“You shaved your head in seventh grade,” I told him. “Because you thought it would make you look cool.”

Now he turned to me with suspicion, and maybe a little bit of fear. But I wasn’t done.

“You hated the way it looked, though, so for a month you wore a baseball cap until your hair started to grow back in.”

Now I could tell he was slightly freaked out—but I still wasn’t done. Now I went in for the kill.

“That’s when you found a lump on the back of your shaved head—a little off center. You didn’t tell your parents about it, but until it went away, you were convinced it was a brain tumor.”

Now Leo looked angry.

“How the hell do you know that?”

“Because you confided in your best friend, and your best friend told you that little lump wasn’t a tumor, it was your entire brain, and you punched him so hard it left a bruise on his arm for like a week.” My eyes were moist now. So were his.

“I never told anyone,” he insisted. “Not my friends, not anyone—and definitely not you!”

“But you remember it a little, don’t you? Like maybe you did—”

“I’m remembering a dream, that’s all. Maybe I dreamed I told someone.”

“How would I know something you dreamed?”

He had no answer to that. None at all.

“What the fuck are you?”

The fact that he said “what” instead of “who” was a good sign. It was a sign that he realized this was bigger than just him and me. That this was a thing. A thing that had to be reckoned with. So I went all in, and decided to answer his previous question.

“I’m from a place where you and I are best friends, and you don’t work as a cashier at Publix, and you still play football, with your eye on USC. Where I come from, your life is going places I could only dream mine would go.”

That made him disappear into himself for a long moment. A bus came. The door opened. The driver looked at Leo for a second, and Leo waved him off. The door closed, and the bus pulled out, the noisy drone of its engines fading into the normal buzz of late-night traffic and the rustling of leaves that were already starting to yellow.

“You don’t make any sense,” Leo said, wiping away what might have been a tear. It didn’t linger long enough for me to be sure. “USC might as well be the moon.”

“Guion Bluford—the first African American in space.” I wondered if it was true in this world. I wanted to believe it was, but doubted it. “Not quite the moon, but close.” And then I added, “You taught me that.”