“Oh. Gra…ck.”

Her eyebrows rose. “Grack?”

I nodded.

“That’s an odd name. Where’s he from?”

“Uh, here.”

“Hmm. Sounds Hungarian. What nationality is he?”

“American,” I said. “I think.”

“Well.” She looked at the clock. “You’d better get going. Maybe Grack would like to come over sometime.”

“Yeah. Sure. I’ll ask.”

She walked over and kissed me. “Have a good day,” she said and left the room.

“Who’s Grack?” Joel asked.

“Who do you think?”

He put another spoonful of jam in his cereal. “I have no idea.”

“That’s just gross,” I said.

I don’t know how many lies I had told in my life but I was sure that I’d soundly trounced my record in the few days since Grace had arrived. Now I was playing hooky. I wasn’t sure what power Grace had over me, but I hoped she wouldn’t make me do anything worse.

I grabbed my school bag and started walking for the bus stop. My mother drove past me halfway down the street, waving as she went by. As soon as she had turned the corner I looked back down the street to see if anyone was watching (as if my neighbors suddenly had nothing better to do than to make sure I was going to school). I didn’t see anyone so I turned back. I ducked into our next-door neighbor’s backyard, then crawled through the hole in the fence that separated our yards. (Joel and I hadn’t made the hole, but we’d enhanced it a bit.) I crossed into our backyard and knocked on the clubhouse door. “It’s me.”

I crawled inside. Grace watched me enter. “I wasn’t sure if you were going to come or not.”

I dropped my school bag on the floor. “Why?”

“You just seemed a little…nervous.”

I was glad she hadn’t said “afraid.” “Where are we going?” I asked.

“The mall.”

The mall? I thought. The place was probably teeming with truant officers. We might as well play hooky in front of the school.

The mall was a forty-five-minute walk from my house. We probably could have reached it sooner except I insisted we keep to the back roads, which Grace didn’t seem to mind. If there were truant officers at the mall, they didn’t see us. This made me wonder if they were just boogeymen that school administrators and parents made up to keep us in line.

We walked, unstopped, into store after store as Grace looked at clothes. For me we made a stop at a bookstore and a model shop. On the way back, we ate lunch at a diner. “Ain’t you a cute couple. You two playin’ hooky?” the waitress asked

“Science Fair,” Grace said.

“Oh,” the woman said.