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know, the day that immediately follows Thursday. What are you up to?”
    “Nothing. Just going to Anna's.”
    “Oh.”
    “What?” I said, meaning: what's with the look?
    “Nothing. I just thought maybe you'd want to come to the basketball game on Friday night. Bronwyn said she'd give you a ride.”
    “Much as I'd love to be your little cheerleader and sit in the special section roped off for Fans of Silas, I actually have a life.”
    “Whatever, kid. Just asking,” he said, and then he pinched the skin on my elbow really hard because he knows that's the one part of the human skin where we don't have any real nerve endings.
    It was a perfectly reasonable question. Silas knows that on most Friday nights I have nothing to do. I hang around at home, usually with Anna, sometimes with Silas and Bronwyn. My dad is out a lot and on those nights Mom likes to take me to plays and lectures and stuff like that on campus. When I go with her I pretend I'm in college and the guy who's playing the lead in the play is my boyfriend and I'm about to introduce him to my mother and then we'll all go out to dinner and maybe even have a glass of wine.
    The truth is I haven't had a boyfriend since seventh grade. That's two whole years. His name was Michael and he still goes to ODS but this year we don't have any classes together.Back then he was really skinny with kind of a big nose and a mass of tight black curls. Now he's filled out and gotten taller and his nose isn't so big and he goes out with Isabella Rothenberg.
    He called me up out of the blue one day and said he had something to tell me.
    “I can't just come out and say it, so you're gonna have to guess,” he said.
    “Okay. Can you at least give me a hint?”
    “Sure. It's a three-word sentence with a subject, a verb and a direct object.”
    We both had Ms. Lockhart for English and he was the star student. Not that this was such a complicated or brilliant little hint, but it did show how he couldn't stop himself from being the class brainiac.
    “Hmmm. I don't know.” I was playing dumb. Why else would this boy who I hadn't really talked to before call me at home on a Wednesday afternoon to say he had something to tell me? He liked me! A boy liked me! And he was about to tell me he liked me! I remember sitting there with the phone pressed to my ear, writing our names side by side and then enclosing them in a sad little heart.
    “Okay. I'm the subject. You're the direct object and the verb is ‘to like.’ As in I—like—you. That's what I called to tell you.”
    I knew it.
    He asked me if I wanted to go out with him and I didn't hesitate in saying yes. We were a couple all the way up until the summer. We were part of an elite group, cool enough to begoing out, which didn't really mean all that much. We almost never went anywhere together. Then summer came and we didn't see each other for three whole months. When we returned for eighth grade he acted like we'd never made out and he'd never put his hand up my shirt, which he had done on five separate occasions. Not that he was mean; he just treated me like some girl who happened to be in Ms. Lockhart's English class with him back when we were both in the seventh grade.
    When eighth grade started and I wasn't a couple with Michael I went back to being Anna's best friend. The privileged world of those who have boyfriends closed its iron doors to me.
    When Friday finally rolled around, I was ready. It was time to meet new people who didn't know me, not that everyone at ODS really knew me, they only thought they did.
    I'd be lying if I didn't say that I was a little nervous about getting into trouble with Mom and Dad. Things had been pretty easy in our house lately. I hadn't heard Mom and Dad fighting in a really long time and I didn't want to give them any new ammunition. I figured that if I got caught lying and sneaking off to a party, then they might start fighting and blaming each other about whose fault it was that I screwed