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road—six huge buildings with cheerful names like Ravenscar and Coldbrooke. I tried to look purposeful (but not businesslike) and I kept going. I was beginning to wonder if 71 even existed. And then I passed it. It was on a corner, a smashed-up, boarded-up, covered-in-bird-shit old pub. The signs had been painted out in black and the number 71 was daubed on the front door in white gloss. It didn’t look like anybody but the pigeons lived there. There was no way I was going in.
    I stopped at the curb a little way past and turned around. I was balancing my bike with one foot on the ground, looking for my mobile to call Bee and tell her it was a big nothing, when I saw the van parked outside the building, around the corner. It was an oldambulance with long double doors at the back and stripy curtains. The driver’s door was open onto the pavement and Harper Greene was sitting there, his seat pushed back, both feet up on the windshield. He was reading a book. For maybe ten seconds I stood quite still. His hair was cut so short you could see the skin beneath, the shape of his skull. I liked his face. I could break it down and say his nose was straight and his eyes were brown and all that, but it wouldn’t work like his face worked, together all at once. Like Jack used to say when something good happened, you had to be there. I watched the slow movements of his breathing, his quick eyes scanning the page. I breathed in hard and I thought, What would Bee do?
    When I got off my bike and started pushing it toward him, he looked around and smiled like he’d been expecting me. Then he got up and disappeared over the back of his seat and opened the double doors at the back, as if that was the way you received guests in an old ambulance, like everyone knew that was the way you answered the door.
    We said hello at the same time. I wasn’t doing a great job of looking him in the eye.
    â€œI’m Harper,” he said.
    I nodded and said, “I know,” but I was supposed to say, “I’m Rowan,” so I did, when I finally realized.
    â€œPleased to meet you,” he said, and he put his handsin his pockets, I guess instead of shaking mine.
    â€œIs this where you live?” I said.
    â€œAt the moment,” he said. “I move around.”
    â€œMarket Road?” I said.
    And he laughed and said, “Yeah, very scenic, but the parking is free.”
    I asked him where he was from. He said, “New York. You?”
    â€œAround here,” I said. I pointed at the pub. “Who lives in there?”
    â€œOh, no one,” he said. “I guess they moved out a while ago. It’s wrecked in there.”
    â€œI like your ambulance.”
    He smiled. “Me too.” He said he got it “from a guy” for hardly anything because the guy was going back to New Zealand and he wanted it to have a good home. It was strange, Harper talking about stuff while the thing I wanted him to talk about just waited.
    â€œDo you want to come in?” he said.
    â€œI don’t think so.”
    I was still holding on to my handlebars. He asked me if I was worried about my bike. I shook my head. I said, “Why did you give it to me?”
    â€œWhat? The thing you dropped?”
    â€œI didn’t drop anything.”
    â€œI saw you,” he said, and he was smiling, like he couldn’t believe I was arguing with what he knew tobe true. “You dropped it on the doorstep of the shop and I picked it up.”
    I told him I thought it was a joke at first. “I thought you just gave stuff to people for a laugh. I thought you were trying to embarrass me in front of everyone.”
    He said that would be too weird and we both laughed, but only a little.
    â€œWhat’s weird,” I said, “is that I’ve never seen that photo before. But it does belong to me.”
    He asked me what I meant and I said, “It’s of somebody I know.”
    â€œIsn’t