“You have to come up with me.”

“Boston?” Lola said. “I have work…”

“You have to. We’ll stay with my friend Greg and go sailing.”

“Chip, seriously. I can’t take off three whole days. I’m running out of excuses.”

“I’ll be fun,” Chip said. “And I’m not going to make it if you don’t come. You’ll like Boston. You have to get used to coming up there anyway when I move in the fall.”

Chip hadn’t gotten into Harvard. All they knew was that he was going to school “in the Boston area.” She and Spencer had a lot of very amusing theories on what this actually meant, several of which involved crayons.

“I guess you’re right,” Lola said. She didn’t say it with much conviction.

“Can I come?” Marlene asked.

“You want to go in my place?” Chip asked her.

Marlene laughed like she had never, ever in her life heard anything as deliciously entertaining as that. It was appalling.

The driver took the car along Central Park South, past the big hotels. Or, as some may have put it, the real hotels.

“Is the corner of Sixth okay?” Chip said. “Can you just walk down? We kind of have to get moving.”

“It’s fine,” Scarlett said. “It’s just a few blocks.”

The car came to a graceful stop between two horse-drawn carriages at the park entrance.

“When you get home,” Lola said in a low voice, “just say that we met up on the street and you walked Marlene the rest of the way home, okay? I really owe you.”

She adjusted Marlene’s wonky, slightly crispy curls and gave her a hug. Once the car slid away, Marlene’s smile was replaced with a look of barely contained rage.

“Why did you do that?” she snapped.

“Do what?” Scarlett replied.

“The car! I wanted to go down to the building! They would have taken us if you didn’t say something!”

Now Scarlett saw the error of her ways. Marlene wanted her friends to see her get out of the chauffeur-driven car.

“They had to go,” Scarlett said. “You wouldn’t want Chip and Lola to be late, would you?”

Marlene’s reply was to bolt from the curb and cross the street on her own, before the light had changed. Scarlett had to run after her. They barely missed getting clipped by a bus. Marlene kept ten paces ahead of Scarlett. Scarlett tried to speed up for a while, but then just gave up after the second block and let Marlene get ahead and slip out of sight. She finally caught up to her in the frigid lobby of 30 Rock. The building had a heavy glamour, with its black and gold walls and floor, the massive murals of planes flying and people building, the army of NBC pages scurrying around. Marlene had already latched on to a few of her Powerkids friends, and Scarlett was more or less forgotten.

One thing about disease: It didn’t care how much money your family had, or what neighborhood you came from. The Powerkids were a mix of Connecticut and New Jersey suburbanites; residents of Harlem, Chinatown, the East and West Villages, and the Upper East and West Sides; Staten and Long Islanders; people from every corner of Brooklyn and the Bronx. These were the people Marlene had lived with for her hospital stay. This was her element.