One day at lunch one of the girls she regularly ate with nudged her and said, “Davy Clement is looking at you.”

Fiona turned to see who that was and it was the boy. When he tried to catch her eye she turned swiftly back to her friend and said, “No, he’s just looking across the room,” and changed the subject.

But soon he was all she could think about. She longed for a best friend in whom she could confide. To dissect every look he gave her, to strategize a plan of some sort for meeting him. But to form that kind of friendship meant the friend would have to find out about so many other things—that they were living with no adult taking care of them. That she was caring for her sisters. Maybe in time, in a year or two, she could develop the type of bond where such a person might be trusted. But it was still too soon for that. And she couldn’t mention Davy to the girls she had casual friendships with because it might get back to him that she was asking about him. So she kept it, as she now kept so many things, bottled up. At night she would gaze out their bedroom window at the Big Dipper and think about him and what it would be like to hold his hand. To walk with his arm around her waist the way she saw kids in the older grades doing.

Sometimes he seemed to be watching and she thought maybe he wanted these things too but that, she decided, was probably wishful thinking.

Most of the kids at school weren’t paired up, they ran together in packs made up of both boys and girls, all friendly and used to doing things together. Fiona didn’t have a pack, she had friends she met for lunch and girls she talked to before and after school but no group she felt she belonged to. She stayed as buttoned-up as she could anyway, keeping conversations short so that they could never work around to anything very personal.

Davy didn’t seem to have a pack either. She saw him talking to other kids but often she spotted him on his own. As far as she could tell he never hung out with just one group.

She imagined she saw in him from afar all kinds of good traits. That he was kind and funny and smart and she decided that if she could tell anyone about their living situation it was him. He would keep the secret and would understand. Fiona longed for this. All the strain of their survival was on her shoulders 24-7 and it would be such a relief, such a blessed relief, just to be able to talk about it. She didn’t need anyone to help out, she had Miss Webster for emergencies and Al for camouflage, she just needed to be able to pour out all the anxious worries that kept her up nights. The things that twisted through her mind all day long.