We had started walking again; the path had widened, and we were side by side.

“Why’s Wilson doing this to us?”

“Wilson’s just doing what he thinks is right, crazy as it is. You need to tell your mom now. Or we tell Grady and get him to tell her.”

“No.”

“You have to. It’s way bigger than us now.”

“No. We can’t.”

The humidity weighed me down as if I were carrying a heavy load, my legs sluggish beneath it.

We walked in silence for a few minutes until Sage spoke. “Do you still have Jack’s T-shirt?”

“Yeah.” It was only five days since the pool but it seemed so far away now.

“It’s probably got Hall and Oates on it, or some lame group like that.”

“It’s just a plain T-shirt. What’ve you got against him, anyway?”

Sage shrugged. “Nothing. I don’t have anything against him, exactly. It’s just how . . . I don’t know.” She stopped as if she wasn’t going to say any more, and then started again in an angry burst. “It’s how he cares so much about what people think of him, how he’s like all things to all people. Science nerd with Thomas, lacrosse star at Conestoga, bong hits in the Sun Bowl, girlfriends with frosted hair and Fair Isles. Why does he have to pick on you?”

It felt like a body blow to the very center of me because I knew what Sage wasn’t saying. She was trying not to hurt me. She saw him at school, and she knew another side of him around girls, and there was no way he’d be interested in me. I felt rotten and small.

The weird thing was that the things Sage said about Jack, you could almost say about her, too. How she was popular at Conestoga, knew how to talk to adults, and like Jack worked hard on her credibility on the mountain. Both their families did things like skiing and “going to the shore.” It occurred to me that both Jack and Sage had made people in my family their best friends. Slumming it, Marie would say. I didn’t want to think about Jack. My head was pounding. What had Wilson done up in Pottstown?

We crossed Oakwood at the bottom of the trail, and below us was Route 23. The sky had darkened, and the trees above us had started to move in a wind we couldn’t feel yet on the ground.

“I’m gonna head back now,” I said. We’d both gone quiet. What she’d said wedged between us.

“Aw. Pleeease walk me down. I look so stupid in this uniform.” Sage made a funny face, and I knew she was trying to fix things.