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although now its more casually arranged weight seems heavier.
    “Coffee before school?” Geneva squeaks. “Annie’s already got you addicted. Hey, you think she might come back this afternoon? She said she was coming. She has to, right? Right?”
    I grope for the lunch money in my coat pocket. Louis turns as Geneva’s voice drifts into earshot, and I know he sees us by the way he squints to a place just left of my head, then looks away. He has already bought breakfast: a carton of juice and a doughnut blanketed in coconut choppings. But he won’t go yet, up the street and across a block to Bishop Brown High School, where he is a freshman in the same class as the night crawler. Now that Louis has seen me, I know he won’t go.
    Louis slides his backpack off his shoulder, then kneels down beside it to unzip one of the compartments. I watch him with the attention of a scout reporter covering my first story.
    I stroll up to the vendor, Geneva in tow.
    “One small coffee, one small orange juice,” I order. “And a cruller. To split.” I turn to Geneva. “Okay?”
    “But I wanted coffee, too,” she whines.
    “I’m older, I’m allowed to have breakfast coffee.”
    “Besides, it’ll stunt your growth,” Louis says, standing up and stepping toward us.
    “Hi,” says Geneva, looking at Louis and trying to place him. She does not know that I have been on constant Louis watch since the afternoon we met him, nearly two months ago. She does not know that, when I learned that he commutes to his school from Carroll Gardens, in Brooklyn, I calculated he would take the F train—which stops at Fourteenth and Sixth—and head east. She does not know that I altered the course of our own route to school so that we cross on Fourteenth Street, even though our school is one street below and we always have to walk down again. She does not realize that for the past two months we have been leaving home up to twenty minutes early or late for school as part of my ongoing experiment to synchronize our commute with Louis Littlebird’s.
    “Hey, I remember now,” Geneva says. “We met you in January at the Sam Flax, when we were buying book cover paper. We helped you find paint for your posters.”
    “Uh-huh,” Louis answers. He tears off the end of his straw wrapper and spits it into the wind.
    “Litter!” Geneva races after the blowing paper. Louis and I watch her spring down the sidewalk, chasing it.
    “Strung like a fiddle,” Louis says. “Your sister’s wired. Same as that day in Sam Flax, saying she would throw up if she couldn’t use the employee bathroom. I remember. She doesn’t need caffeine, that’s for sure.” He looks at me and I tilt my head and sip my coffee, petrified by the knowledge that after the cup leaves my lips, I will have to think of something to say and I have no idea what.
    Meanwhile, my brain is snapping hundreds of tiny pictures. Louis’s skin is olive dark, there’s a mole just beside his right eyebrow, he’s traded the black stud for a gold hoop in his left ear, his wrestler’s shoulders are wide and sloped and thick. I would give my whole allowance at this moment to put my hands on those shoulders. Very Ick, Mom would say.
    “What time is it?” I ask. Dumb question, obvious, stupid.
    “A little past eight.”
    “Oh, did those posters come out right? Those ones for your wrestling team?” Better. Louis smiles and swigs his juice.
    “Yeah, great. The glow-in-the-dark paint looked so pro. We had a lot of people show up to support the team. I won my weight division, too. You should have come and watched. There was enough room in the stands. You said you’d be there.”
    “Um, sorry about that.” Except that I was there, up in the way, way back bleachers. I watched Louis Littlebird wrestle and pin his opponent in the 145-pound category. Afterward, I chickened out and ran home. But what was I supposed to do, run up to him, tousle his hair, and smack his backside, along with the rest of