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actually turned fourteen, he confessed his age, and by then they were too close for her to make much of a fuss, although he thought he detected a new and faintly patronizing undertone in the way she spoke to him, especially about her dates, which were as frequent as her ballet schedule would allow and, he gathered, relatively chaste. She seemed more interested in the public victory of securing the attention of popular and athletic boys than the private encounters that might follow.
    “I can tell you anything,” she told Jacob often, which, to him,sounded less like a compliment than a command, the way his father said, You’ll make this family proud . Her confessional openness struck him, sometimes, less as a sign of intimacy between them than a smoke screen meant to keep him at a distance. She would chatter on, telling him how Barry Sauerland had offended her at the winter formal by implying that she was not his first-choice date or how Floyd Bishop had called her an icicle. She never seemed to notice that Jacob did not reciprocate her confidences, or not exactly. He confided in her about his father’s distant rigidity and his mother’s suffocating rigidity and about their clockwork marriage that, on rare occasions of malfunction, caused both to go wild with rage. But he did not talk to Joan about girls, even though he took dates to dances and sometimes to the movies, disguising his lack of a driver’s license as a lack of a car.
    Just before graduation, Joan tore a ligament in her foot. She had been slated to dance in a student performance in New York, where she would be seen by the directors of companies there and from San Francisco and Chicago and everywhere , she said, but now she could only lie around her house with her foot in a cast, paralyzed with fear that she would not heal, that she would miss her chance.
    “Let’s go to the beach,” Jacob said on a hot Saturday. Joan was lying on the couch with her cast propped up on a pillow, and he was sitting on the floor beside her, absently digging his fingers into the jungley olive-green pile of the carpet while they watched American Bandstand . “This is getting depressing.”
    Track was over; he was officially going to Georgetown, was officially the valedictorian, could relax for the first time in his life, and his big reward was to be pressed into constant service as Joan’s footman in her mother’s austere, gloomy den. At first, he had been eager to spend long, unsupervised hours indoors with Joan, but she was so morose that it seemed inappropriate to persist in the hope that they would finally make out, if only to dispel the boredom. Instead he made sandwiches for her that she didn’t eat, poured Tab over ice, changed the channel at her bidding, and waited for the unseen filamentsof her ligament to knit themselves back together. Even Joan’s mother, off for the weekend with one of Rick’s successors, was having more fun.
    “I can’t go to the beach,” she snapped, pointing at her cast. “Remember?”
    “You don’t have to go in the water. Let’s just get out of here. My mom will let me take the car. She’s so happy I’m leaving soon.”
    “I’ll get sand in my cast.”
    “We’ll put a bag over it.” An idea struck him. “I’ll carry you.”
    She looked skeptical.
    “I’ll put you down on a towel, and you can just lie there. It’ll be almost as good as lying on the couch all day. You’ll love it.”
    “You’re not that strong.”
    “You don’t weigh anything.” He was not entirely certain he could carry her all the way from the car to the beach, but he was willing to try. Her injury made her more approachable, somehow. Not that he was afraid of her. He was just aware of her boundaries, of the prickly force field around her. Standing over her, though, while she lay hobbled and clutching her plastic cup of soda, he decided to be daring. “Stand up,” he said.
    His authoritative tone seemed to surprise her. She set her drink on the