“What do you mean?”

“Cover up your answers like that. Like I was copying you.”

“You were copying me,” I tell him.

“Who cares? It’s just a stupid math thing.” Then he says as he walks off ahead of me, “I thought we were friends.”

“But—” I start calling after him, but he doesn’t turn around.

When I get to the cafeteria, he’s sitting at the table with Mabley and everybody else. He smiles at me, and I think, maybe he isn’t mad at me anymore. When I sit down, he says, “Does your dad know any other tricks?”

Mabley says, “What are you talking about?”

“Ben’s dad sounds pretty cool. He knows a lot of tricks.”

I get out my sandwich and start to eat. Pete says, in his teacher’s pet voice, “Do you want to explain it to the class?”

“You know I didn’t want to do that.”

“I still have no idea what anybody’s talking about,” Mabley says.

“Ben’s like a mathlete,” Pete says. “He’s got a computer brain. You just have to plug him in sometimes and wait for the answers to come out.” Nobody else is paying attention, and eventually they start talking about something else.

I finish lunch early and walk outside on my own. It’s a bright sunny afternoon but less hot than a few weeks ago. Already a few leaves have started falling from the trees. There’s a bit of wind, which keeps blowing them around. Some kids on skateboards, wearing black clothes and backpacks covered in stickers and badges, mess around by the curb of the parking lot. I watch them playing and talking together.

The bell’s going to ring in a few minutes, and I’ll have to go back in with all the other kids. You don’t have room to think in school; there are too many people—it’s like they crowd into your brain as well. But for a few more minutes, standing around in the leaves on my own, it’s like my head is quiet.

I can’t understand why Mabley hangs out with Pete. She’s friendly to everybody, but Pete is only friendly if you count making fun of people as friendly. It bugs me that he has an article about him in the school newspaper, that even the teachers think he’s smart and funny. When really he’s just mean. But for some reason I’m the only one who can see it. Maybe because he’s a bit like Jake, because I had years of putting up with that kind of thing from Jake, but the funny thing is, I miss him, too. Then the bell rings, and I go back in.

After school, Mabley sits next to me on the bus. The heat is on and the windows have started to fog up—you could play tic-tac-toe on the glass. “You walked off early at lunch,” she says, touching my shoulder, and I turn to face her.

“Why do you like Pete?”

It seems to me that if you’re going to get to know people, if you’re going to be friends, you have to be honest, you have to talk about what you’re actually thinking about. At least, that’s the kind of mood I’m in right now. I’ve been brooding about it all since lunch.