“She’s only doing her job as a sister. Listen, it’s taken you a long time to get to the point where you’re even open to dating. Don’t shut down now. You’ve finally met someone who makes you blush when we tease you about him.”

“I’m not blushing.” Camille’s burning cheeks made a liar of her. “I don’t even think of him like that. I don’t think of him at all.”

“Sure you do, and you should. He lives in Aix-en-Provence. Isn’t that pretty close to Bellerive?”

“I have no idea,” Camille said. Forty-seven kilometers, to be precise. She’d looked at the map several times. Several dozen times. “If there’s any hanging out to do,” she said, “it would be with Papa. And I still haven’t made up my mind about going.”

Her mother dabbed at her lips with a napkin. “Your father just finished cancer treatment. This is what he wants. I don’t believe you have a choice.”

“Are you sure these are the right forms?” Julie asked Tarek, sitting next to him on the curb outside the post office.

“Yes.” He turned the blank form so she could see it. “All you have to do is fill it out completely, get your mom to sign it, pay the fee for expedited service, and you’ll have her renewed passport within two weeks.”

She scanned the official-looking forms. “Really? Then we’d better get started right away.” The we just seemed to slip out. Since the previous soccer fiasco, she and Tarek had been hanging out, sort of, like shipwreck survivors hanging on to a raft.

She still cringed when she thought about the soccer match that had incited the stupid purse incident. The trouble had started with the morning pickup game. It was pretty common for kids to kick a soccer ball around on the front school lawn. Soccer was huge at their school, and everybody played.

But not everybody played like Tarek. He was amazing. He had incredible moves and speed, and he was good at every position he played. You’d think a kid like that would be popular with everyone else, but no. Tarek looked different. He was from a foreign country. He was so good at soccer that you almost couldn’t take your eyes off him. That morning, when he’d drilled a goal past Jana Jacobs’s stupid boyfriend, Rolfe, Jana called Tarek a terrorist and told him to go back to where he came from.

From her midfielder position, Julie had heard the remark. She’d seen the look on Tarek’s face as he’d left the field. And she’d seen Jana’s couture purse on a bench next to a big, juicy mud puddle. She’d wanted to push Jana herself into the puddle, but she’d settled for the purse instead, not realizing Jana was going to make a federal case out of it.

“You need a passport photo and your mom’s old passport. Do you have that?”

“I haven’t even told her I’m doing this.”

“Will she be mad?”

“She keeps saying we can’t go, but I think she might be coming around. And I do have a photo we can use. My mom and Billy used to have a passport photo service. I found one on her computer.”