“No, no, no,” she says. “It’s a good sign. You’ve got your wings! Finally!”

“What do you mean?”

She takes her purse back and digs out her keys for me to take. “Baby, any time someone is in my office it’s because they’re sick or they’re hiding, and it’s usually the latter. I’m glad to see you’re not hiding.”

I take the keys from her and give her a slight smile. I feel pretty uneasy having this conversation with Tucker so close by. “Thanks,” I say quietly.

“Do me a favor and roll up the windows if you see any stormy-lookin’ clouds.”

“Yes, ma’am!” I call after her as she heads into the building.

The next hour is a flurry of teachers and organizing the faculty parking lot and writing down makes and models and making notes like whose driver’s side door needs jiggling and whose brake sticks and whose radio won’t turn off once it turns on.

But finally the last bell of first period rings and the whole parking lot looks like the rapture just happened and the only two people left on Earth are me and Tucker.

“Man,” he says, looking over the coffee station. “Those teachers demolished the doughnuts.”

“It’s scientifically impossible to say no to free doughnuts.”

Tucker surveys the lot. “We’re going to have to divide and conquer. I’ll show you how to do the first few and after that we’ll split up. I’ll give you similar cars so you’re not hunting for oil filters.”

We start with Mr. Higgins’s car. I help Tucker jack the car (something I’ve done before) so that we can both crawl under.

With the light of his cell phone, Tucker points to a nut. “You see this thing?”

I nod, wiping back a bead of sweat and immediately regretting my decision to agree to this.

He positions a pan between us. “First thing we do is empty out the old oil.” With a gloved hand, he unscrews the nut and oil spills out over his hand and into the pan, splattering on both of us.

“Seriously?” I ask, motioning down to my coveralls.

“I told you white wasn’t the best choice.”

“Hmph. Well, at least we’ll wear the evidence of our labors.”

“So we let this drain and then screw this guy back in, then we go back up top to put in some new oil.”

“That’s it?” I ask.

“Pretty much.”

The oil drains and we both shimmy out from under the car. As Tucker pours in the oil, he explains that every car will take a certain kind of oil, and using the labels on the engine and on the bottles of oil, he shows me how to figure out which car gets which oil.

“You bought all this oil?” I ask, wondering how much he must have spent.