“Aw, Stevie.” She turns to face me. “You love me! You really, really love me!” She folds me into her arms in a gust of smoke and hair.

“Yeah, yeah. Don’t let it go to your head.”

“Got it.” She ashes her cigarette over the porch stairs. “For the record, I’m glad I’m here, too. I didn’t know if I would make any friends here, but here you are. There are actually some pretty cool people here.”

I nod, slowly. “They sure like you,” I say, and I can feel the damp corner of a wet blanket of envy in my voice.

“Oh, now. They just tolerate me. I’m good in small doses.”

“Yeah … right. Looks like some people are really getting into this stuff. I just wonder—”

But then there is a rumble coming around the corner, and Dee stands, flicking her butt into the garden. Antar’s car rounds onto my street, and he rolls down the window as he pulls up to the house.

“Want a ride?” And then, “Hang on …” He turns up the music, louder, louder, so loud it seems that the roof of his car will come off, while he dances at the wheel in an increasing frenzy. Dee leaps into the front seat and joins him, and I slide in back and cover my ears, laughing.

It is a warm, deliciously fresh evening. The sun is glinting off the edges of leaves as they shiver and shimmer and preen, shaking their tits because they know they’re at their peak and that in a few months they’ll be dried up and dead. We roll down all the windows and breathe in deeply, that almost summer—practically summer! just on the edge of summer!—air that smells like barbecue and sunscreen and grass. Somewhere in the back of my mind I remember childhood summers: sliding down a Wet Banana and hurting my back on a rock, running barefoot over a hot blacktop driveway, sipping Slurpees while walking home from the Mac’s Milk with Lottie. All at once, just with a couple of inhales from the summer air, those memories hit my brain like an electric shock, and I am happy and sad and nostalgic and excited all at once. Dee is talking away, a mile a minute, her happy chatter filling the car, layered on top of the music like a rhythm, and I close my eyes and take it all in. Antar’s car climbs Woolverton Road, the steepest and curviest road in town, and it is struggling, we can hear it, and he laughs and urges it on, “Come on, girl. You can do it.”

“Lean forward, everyone!” Dee yells, and we cling to our knees, like we’re cajoling an old horse, a boat in a sea storm, and up we go. Up and up and up.