She jumped with a low scream at the sight of me, her face hydrant red.

“Am I that scary?” I tried to laugh through my labored breathing but wound up hacking a cough.

“Depends,” she panted. “Are you stalking me?”

She straightened, hands on hips, the blood in her face receding into two cheek circles, like a little Dutch girl in an illustration.

I wasn’t sure what I looked like right now, but not Dutch, and sweatier than any picture they’d put in a book. “I wanted to ask you how long you’ve been running?”

“Seriously.”

It seemed like a fair question to me. “It doesn’t strike me as very Julie-ish.”

“Oh! Doesn’t it?” Her blue eyes sharpened even as she moved away. “First of all, I haven’t been Julie since the seventh grade. It’s Jules.”

“Oh.” How was I supposed to know? We weren’t exactly Facebook friends.

“Second . . .” She laughed up at the sky. “That’s what you want to ask me? We haven’t spoken for six years and you want to know how long I’ve been running?”

“We’ve talked,” I tried feebly.

“No.”

“We say hi, or . . .”

“No.”

“In six years—?”

“No.”

I opened my mouth. Shut it. God damn, I was dying of sweat. I pried my dress off my midriff and held it out so I could draw a breath.

“I just thought it was interesting that you’re doing something that, to outward appearances, seems brand-new for you. Whoever you are now. And I guess I found that interesting because I’ve quit piano—”

“You . . .” Julie’s smirk dropped away.

“And I don’t know what that leaves me with now, as, like, a human being, or what I have to offer the world or even what to do with my day and I can’t even be at home because there’s this kid there studying with my dad and he’s straight out of my fantasies—”

Her eyebrows shot up.

“Not like that.” Sort of like that. I swallowed. “I fantasized about being him, all my life, but I’m so far from being him that his presence is . . .”

I couldn’t think of the right words, so I made a weird disintegrating gesture, and she nodded like she got it.

“And so now I’m avoiding my house. And I’m thinking about getting into philanthropy but I’m worried if I’m going to stretch that far, I might as well become, like, a cowgirl. An astronaut? Um.”

Julie—Jules looked at me. Then she wiped sweat off her forehead and shifted her weight with a sigh. “Yeah, so, two weeks. I started running right after school got out.”

That explained the zigzag. “You just decided—”