She said hey and I said hey. Her hair was in a ponytail and she had on her light-blue camp T-shirt that was crusty with some kind of freshly dried paint or clay. She had the clearest eyes. I had no idea what the word was for the color they were. She asked me if I was having a good summer and I asked her the same. We told each other which books we’d chosen from the summer reading list. She promised me that The Brothers Karamazov got better sixty pages in. And then we placed our orders, which came quickly, wrapped up tight, and she left, saying she had to bring one back to the house for her brother.

“Only one sub for Fatty?” Ed said.

When she was gone he said, “She likes our boy.”

“What’s not to like?” Grant said.

The next time we saw her I was supposed to ask her out. But I chickened out. The time after that Ed did it for me.

“We’re going to the movies tonight. Want to come?”

“Um, yeah.”

“Um, yeah it is. We’ll pick you up at six forty-five sharp.”

“But you don’t know where I live.”

“You’re in the blue book, right?” I said, as if I didn’t know 67 Vine Road and the big beech tree out front and her mother’s Volkswagen Rabbit (LL3783) and her father’s Audi (KN9722) that sat in the garage they built last year.

“Oh, you’re in the blue blood book, right?” Ed mocked afterward, exactly in my accent, which had never seemed an accent to me before then.

At first, of course, I feared Becca would fall for Ed. “Une femme qui rit est une femme au lit,” he’d said once, and he was so much funnier than anyone I knew.

The third time she came out with us, we went miniature golfing and got through five holes before it started pouring and we went back to the house. Grant pulled out the big pot for popcorn and Ed went into the living room and flopped on the sofa. I said I needed to go upstairs and change my shirt, but I lingered on the stairs to see what she and Ed would do together alone.

“You’re kind of a ringer at the mini links,” he said. “You go there a lot?”

“My brother likes it.”

“But you not so much.”

“I just beat him so easily.”

Ed laughed and said, “Have a seat.” But Becca said she was going to go find me.