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whatever it was my mom didn’t want him to use. It’s bound to be worse than frogs in the salad.
    The bell rang and I groaned; Driver’s Ed right after lunch is not a great idea. Mr. Howser always starts us off with a gruesome car wreck video to get us in the right frame of mind.
    “Before next week, I have to drive two hours with Mom or Ben,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Driving with Lily doesn’t count—it has to be with an adult.”
    “I’ll take you out,” Jesse said to me. “The ‘adult’ just has to be eighteen. I remember. We can take my egg for a ride.”
    “Both of us?” I asked.
    “Sure. I can borrow my mom’s car. It’s an automatic. The only thing I can’t handle with the damn leg is a stick. How about it, Rudolph?”
    “You bet,” Lily said. “My dad talks about our dependence on fossil fuels the whole time I’m driving. I don’t know why he doesn’t just sign off the hours, but he’s overly honest about things like this.”
    Jesse nodded. “Outgrew his frog period. It happens.”
    So we all went driving on Saturday and had such a blast. We went out to the East End where there isn’t much traffic, and Jesse handed the car over to me. I was a little nervous because it was his mom’s car and what if I ran it into a tree?
    “Want some music?” he said while I put it in gear.
    “Yeah.”
    He turned the radio on and we all sang along to everything while I drove.
    I did all right, though, and when we came to where somebody must have been having a party because there were lots of cars parked along both sides of the street, Jesse insisted I practice parallel parking.
    “She’s awful at it,” Lily said, leaning between us from the back seat. “And we don’t know these people.”
    “All the more reason to practice on them,” Jesse said. He showed me how to line the car up with the car in front of my space, and then just when to cut the wheel back over, and I actually got it in the spot without backing into anybody.
    “Atta girl!”
    He had me do it twice more until he decided I had the hang of it. After that we drove all over the East End, and Lily got her driving time in too, and we ended up going for pizza at Delmenico’s. Lily and I had decided beforehand that we would take Jesse out to thank him, and we weren’t going to let him pay for any of it.
    We started to sit at our usual table at the front window, but Jesse pointed toward a booth in the back.
    “What do you like?” I asked him when we’d settled in.
    “Pizza.” He grinned.
    So we ordered our usual garbage pizza with everything on it, and a pitcher of root beer, which, it turns out, Jesse shares my secret passion for. Lily doesn’t care what she has to drink as long as she gets pizza. Her parents are vegetarians—they don’t insist on Lily being one, but pepperoni and sausage are not household staples for her.
    “Oh my God this is good.” Lily took a huge bite and pinched the cheese strings off with her fingers.
    “You guys are the most,” Jesse said. “I can’t get over it, you taking me out for pizza.”
    He sounded like he thought we were cute, and maybe about five, but I didn’t care.
    “Nobody ever took you out for pizza before?” Lily asked.
    “Not for a long time,” Jesse said. He looked sad. His face can change in a heartbeat, so that he looks like somebody else.
    “You’ve been neglected,” Lily told him. “We’ll adopt you.”
    I like adopting Jesse. He’s funny and he knows stuff, not just because he’s older, but stuff that no one at school is interested in. Like, for instance, why the oaks look like something might be living in them.
    We were working on decorations for Homecoming out of leaves and papier maché. He was making a face out of his leaves, sticking them on wet papier maché and smoothing them down so it looked like a tree person’s face.
    “That’s way cool,” I said.
    “He’s the Green Man,” Jesse said. “He’s really old. He’s from Europe, but I imagine he