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good.”
    She saw him give their parents a quick thumbs-up, and then he checked his pedometer. “Oops, running on empty.” He began taking enormous steps, trying to cover as much ground as he could with each one.
    They passed a family whose kids turned, giggling, to watch Jamie lunge down the street.
    “Sorry,” Jamie said to Bridge. “Is this horribly embarrassing?”
    Bridge licked her ice cream and smiled. “Well, yeah,” she said. “But only for you.”
    “Maybe they’re staring at your cat ears,” Jamie said, lunging again.
    “Possible,” Bridge said. “But I’m pretty sure they were laughing at you.”
    Then Jamie grinned. Bridge knew this particular grin. It was his Hermey-the-elf grin.
    “Oh no,” she said.
    “ ‘I don’t need anybody,’ ” Jamie said. “ ‘I’m independent !’ ” It was a line from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the Christmas special. They both knew the whole thing by heart because when they were little they liked to act out scenes for their parents. Jamie was always Hermey, the elf who wants to be a dentist, and Bridge was always Rudolph.
    She picked up the scene where he had left off: “ ‘Yeah? Me too. I’m…whatever you said. Independent.’  ”
    “ ‘Hey, what do you say we both be independent together, huh?’ ”

    “ ‘You wouldn’t mind my red nose?’ ” Bridge asked.
    “ ‘Not if you don’t mind me being a dentist,’ ” Jamie said, lunging again.
    Bridge ran to catch up with him, then stuck out her hand to shake. “ ‘It’s a deal.’ ”

THE NINE THOUSAND THINGS
    “Aw!” Bridge said, handing the poem back to Emily. “It’s sweet.” They were standing at their lockers before fourth period.
    Emily had written about her little brother, Evan, who was into fortune-telling and robots. The last line was about how he always slept in the bottom bunk of her bed when he had bad dreams, and reading it made Bridge remember that she’d had a nightmare the night before, the usual one, where she was wrapped up tight like a mummy. By the time she’d fought her way out of it, kicking the sheet and blanket off her bed, her mother was next to her, touching her forehead and reminding her to replace the scary picture in her mind the way they’d practiced, with an image of a cold blue sky and clouds moving across it.
    Em gazed fondly at her paper. “Yeah, I wrote it this morning in math. When you’re weak on effort, it helps to be big on heart.”
    “That is so cynical!” Tab said.
    “Does he really come to your room when he has a nightmare?” Bridge asked.
    “Only since the divorce.”

    Em’s parents were the kind who wanted to talk about everything. Her mom wanted to know what Em’s friends were “into.” She did mother-daughter manicures on Saturdays, and noticed a girl on the train with a thin braid pulled to one side and then practiced so she could do it for Emily. And Em’s dad reminded Bridge of Em’s mom—he watched reality TV and always knew what meme was going around. They were more alike than any other parents Bridge knew. So it was weird that they were the ones who got divorced.
    “Let’s say everyone has nine thousand things about themselves,” Em had explained to Tab and Bridge in sixth grade, “and say two people fall in love because it seems like all their things match up. But what they don’t know is that only like a thousand of their things actually match up. My mom says most people who get married don’t even know those other eight thousand things about themselves yet. So it could happen to anyone.”
    Now Em belonged to the school’s Banana Splits Book Club, for kids whose parents had split up. They read books about other kids whose parents had split up, and talked about them. When Bridge asked her about it, Em just shrugged and said, “Hey, it’s free cookies. Mr. P gets black-and-whites from Nussbaum’s.”
    That meant she didn’t want to talk about it. But she did say that after