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door, no one was there. Dumbfounded, Maps looked around his room again. There it was again—a gentle tap tap tap .
    His window.
    Maps plastered himself against the far wall. His window was covered by curtains, and if there was a monster or a bird on the other side, well, it could bloody well stay out there.
    “Little pig, little pig,” someone on the other side of the window whispered, “let me in.”
    What. The. Shit.
    Maybe it was just Benji, for some reason or another, playing a trick on him in the middle of the night. Or maybe it was just a dream. Maps pinched his arm.
    Nope, not a dream.
    Like the true soldier of bravery he was, Maps walked to the window and pulled back one of the curtains. On the other side of the window—the second story window—somehow, was Lane.
    “Open up,” Lane whispered. “It’s freezing.”
    Maps pulled open the curtains and unlatched the hinge on the side of the window then slid it open. He had no idea what Lane was doing outside his window or how he got there, but the last thing he wanted was to let the guy freeze.
    Lane slipped inside and shook himself like a dog just in from the rain. Then he looked at Maps and smiled.
    Maps swallowed hard. Then remembered something.
    “Did you just call me a pig?” Maps huffed, folding his arms over his chest.
    Lane laughed quietly. “Yeah, sorry. I thought it would be funny.”
    “How did you get up here?”
    “I climbed the lattice.”
    “Okay. Why?”
    “To get into your room without anyone seeing me.” Lane shrugged.
    “Well, yeah. I mean, why are you in my room, especially at—” Maps looked at the clock on his desk—“almost one in the morning?”
    “I couldn’t sleep, and I wanted to talk to you. Then I looked over and saw that your light was on and thought you were still awake.”
    Lane gave Maps a once-over, starting at his toes and ending at Maps’ obviously disheveled hair. Lane grinned wider.
    “What?” Maps demanded.
    “Nice pajamas.”
    Maps looked down. “They’re robots. My mom bought them for me for Christmas.”
    “Uh huh,” Lane replied. He started unzipping his hoodie.
    “Yeah, well, nice, uh…”
    Maps watched Lane unzip his hoodie and toss it to the ground. Lane was wearing gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt underneath.
    Lane didn’t look right in Maps’ bedroom. Lane was too… something. He was obviously much too large for most of Maps’ furniture. Maps figured that Lane could probably take up the entirety of Maps’ bed if he star-fished out his limbs. Maps found himself blinking rapidly at that thought.
    Just as Maps was about to tell Lane to Spiderman his way back over to his own room, Lane moved past him, further away from the window. Lane walked up the far wall and stared. Maps went over and stood next to him.
    “What is all this?” Lane whispered.
    Maps looked up at the wall Lane was facing.
    Often enough, Maps forgot they were even there—they, being hundreds of taped, tacked, and glued pieces of paper, each exploring a different experiment, diagram, graph, chart, or map. He’d started when he was younger; he’d rip pages out of his mother’s cookbooks and scribble his ideas all over them. Not wanting to forget his genius ideas from one minute to the next, Maps would tape the experiment outline on his wall. But then he’d need another piece of paper to write down supplies, and another for the subjects and factors affecting each experiment. He’d need maps of the places he found tools for each experiment, or where each experiment took place. Some were city maps that had lazy red circles and scribbles all over them, some were much older ones drawn in crayon of Maps’ own backyard. There were etchings and drawings of findings, experiments gone right, and experiments gone oh-so wrong.
    But something else caught Lane’s eye, because he walked over to Maps’ bed, crawled up on it, and kneeled in front of the wall the headboard was against.
    “Wow,” Lane said, and for some reason