On Monday morning, though, on the ride to school, she makes a point of sitting next to me. “Where do you go for lunch every day?” she says.

“I don’t know. I just wander around. There’s a bench out by the football field where I sometimes sit.”

“Why don’t you eat with us anymore?”

I look at her—she’s got what my granma calls “a good face,” but the last time I complained to her about Pete she got mad at me, and we stopped talking for a while. Instead, I tell her, “I kind of feel like, what’s the point. I’m not sure how much longer I’m gonna go to this school anyway.”

“What do you mean? Are you going back to New York?”

“I want to go to London. That’s where my dad is.”

I don’t know why I tell her this—it just comes out.

“Don’t you like it here?” she says. She’s sitting right next to me, just a few inches away, but I can’t meet her eyes and look out the window instead. We’ve passed under the highway; there are houses to look at, a lot of construction going on, a woman on a stepladder painting a screen door, two guys in overalls blowing leaves around.

“It’s not that, it’s just . . .”

“Is your mom going, too?” She sounds almost hurt, or puzzled and upset.

“I don’t always know what’s going on with them.” Somehow this sounds like a grown-up thing to say.

“Do they talk on the phone a lot?”

“He calls me sometimes. And then afterward he says, Put your mother on the phone. They don’t usually talk for very long.”

But then the bus pulls in and the engine rattles off. Everybody gets out. “Do you want to have lunch with me today?” I ask her. There’s always a squeeze as you try to get out the door—kids carrying bags, sliding off the bench seats, pushing and stumbling as they get off the bus. It’s like everybody just woke up.

“Sure,” she says. “See you in the cafeteria.”

“I’d rather go outside. I can show you where I eat.”

“Okay.”

That’s all—we drift apart in the different streams of kids.

We meet up a few hours later in the cafeteria lunch line. I buy my carton of chocolate milk, and Mabley pays for a plate of chicken, sweet corn, and mashed potatoes. She carries it all out on a plastic tray.

It’s a bright warm day. The trees are starting to grow new leaves; the light when you walk underneath them feels green. We pass the picnic tables, and Mabley asks, “Where are we going?”

“Just wait,” I say.

Mabley makes me nervous. I don’t always know what to say to her. Sometimes, when I’m alone, I imagine talking to her in my head, asking her interesting questions, like, do you ever think about living on your grandparents’ ranch in San Antonio, and answering the interesting questions she asks me. But somehow when I see her again, we never have these conversations.