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they shouldn’t invite you without inviting me,
I thought. Instead I said, “That would be hard, I guess.”
    â€œYeah. Because explaining everything . . . us, you know. It’s not . . . easy.”
    â€œOh,” I said. We kept playing. But I wasn’t paying attention anymore. I didn’t even care when he took both my rooks. Normally I care a lot.
    â€œI’m sleeping over at Peter’s tonight,” Curtis said after a while.
    â€œOh. Okay.”
    â€œYou know, his mom and stuff . . . I don’t want to be late . . .”
    It was not late, but he left anyway. I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t.
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Monday, July 1
    D.J. had two basketball games today. On the way to Prophetstown she didn’t talk at all because she was so nervous.
    I walked Jack Russell George same as always (we now play actual fetch instead of just catch-and-run-away!) and guess who was in Z’s apartment when we got back: Z! She was sitting at her kitchen table with a box of colored markers. “What do you think?” she asked, holding up a Dog Days of Prophetstown poster. On the back she had written I SAY D.J. ! in big bubble letters.
    You would not think of my grandmother as a crazy sports fan, but you would be wrong. Z is actually quite a fan in her yoga hippie kind of way. She has been watching D.J. Schwenk play basketball for years—even before Curtis and I became friends. She says her Wisconsin heritage left her with a love of milk and a love of basketball. Especially girls’ basketball. Especially good girls’ basketball.
    â€œDon’t you have a sign made?” Z asked. “Oh, never mind, we’re late already. Come on, darling! We need to envelop the court with our karma!”
    I am glad I do not play basketball against D.J. Schwenk. Yes, this morning D.J. was so nervous in the car that she could not talk. But walking out from the locker room, she hid her nervousness extremely well. On the court she looked even more like a lion than she normally does. She looked like she had picked out one player for dinner and another one for dessert.
    We had an amazingly good time, Z and I. Z waved her I SAY D.J.! sign, and she kept asking the man in front of us why the umpire was blowing his whistle. I think she was flirting. It was nice to see other people in the stands cheering for D.J. too. D.J. has a lot more fans than she realizes, I think. I was proud to know her. And Z was tickled that D.J. had visited her apartment and liked it so much. “That girl ate my Oreos!” Z said to the man in front of us. Somehow it did not sound crazy when she said it. It just made us laugh.
    I had a question for Z, though, and during halftime I worked up the courage to ask it: “How bad is the air in Rome?” I cannot stop worrying about this. Seriously: Miss Hesselgrave talks about bad Roman air all the time.
    â€œOh, darling!” Z laughed. “I should have told you!” It turns out Rome actually did used to have
bad air
—or, as they say in Italian,
mal’aria
—but the real problem was mosquitoes. Mosquitoes flew around at night and bit people and made them sick with malaria, only at the time no one figured out it was the bugs. They all just thought it was the air. Isn’t that fascinating? I feel so much better now.
    I wish I could tell Curtis about Roman malaria and paranoid Miss Hesselgrave and how even she didn’t figure out it was mosquitoes. He would find it fascinating too. But he and I have not communicated since last week. I think something is wrong.
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Saturday, July 6
    Curtis and I have broken up. I know: how can we break up when we were never going out? But we did.
    It started because he came over to get ice cream. We didn’t say much. We just walked over to Jorgensens’ for our chocolate and vanilla. We didn’t even talk about Boris. I wanted to talk about