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he brought his hands to her face he could feel her warm breath on his wrists. They’d spent the summer trying to catch one, and there one was, sitting right beside them when they’d just about given up.
    “Like she is. You know.”
    But he didn’t know, really. And neither did Kate. So they let the subject drop.
----
    After Central Ave. came Washington, then Madison, then Jefferson, and once the bus rumbled past the Berkwoods’ pine tree, Peter could see his own driveway.
    “We’re gonna have a war,” Kate said as she leaned into him to get a better look out the window. Half the kids had taken out their lunchesand fished out the snacks. The bus smelled like potato chips and Hi-C. “Two teams. Twenty minutes to make ammo and then the war begins.”
    The bus bounced them up and down, jolted them forward and back. Branches, sky, and then he saw it: the maroon of her car. Beside him, he knew Kate spotted it, too.
    “Okay, well, you’ll ask, right?” Kate said. “You might be allowed.”
    “Yeah,” Peter said.
    They tumbled down the bus steps, one after the other, into the afternoon. “See ya maybe,” Peter said, hitching his backpack up on his shoulder. The clouds were backlit, phosphorescent. Kate stood there for a moment like she’d forgotten something, and then she ran up her steps and into her house.
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    He found her in the near dark of the kitchen, pulling the yellow skins off a pile of chicken drumsticks. The cuffs of her shirt kept brushing the raw meat. “You can do this, can’t you?” she said without turning around. It was twelve twenty in the afternoon. They wouldn’t eat dinner for another six hours. She usually twisted her hair away at the top of her head when she was cooking, but today her hair was loose around her face, stringy. He tried to read what was coming in the set of her shoulders. He put down his backpack, unzipped his coat. She’d not eaten anything at dinner the night before, and he’d watched his father glance at her as he told a long, drawn-out story about something that had happened at work. He made himself a drink and then rattled the ice cubes around the bottom of the glass. She had a way of cringing and closing her eyes as if against the sight of something too painful to look at straight on, except it was just Peter, just his father. They were just sitting at a table. Just talking about stuff that had happened to them that day.
    “Mom’s not feeling great,” Brian Stanhope said when she finally went upstairs to lie down. He seemed to not notice her leaving, but once shewas gone he made himself another drink and then broke open a baked potato, dropped a slice of butter on the steaming white inside. “She’s on her feet all day, you know? Not like an office job.” He reached for the salt.
    “You’re on your feet all day, too, right?”
    “Ah, not all day,” Brian Stanhope said. “And it’s different for women. They need—I don’t know.”
    Peter wondered if the way his mother acted sometimes was related to the reason Renee Otler was allowed to go to the bathroom in the middle of assembly even though no one was ever allowed to go during assembly. Kate wouldn’t talk about it on the bus. When they were alone out at the rocks, she said that he better not tell any of the boys, but Renee had gotten her you-know-what on the playground the day before and the school nurse had showed her how to use a pad. She was the first of the girls, as far as Kate knew. “I’ll probably be last,” she added as she pulled her T-shirt tight across her chest and frowned at what she saw there.
    When Kate said “pad,” Peter felt a shock go through him and he could feel his face burn. Kate tilted her head with interest. “You know about periods, right?”
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    “Sure. Just like this?” Peter said now, pulling at the edge of the slippery chicken skin. The kitchen was so dark that Peter had trouble making out the bowls she’d set up on the table: eggs beaten in one, a pyramid of