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from Sung Chu Mei. First of all, they feature two of my favorite foods: pasta and peanuts. Dad says there aren’t actual peanuts in the sauce—that it’s sesame I’m tasting—but to me, cold sesame noodles taste like creamy, but spicy, peanut butter on spaghetti. If that sounds gross to you, all I can say is you need to come to Brooklyn and try them—and then, like me, you will dream of them whenever you leave home and can’t have them. I hope to someday personally go to China and thank the people there for the best food import, ever .
    Our roof is not fancy. The floor is basic loose gravel covered by tar paper and a layer of green-friendly eco-tarp. There is a four-foot safety fence all the way around the perimeter. We have three chaise lounges and a wooden coffee table painted sky blue. Mom hides the roof vents with a trellis of beach roses. She comes up here to read, Dad to think, and I come up with my friends to hang out.
    “Be careful up there,” Mom says as she hands me the brown bag from Sung Chu Mei.
    “Ma, I’m fifteen ,” I remind her, as if she doesn’t know, and as if my birthday is not seared on her brain.
    “That’s why I won’t come up to check on you,” Mom says, getting those creases between her eyes that tell me she’s going to worry no matter how much I reassure her. “Because I trust you.” She gathers paper plates, napkins, and chopsticks from the kitchen cabinet. “I think it’s nice that you’re including Maurice.”
    “It would be rude not to.”
    “Still. I’m proud of you.”
    “I just spent a year at an all-girl school. A little testosterone is nice, if just for observational purposes.”
    Mom throws her head back and laughs. “I’ll tell your father you said that. He will like the idea of observation.”
    “I live to serve.”
    Mom goes to the sink to clean up some dishes, and for a second, I want to tell her all about Jared Spencer, not just the little bits she knows, but absolutely everything. I want to tell her about how I met him at Grabeel Sharpe Academy, and how he kissed me and gave me Sidney Lumet’s book, and how we went together to Wendy Luck’s one-woman show on the Saint Mary’s College campus, and how when we were in competition with each other at the film festival, he dumped me because my movie was better. But I don’t. If I tell my mother all this, she will worry that I’m way into boys and might end up like Esme Amberg, who fell in love with a boy and ran away from Prefect, never to return. I’m not boy crazy like Esme, I’m just hopeful that someday I will have what I once did with Jared Spencer—when he was a good egg and before he went rotten on me.
    “You need something?” Mom turns to face me, wondering what I’m still doing there.
    “Nope. Send Caitlin up when she gets here.”
    I climb the steps to the third floor and then through my parents’ bedroom to the roof. I could never do anything against the rules in this house, because everything is connected. All you have to do is stand on the landing and you know everything that’s happening on a particular floor. I figure Mrs. Pullapilly knows that or she wouldn’t let Caitlin come over ever . And nobody wants to hang out at Caitlin’s, because it’s just too uncomfortable. They serve suspicion over there for snacks.
    The roof is truly a sanctuary. I set the take-out bag down on the table, along with the plates and utensils. I go to the street side of the roof and look out over the fence. The streets below are summer busy, lots of visitors and neighbors out to shop. I can hear thumps of bass lines coming from cars, and the occasional cacophony of horns, and more than one “ Yo .”
    I look out over the neighborhood and see other rooftop gardens. Some are flat and plain, with only an air-conditioning unit and some old pots as decoration, and others are way too fancy, as if they were inspired by terraces on a palace overlooking a kingdom other than Bay Ridge.
    The Melfis have an