“Yeah, it’s fine.” She takes out another square and nibbles on it. She glances over at me, chewing, and then sets her sandwich down. “You will notice,” she says, “that everything in my lunch has something orange in it. And I can guarantee you that those Pringles number some multiple of four — looks like either twelve or sixteen. And the carrots were also cut into fours. And I think the M&M’s speak for themselves.”

I swallow my bite of sandwich. “So, you like orange and you like fours?”

She shakes her head. “It doesn’t have to be orange. It can be any color, as long as it’s in all four things. But it always has to be fours.” She looks down and picks at the paint on her thumb. “And it’s not me. It’s my mom.”

“Does she . . .” I speak softly. “Does she have, like, OCD or something?”

Sam doesn’t move for a moment, and then she nods — just barely. “Don’t tell anyone,” she says, still avoiding my eyes. “Okay?”

My heart aches for her. I know what it feels like to say those words, to plead like that, terrified that people will find out your secrets. To be ashamed of something you can’t control and the way people might judge you and your family. “I won’t,” I tell her. “I would never. I promise.”

She’s as still as a statue. I look for some way to defuse the seriousness, because it’s heavy. I gesture at her lunch. “This is actually very useful for splitting lunches fifty-fifty.”

She cracks a smile, but it’s like she’s still afraid to look at me. I lean over and peer into her face, and she smiles a little more, then laughs. She divides the chips and M&M’s into two equal piles and hands me my halves of things.

I open my sandwich square and stick a few Pringles inside, then mash it back together.

“Oh, Jesus,” she whispers, staring. “My mom would shit an entire litter of kittens if she saw that.” And then she laughs kind of hysterically and copies me. She looks nervously at her creation before biting into it.

“Is she okay with going out to eat? I’d die without my Ace’s burrito fix,” I say.

“Actually, my mom loves Taco Bell. Because . . .”

I chew some carrot slivers, watching her. “Because why?”

“Because. T and B are even. And taco and bell have even numbers of letters. And they’re even more perfect because both words have four letters.”

She takes a deep breath and keeps going.