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since he already told the Wagners, Dad basically opened the party to Army People, which I know is exactly what Mom didn’t want. Because if you invite one army couple, others come. I guess I’ll just have to tell her.
    “Come on, Lane. Everyone’s already in the parking lot.” Steph starts leaping across the field. I turn away from watching Dad and run to catch up.

4
    W E SIT IN THE way back of the Wagners’ wood-sided station wagon, in the part with no seats, far away from Steph’s parents so that we can talk freely about the war fort and the kids from the other side.
    “You know Jason McCullough?” Steph lowers her voice and her eyes flit to the front seat, checking to make sure that her parents aren’t eavesdropping. She pulls her T-shirt over her knees and then wraps her arms tight around them, folding herself into a box with a head on top and sneakers poking out the bottom.
    I shake my head. Steph leans in closer to me.
    “He lives over on 6th Street and goes to Fort Bryan West, but he stayed back like three times, and I heard that when the kids from the other side built their war fort it was his idea to bury a machete and a BB-gun in a footlocker underneath the ground. But that could be a lie. But anyhow, you’d maybe remember him from soccer camp.”
    I think back to the sweaty herds of kids from soccer camp. “Is he, um, really really tall with brown hair in a bowl cut?” I ask.
    “No. Well, maybe. He’s not that tall and I think he has a buzz cut now. Anyhow, he’s a psychopathical—no, wait—pathological liar and once he stole a bike and his dad put him out in the yard on a dog chain to punish him.”
    “Lie. That’s a lie.”
    Steph looks stricken. With her pinkie, she slices an X across her chest. “Cross my heart, I heard that. This kid is loco. Crazier than Charlie.”
    I ignore that last comment. “What’s a pathological liar?”
    “Someone who lies because they can’t help it; for them a lie is as good as the truth. It’s kind of like a disease.”
    I thought about my family and wondered if this is what had happened to us?
    “You girls want macaroni and cheese or peanut-butter-and-jelly?” Mrs. Wagner twists around from the front seat to look at us. She smiles wide, like she can’t wait to get started making lunch. Her excitement over things like this is partly why Mom has a problem getting along with her. “She burbles,” Mom says. Still, Mrs. Wagner’s always trying to get Mom over for lunch or a game of racquetball, and Mom always pretends that she has errands or a headache.
    “Peanut-butter-and-jelly,” Steph and I shout. “Grape jelly,” Steph says.
    “Please,” I add. Mrs. Wagner smiles even wider, dropping her mouth open.
    “Sweet girl,” she says to me. “I wish my Stephanie was so polite and sweet.”
    The Wagners live in Fort Bryan too, but on Fourth Street where all the captains live. I live on a different street because Dad’s a lieutenant colonel. The army organizes everything so nobody has any questions. If you know the rank of someone’s dad (or mom, but it usually doesn’t happen that way), then you pretty much know where the family lives, and the higher ranks get the bigger houses. It’s not so different from the regular world; it’s just that with the families and ranks divided up as square as a TV dinner, there’s less guessing about who has what.
    The thing is, I know that Mrs. Wagner wants Steph to be my friend just because of my dad’s rank. Even if I liked acid rock music and wore skimpy halter tops, like Major Franken’s daughter, Mrs. Wagner would want Steph to be friends with me. Steph and I think it’s funny, but then Steph also doesn’t seem to go out of her way to make any friends whose dads are lieutenants or privates or even captains like her own dad.
    Air conditioners blast night and day in the Wagners’ house. Their floors are a spongy blue ocean of carpeting and the house is decorated completely with furniture that they’ve