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jewelry, but this was man jewelry on Amiel’s neck, so I studied the disk of black stone lying warm on the soft spot between his collar bones and shivered again. I must have breathed in and out, though I’m not sure how. Amiel read the note or seemed to read it, and he looked up at Hoyt’s house again. He neither nodded nor shook his head at me while the purple jacaranda leaves remained supernaturally purple and the fog closed everything in. Amiel put the paper in his pocket and made the sign I had seen him make earlier, his hand in the shape of the letter
C
.
    “
¿Sí?
” I asked, and he nodded. Before I could figure out what it meant to say “yes” in this situation, he had walked away.

Twelve
    “W hat were you and Marcel Marceau
le
signing about?” Robby asked while we waited in the car for my mother to find her phone in the guesthouse and drive us to school.
    “Were you camped out in the xylosma hedge again, Mr. Double-oh-seven?” I asked.
    Robby just tapped on his backpack with his wide, flat fingers. I didn’t know why we were so rude to each other now. We’d been really good friends our whole lives, and now that I lived in his guesthouse, we sounded like Greenie Coombs and her brother, who bickered twenty-four hours a day.
    “Who’s Marsell Marso, anyhow?” I decided to ask, hoping that would be non-hostile.
    “You don’t know who
Marcel Marceau
is? Marceau was a French actor,” he deigned to tell me. “A hugely famous mime.That’s why I thought you’d know. Being so mime-freaked and all.”
    There are times when being good-looking and intelligent make up for sarcasm and bitterness, but this was not one of those times.
    “Amiel’s not just a mime,” I said. “He juggles.”
    “It’s not his choice of self-expression that I’m worried about,” Robby said. “You probably shouldn’t flirt with him.”
    “I wasn’t flirting! I don’t see why I can’t talk to someone who has a job here. Your dad’s friendly.”
    “That’s different.”
    “No, it isn’t,” I said, though I knew it was.
    “Can he mime hanging himself?” Robby asked as my mother hurried toward the car holding her coffee cup.
    She opened the car door as I said, “Just stop it.”
    “Stop what?” she asked.
    “Nothing,” I said.
    It didn’t feel like I was headed toward any good discoveries, but I was. I was headed, though I didn’t know it, for the river.

Thirteen
    B y the start of second period, the foggy haze had started to burn off. I wanted to sit in the sun and read or just look at the newly visible turquoise sky and not think about my father or what my note would do to Amiel, but this was school, so Greenie and I just kept shambling toward the redbrick bunker where we had drama with Ms. Grant.
    Greenie Coombs became my best friend the last summer of making things up. We were in fourth grade, way too old for playing with Barbies, which is why we were so close: we had to protect our secret. We wanted to give Barbie and Ken a wedding—not just a wedding, actually, but a rehearsal dinner, ceremony, reception, and honeymoon. It was very involved. We found a birdhouse that looked like a chapel at a garage sale and spent five whole dollars on it. We made breath of heaven flower arrangements for the tiny dinner tables and a purplelantana bridal bouquet and a redwood Lincoln Log reception hall and satin dresses for the whole bridal party. Greenie was good at turning one thing into another—at seeing how an acorn cap could be a goblet—and I was good at sewing and believing. Thinking back, it feels like the last time, before Amiel, that I was happy.
    Greenie had a pretty face even then, but she was heavy around the middle and her thighs rubbed together. Her hair was black and straight, like a horse’s. Her skin was olive and her eyes were green, which was why her brother had given her the nickname. She breathed with her mouth open, which even I could see made her look dim-witted, though she wasn’t, not at