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Revolutionary War and the rough draft of an essay on Brave New World .
    Lincoln knew what he was looking for; somewhere near the middle, there it was …Sam’s handwriting. Purple ink. Too many capital letters.
    “THINGS LINCOLN IS GOOD AT.”

    SHE’D MADE THIS list for him senior year when he was trying to choose his major. Lincoln had already known where he was going to college—wherever Sam was going.
    His mother had wanted him to stay close to home. He’d been offered a regent’s scholarship at the state university just forty-five minutes away. But Sam would never go there. Sam wanted to go somewhere big and important and FAR AWAY. And Lincoln wanted to go with her. Whenever his mom brought up the scholarship, how nice the state campus was, how he could come home to do his laundry …Lincoln would think of Sam loading her things into her dad’s minivan and heading west like the last sunset. He could do his own laundry.
    So he let Sam do all the school shopping. She sent away for brochures and went on weekend trips to see campuses. “I want to be near the ocean, Lincoln, the ocean! I want to feel the tides. I want to look like one of those girls who live by the ocean, with the windblown hair and the color in their cheeks. And I want mountains, too, at least one mountain. Is that too much to ask? And trees. Not a whole forest, necessarily. I’d settle for a thicket. Scenery. I want scenery!” Something to chew on, Lincoln thought.
    Sam picked a college in California—not too far from the ocean, not too far from the mountains—with a tree-lined campus and a robust theater program. Lincoln was accepted, too, and offered half a dozen scholarships.
    Technically, he said to his mother, it’s the same amount of scholarship money the state school is offering. “Yes,” she said, “but the tuition is four times as much.”
    “You’re not paying for it,” he said.
    “What a mean thing to say.”
    “I didn’t mean it to be mean.” He didn’t.
    He knew she felt bad that she couldn’t pay for college. Well, he knew that she felt bad sometimes. College was his thing. She expected him to pay for it the same way she had expected him to pay for his own Nintendo. “You can have it if you want it, if you’re willing to pay for it. Save your money.”
    “I don’t have any money,” he’d said in the ninth grade.
    “Be thankful, Lincoln. Money is a cruel thing. It’s the thing that stands between you and the things you want and the people you love.”
    “How does money come between you and the people you love?”
    “It’s coming between us right now.”
    It wasn’t really the tuition that bothered his mother about California. She didn’t want him to go to California because she didn’t want him to go. She didn’t want him to go so far. And she didn’t want him to go so far with Sam.
    His mother didn’t like Sam.
    She thought Sam was self-centered and manipulative. (“Pot. Kettle. Black,” Eve said.) His mother thought Sam was loud. And pushy. And too full of opinions. She complained when Lincoln spent too much time at Sam’s house. But when he brought Sam home, that was worse. Sam would do something—rearrange the spice cabinet, turn on too many lights, say that she couldn’t stand green peppers or anything with walnuts or Susan Sarandon—that irritated his mother. “Is she always like that, Lincoln?”
    “Like what?”
    “Is she always so much ?”
    “Yes,” he’d said, trying not to sound as happy as he felt. “Always.”
    His mother tolerated the Sam situation, mostly quietly, for about a year. Then she started talking to Lincoln about how young he was, too young to be so serious about one person. She asked him to slow down, to think about seeing other girls. She said to him, “It’s like buying shirts, Lincoln. When you go shopping for shirts, you don’t buy the first shirt you try on. Even if you like it. You keep looking, you keep trying things on. You make sure you find the