Boyfriend! That’s great. I hope he’s good to you . . . I didn’t have a girlfriend until older than you. Eighteen, I think. I was very nervous with the girls. I remember feeling excited about the future but also incredibly scared.

Oscar likes football and wall climbing. The younger one, Daniel, is the artistic one. He has always loved to draw too—cartoons mostly. We go camping together in the summer holiday, and we usually go for two weeks to Spain.

I would love to see your drawings one day, if you ever want to show me, and your animation. I’m not even sure how you make an animation. Maybe you can explain it to me.

Antonio

21

Dr. Osterley is always telling me to live as normal a life as I can, and at the end of June my mother let Jack and me drive up to the lake house, just the two of us, in his father’s Nissan. He’d passed his test the minute he turned sixteen. Me, I’m going to learn when I have more time. My mother insisted on being a passenger with him a few times before she said we could go. Even so, she had to lecture him on the evils of speed, the stupidity of other drivers, and the tendency of the teenage brain to downplay danger. I could see her point. After all she’d been through, to lose me in a car crash would be really annoying.

“You’re a great kid,” she said to Jack on the morning we left. “But you have to remember your frontal lobes are not fully developed.”

“My what?”

“Your frontal lobes.”

Jack laughed. “There’s nothing wrong with my lobes! Way above average, these lobes.” When we were small, he liked my mother because of the games she played with us, and he liked her now for the same reason.

“I have no doubt,” said my mother, “yours are more highly developed than most. The same goes for Maddy. But you are sixteen. Your brain is a work in progress.”

“Everyone’s brain is a work in progress.”

“I’ve got a book if you want to read about it.”

Jack shot me a grin. “Your mother’s got books on everything.”

By now, it was plain that Jack and I were sleeping together. He even stayed over one night, and my mother let him stay in my room. She appeared surprisingly cool about this, though I was pretty sure she hadn’t told Grandma. Aren’t mothers supposed to object, on principle?

The trip seemed longer than usual, and the fields and barns were like fields and barns in a dream because I was in a car alone with Jack, driving to the lake. I kept reaching over and pressing his leg, and he put his hand snug over mine, until after a minute I said, “Two hands on the wheel,” and he took his back.