I’d come or how much farther I had to go. I liked to keep one page between my fingers, as if it couldn’t wait to be turned. Sometimes I even liked to make notes in the margins.
    Not even halfway into the movie, we had gotten caught up in one of our favorite games—recasting movies of any generation with members of the Brat Pack.   The Great Escape ,   Harry Potter ,   Star Wars   , you name it. The epic or serial films were especially adaptable to this game. Theo was put in the position to settle the argument about who would make a better Edward in   Twilight —Rob Lowe or Emilio Estevez. I was adamant that it had to be Rob, while Georgie was gangbusters for Emilio. Runner-up, of course, would be relegated to Jacob. “I don’t really care,” said Theo, “but Andrew McCarthy is so Mike Newton.”
    Just as the school dance scene began in   Sixteen Candles , I asked Georgie about the Must Talk noteyet again.
    He took a