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guitar in his left hand. His hair was messy, hanging in front of one eye. He was too cute to look at.
    I was somehow hoping that if I didn’t move, he wouldn’t see me, wouldn’t see the hardhat and the work boots caked with mud and the dirt that had wedged beneath my fingernails and my mother’s old flannel shirt and my godforsaken canvas painter’s pants with my brand-new shiny hammer hanging from a loop.
    I just said, “Ummmm.”
    And that was it. Then I turned and ran into the house and stood at the screen door, and I could almost discern his movements behind the fence. He stood there for a minute, then returned to the big house’s porch and sat down with his guitar. He sang a little bit off-key, just the tiniest bit flat, a hint of twang in his voice. I loved twang.
    For some reason I was out of breath, as if I had one-time adolescent asthma. There were two things that helped me breathe: pot and singing. So I trudged up to my room, taking my filthy clothes off as I went, and got a joint and changed into a tank top and cutoffs and bare feet, and got my guitar—​a beat-up old Gibson with a rich, bell-like sound that my mother had played in a band in college. I opened the window and climbed out onto the roof of the porch with my guitar. I didn’t look toward Mrs. Richmond’s giant fancy house. But I could hear. He was playing a song by Squeeze: “Goodbye Girl.”
    I went out to my corner of the roof with my guitar. The sun was setting, zodiacal light glinting off the horizon. And very softly, I played along with the simple song: D, then A, then D, then G. Maybe not loud enough for him to hear me. I didn’t know.
    And then my father was yelling, his voice surely carrying over the fence: “Caraway, get off the roof! And you left your filthy clothes all over the floor. Come down here this instant and pick them up!” My father yelling, my real name, my filthy clothes. The music stopped. On his side too, the music stopped.

Chapter 3
    The point of our being in the park, besides to rehabilitate us, was to build a footbridge. Most of our summer-long program, Lynn declared, would be spent designing and constructing a three-hundred-foot bridge that would span the muddy, makeshift walkway from the giant calcium deposit, across the creek, and all the way to the stone steps of the observatory.
    â€œIt’s possible that they’ll be reopening it at some point,” he said. He didn’t look at me throughout the announcement. Did he know?
    â€œSo let me tell you how this is going to work,” he continued. “We’ll choose a design. We’ll do some waymaking, which is what they call making a path in England.” He offered no explanation of why we should be learning the British version, but okay. “We’ll be learning all the steps and all the tools needed. Got it?”
    The kids nodded their heads.
    â€œGot it?” Lynn asked again.
    A few said “Yes!” or “Got it!” but that wasn’t good enough for our lead Boy Scout, Lynn. “Let me hear you say it!” he shouted. And then the whole group, everyone but me, shouted, “Got it!” Tonya yelled the loudest, and most enthusiastically, of all. Maybe she was competing for the title of most rehabilitatable. Lynn leaned back, arms crossed, a satisfied smile on his face.
    â€œI’m going to pass this around for inspiration,” he said, displaying a book called
Footbridges from Around the World,
waving his hands past the cover like a car-show model.
    â€œThis is a thing?” I asked.
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œPeople care about footbridges enough that they published a whole book about them?”
    â€œYes,” Lynn said. “People care about all kinds of things that you have never even heard of.”
    While I waited—​with breathless anticipation, of course—​for the book to come around to me, I adjusted the