“Phillip is our math guy,” the boy’s mom said, putting her arm around him.

Aaron is only six, but so far he’s not a math guy. Or if he is, no one knows it.

“So this is what you have to do to make hot chocolate,” Honey is saying now, carefully pouring it from the pot into a mug for me. I come over to where she is standing by the stove. “You make a paste out of cocoa and sugar with a bit of hot water. Then you boil the milk, but don’t let it overflow. Then you add the paste to it and mix it really well so there’re no lumps.”

I take a sip. “It’s delicious,” I say, not for the first time wondering how Honey knows how to do this stuff. Also that her mother lets her. Does she have to negotiate for everything like I do? She was probably right that Mrs. Wine wouldn’t have minded either way about us going shopping at What Goes Around. “Better than Starbucks,” I add, and Honey laughs.

“Well, we’re watching Aaron today anyway,” she says. She pours some hot chocolate into another mug. “Aaron, I’m letting yours cool off, okay?”

“Okay,” he says, looking up at her for a moment.

I look through the bay windows at the Wines’ snow-covered backyard and the park beyond their fence behind it. An early heavy snow fell last night. I think what it might be like to be an explorer and walk on places no one has ever walked before. Although now we know that most explorers weren’t necessarily the first, they just were the first white men who thought they discovered places people had already inhabited for hundreds or thousands of years. But then there was Neil Armstrong, who walked on the moon the first time. I wonder if those explorers felt ordinary and insignificant when they were growing up too or if they always felt special.

“Do you think we’ll ever be famous women because we’ve done something first?” I ask Honey. “Or even just something special—you know, make a mark in some way?”

“Definitely!” she says, hopping up on the counter with a big grin.

“Well, but—” I hesitate. I realize I asked the question wrong. I’m not worried if she will or not. Neither is she. “What about me? Do you really think I will?”

“If you want to.” She shrugs. “I mean, why not?” I look at her. It sounds so simple, so reachable, the way she says it. She takes a sip of hot chocolate. “I hope Josh doesn’t get expelled.”

“What did he do with Ari Schoenberg’s tests?” I ask. “I thought he graduated already.”

“Yeah, Ari graduated,” Honey says. “But he’s, like, a Talmudic ace and he gave Josh all his old tests because everyone knows that Rabbi Bienenstock gives the exact same tests every year, so all Josh had to do was study from Ari’s answers.”

“Oh,” I say. “Is that not allowed?”