DAVID’S ROOM was a lot like I’d pictured.

I mean, not like I’d ever spent a huge amount of time thinking about David Stark’s room, but if you’d asked me to describe it, I think I would’ve been pretty dead on. There was the totally sensible wooden-framed bed, complete with a blue comforter. There was a matching desk piled high with notebooks and computer stuff, and not much on the walls except for a few maps. I paused in front of one of them.

“Where is this?” I asked.

It wasn’t a continent I recognized. David looked up from gathering a pile of laundry. “Oh. Um, that’s Middle Earth.”

I could’ve sworn he was blushing, but in the interest of working together, I decided not to give him a hard time about it. Instead, I nodded and moved over to the bookshelf. There was a corkboard posted above it with a few newspaper articles pinned to it, and three photographs. Two were nature shots—a tree that I thought was the oak in Forrest Park, and the pond behind Grove Academy—but one showed David sitting on a stool in front of a blue backdrop. There were three other kids in the photo. I recognized all of them from the newspaper staff. Chie, the pretty Asian girl I’d seen hanging around David, was leaning on his shoulder.

“Are you guys a thing?” I asked, tapping the picture. It suddenly occurred to me that I knew next to nothing about David’s social life. He’d always hung out with the same handful of kids in school, all the same kids that were on the newspaper staff now. And since David and I had basically declared ourselves mortal enemies in preschool, our circles didn’t overlap often. But I never saw him at school dances or at the movies or anything. I’d certainly never seen him with a girl. But Chie had looked weirded out about him holding my hair when I puked at Homecoming.

“Huh?” he asked, squinting at the picture. “Oh, no. We’re friends. That was . . . goofing off with the camera in newspaper.”

“I think she likes you,” I said. He gave a noncommittal grunt in reply, shoving his laundry basket into the closet.

Since that was a dead-end street, I crouched down in front of the bookcase. Like mine, it was overstuffed, but whereas I’d at least made an attempt at organizing titles, David had books shoved in every which way and stacked on top of one another.

There were a bunch of fantasy novels, and classics, as well as several biographies of journalists. I picked up a book about Ernie Pyle and started thumbing through it. “So you’re really into this whole newspaper guy thing.”

David pushed the closet door closed. “Yeah. I always thought that’s what I’d do for a living one day.”