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Stewart.
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    My hand shook when I wrote a note for my dad.
Grabbing a hamburger with Danny Stewart. Up at Smitty’s in North Haverhill. Won’t be late.
    I made a heart and signed my name. Dad would know, as well as I did, that what I left out of the note was way bigger than what I had put in it. Like: What in the world was I doing with Danny Stewart? Like: Who said I had permission to drive around with boys? Like: Who even knew I could date anyone?
    By leaving things out, by being casual about it, I had made the note much more dramatic than I intended. It was not a big deal, I wanted to say. But saying it was not a big deal was a way to make it a big deal, so I kept it short and sweet and taped it to the handle of the fridge, where he was sure to go about thirty seconds after he made it home. I didn’t look forward to the discussion we would have when I returned.
    I ran back upstairs and looked at myself in the mirror one last time. Then I sprayed a little bit of perfume—Beautiful by Estée Lauder, my mom’s big bottle that I took after she died—into the air and walked through it. Mom always said that was the way to put on perfume.
    Danny Stewart?
    What was up with those sideburns? I wondered as I came downstairs. And a sweatshirt about the blues? All I knew about Danny Stewart was that he went to the vo-tech, studied cars or diesel mechanics or something, had a maniac for a father, had a mother who sat at her kitchen table chain-smoking for a bunch of years before taking off to parts unknown, and had an uncle somewhere down south. The end.
    I also knew he chucked food at Wally. And then cleaned him up. Too strange.
    He stood next to the stockade fence when I came back.
    â€œYou smell good,” he said.
    â€œJust soap.”
    â€œI hope you’re hungry, because they make big burgers up at Smitty’s. You ever had one?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWell, they’re something. Come on.”
    Wally barked when we left. The sun fell on his black fur and you could see rainbow colors if you looked hard enough.

Six
    H IS CAR WAS NICE . I had to give him that, although you also saw that it was a major big deal to him, and that kind of undermined it. It was a Chevy with the rear end raised up, like some boys like, and it smelled of wax and soap and ammonia. He had put a hula dancer on the top of the dash, and a pair of fuzzy dice on the rearview mirror, and those things inked a kind of thin line in my mind where I couldn’t say if they were cool or complete jerk behavior, because I didn’t know how he intended them.
    He drove hard. Not fast, necessarily, but hard, revving the engine when he could and jamming the brakes when we came to a stop. He wanted to show off, obviously, but he also seemed to think the car needed to be handled that way, and I’d been around my dad and his Harley enough not to think it was completely idiotic. I stared straight ahead and watched him driving from the corner of my eye, and I felt about a million volts of weirdness charging around in my chest. For one thing, he had a really good sound system in the car that he hooked his phone into. He played the blues, exclusively, from what I could tell, but I had a hard time connecting the dots between Danny Stewart, jerk-to-the-ten-millionth-power, and this sort of cool kid slouched behind the steering wheel, listening to blues and driving his muscle car and raking up after his dog.
    Also, the sideburns.
    I couldn’t get over the sideburns. I had known Danny Stewart a long time, almost since we were in kindergarten, and he had not done one cool thing, not even remotely, until he had grown out the sideburns. Driving with him, glancing over in quick bites from time to time, I saw he had a lot of red in his hair, and the sideburns collected most of it. It looked like his hair had leaked color into his sideburns, and they had spread out like two river deltas on either side of his head.
    â€œYou into the