“Push them into a puddle?”

“Well, no. You can just… I don’t know. Call them names.”

“Their names are Sean and Amahl,” Jacob said.

“Not those names. Try You dickhead. Or Cut it out, prick.”

“That’s swearing…”

“Yeah. But it will get them to think twice before they cream you again.”

Jacob started rocking. “During the Vietnam War, the BBC was worried about how to pronounce the name of a bombed village-Phuoc Me-without offending their listeners. They decided to use the name of a nearby village instead. Unfortunately, it was called Ban Me Tuat.”

“Well, maybe the next time a bully is holding your face down in a mud puddle you can shout out the names of Vietnamese villages.”

“I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too!” Jacob quoted.

“You might want to go a little more hard-core,” I suggested.

He thought for a moment. “Yippee kay yay, motherfucker!”

“Nice. So next time a kid like that grabs your book, what do you say?”

“Pussbucket asshole, give it back!”

I burst out laughing. “Jacob,” I said. “You just might be gifted at this.”

I honestly do not have any intention of going into another house. But then on Tuesday I have an absolutely crappy day at school. First, I get a 79 on a math test, and I never get Cs; second, I am the only kid whose yeast doesn’t manage to grow in the lab we’re doing in bio; and third, I think I am getting a cold. I cut last period, because I just want to huddle in bed with a cup of tea. In fact, it’s the craving for tea which makes me think about that professor’s house I was in last week, and as luck would have it, I am only three blocks away when the thought enters my mind.

There’s still no one in the house, and I don’t even have to jimmy the back door; it’s been left unlocked. The cane is still leaning against the entryway wall, and that same hoodie is hanging, but now there’s a wool coat, too, and a pair of work boots. Someone’s finished the bottle of red wine. There’s a Bose stereo on the counter that wasn’t there last week, and a hot pink iPod Nano is charging in its dock.

I push the power button and see that Ne-Yo is cued up.

Either these are the hippest professors ever or their grandkids need to stop leaving their shit lying around.

The teakettle is sitting on the stove, so I fill it up and turn on the burner while I rummage around the cabinets for a tea bag. They are hiding on a shelf behind a roll of tinfoil. I choose Mango Madness, and while my water is heating, I scroll through the iPod. I am impressed. My mom can barely figure out how to use iTunes, and yet here is some elderly professor couple whizzing through technology.

I suppose they might not be that old. I’ve imagined them that way, but maybe the cane is for arthroscopic surgery, because the professor plays hockey on the weekends and blew out his knee as a goalie. Maybe they’re my mom’s age and the hoodie belongs to their daughter, who’s my age. Maybe she goes to my school. Or even sits next to me in biology.

I slip the iPod into my pocket and pour the water from the whistling kettle, and that’s when I realize that I can hear a shower running above me.

Forgetting my tea, I creep into the living room, past the monster entertainment system, and up the stairs.

The water sound is coming from the master bathroom suite.

The bed’s unmade. It’s a quilt with roses embroidered all over it, and there is a pile of clothes on a chair. I pick up a lacy bra and run my hand over the straps.

That’s when I realize that the bathroom door’s ajar, and that I can sort of see the shower reflected in the mirror.

My day has gotten considerably better in the past thirty seconds.

There’s steam, so I can only make out the curves when she turns and the fact that her hair reaches her shoulders. She’s humming, and she’s wicked off-key. Turn, I silently beg. Full frontal.

“Oh, crap,” the woman says, and suddenly she opens the door of the shower. I see her arm emerge as she blindly feels around for her towel, which is hanging on a rack beside the shower door, and wipes her eyes. I hold my breath, staring at her shoulder. Her boob.

Still blinking, she lets go of the towel and turns.

In that second, our eyes meet.

People say things all the time they don’t mean, and neurotypical folks manage to figure out the message all the same. Take, for example, Mimi Scheck in school. She said she’d die if Paul McGrath didn’t ask her to the Winter Formal, but in reality, she would not have died-she would just have been really sad. Or the way Theo sometimes smacks another kid’s shoulder and says “Get out!” when that really means he wants his friend to keep talking. Or that time my mom muttered “Oh, that’s just great” when we got a flat tire on the highway although it clearly was not great; it was a colossal hassle.

So maybe when Jess told me to get lost on Sunday, she really meant something else.

I think I might be dying of spinal meningitis. Headaches, dementia, stiffness of the neck, high fever. I have two out of the four. I don’t know if I should ask my mother to take me for a lumbar puncture or just ride it out until I die. I have already prepared a note explaining how I’d like to be dressed at my funeral, just in case.

It is equally possible, I suppose, that the reason I have a severe headache and stiff neck is I have gotten no sleep since Sunday, when I last saw Jess.

She didn’t send me pictures of her new house in advance, like she promised. I sent her forty-eight emails yesterday to remind her, and she didn’t respond to any of them. I can’t call to remind her to send the pictures because I still have her cell phone.

Last night at about four in the morning, I asked myself what Dr. Henry Lee would do, if confronted with the evidence that:

1. No photos ever arrived by email.

2. None of my forty-eight messages were acknowledged.

Hypothesis One would be that Jess’s email account is not functional, which seems unlikely because it is connected with the entirety of UVM. Hypothesis Two would be that she is actively choosing to not communicate with me, which would indicate anger or frustration (see above: Just get lost). But that doesn’t make sense, since she specifically told me at our last meeting that I should tell her what I’d learned… which implies another meeting.

Incidentally, I have made a list of what I learned at our last meeting:

1. Gluten-free pizza tastes disgusting.

2. Jess is not available to go to a movie this Friday night.

3. Her cell phone sounds like a bird chirping when you power it down.

4. Mark is a dim-witted moron. (Although, in fairness, this is (a) redundant and (b) something I already knew.)

The only reason I went to school today, feeling as awful as I do, is that if I stayed home I know my mother would insist I miss my lesson with Jess, and I can’t do that. I have to give her back her phone, after all. And if I see her face-to-face, I can ask her why she didn’t answer my emails.

Usually it is Theo’s job to walk me to the UVM campus, which is only a half mile from school. He drops me off at Jess’s dorm room, which she has always left unlocked for me, so that I can wait for her until she gets out of her anthropology class. Sometimes I do my homework while I’m waiting, and sometimes I look through the papers on her desk. Once I sprayed her perfume on my clothes and went around smelling like her for the rest of the day. Then Jess shows up and we go to the library to work, or sometimes to the student union or a café on Church Street.

I could probably get to Jess’s dorm while comatose, but today-when I really do need Theo’s help to find my way to a new location-he leaves school because he’s sick. He searches me out after sixth period and tells me he feels like crap and is going home to die.