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“We should go.”
    I rose and followed him along the row where the grapes were fat and gold, clarified. He seemed older, walking ahead of me in the slanted light, his shoulders square under his navy T-shirt, his neck straight and stiff as the standpipe that threw a blade of shadow into the road.
    We’d reached the graveled entrance to Berna and Nelson’s driveway.
    “Well so long,” he said. There was a thumbprint of dust under his right eye. His lips were tight.
    “So long,” I said back. I turned into the drive but had gone only twenty or thirty feet before I heard footsteps pelting behind me. I spun around and was surprised to see, once he reached me, that Patrick was crying. His face was twisted and damp. And before I could think of what to say, he grabbed my shoulders and kissed me. He was taller by several inches and when he bent in, the kiss landed hard and wrong near my nose. Still, his facestayed there for a moment, wet, insistent, and then he said something. I hate you ? I’ll miss you ? His voice was so soggy I couldn’t make the words out. It sounded as if he was talking through wet paper, and then he pulled away and ran home.
    I didn’t miss Bakersfield exactly, but bits of memory tugged at me, like children not wanting to be forgotten for a moment. Some recollections were eerily available, like the smell of alfalfa, green and malty in early summer. Like jack-rabbits and kissing bugs. I hadn’t told Patrick I was moving to Illinois. I hadn’t said anything about leaving to anyone, but as the school day neared its end, Mrs. Ortiz, my eighth-grade teacher, had announced it to the whole class. Didn’t they want to say good-bye? Patrick sat in the second row, up and diagonal from me. I glanced at him as Mrs. Ortiz made her announcement. He looked as if he’d been shot in the foot with Myron’s BB gun.
    Patrick never did say good-bye to me. In fact, he never said a word after the day he’d kissed me. Still, I wanted to say something to him . I wasn’t sure what, but something . When I climbed on the bus, I saw he was sitting on the back bench seat with Myron and Leonard Sparks and Joey Carnelle, tough boys who used the time on the bus to chew tobacco. They spit the slimy brown juice right out on the floorboards, and the kids all knew to lift their feet when the bus rolled to a stop, to spare their shoes. Patrick never sat with those guys—they were Myron’s friends, not his—but he did that day, and I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like he might have a plug of chew in his mouth too.
    The ride home was long and lurching, made doubly so because I could feel Patrick at the back of the bus not looking at me. Finally, our stop came. I sat still, waiting for Patrick to pass first, and he did. I heard the tread of his sneakers in the aisle, rubber on rubber; heard his breath, and the zschub-zschub of his jean knees, one against the other; heard (or thought I heard) his jaw clench and unclench, blood thrumming just under his skin, hispupils narrowing to pinheads. Then, just as he passed my seat, I felt a sharp, stinging pain in my thigh. Looking down I saw a yellow school pencil sticking straight up out of the top of my leg, perched there like a quill pen in an inkwell. He’d stabbed me and kept on walking. I thought I might be sick. The quilted aluminum of the seat back reeled, rivets spinning. I closed my eyes and could smell saliva and the mint of Copenhagen congealing on the floorboards, could smell Adorn hair spray on the girl in the seat ahead of me and, more subtle, fallow alfalfa fields beyond the open window. The bus grumbled. I knew it would drive away in a few seconds, leaving me stranded with a longer walk home, so I yanked the pencil up and out as hard as I could. Even so, the lead tip remained lodged there, like shrapnel, like a kissing bug’s kiss, and the skin quickly rose up all around, preserving it.
    It was still there, that piece of lead, like an inkier freckle in a constellation