“Oh. Is everything okay?” He’s leaning over the heat, letting it blow straight into his face, not answering me. I smack him. “Oh my God, wuss. Grow a pair.”

He gives me a superior glance. “All right, then this wuss won’t tell you what he remembered about January 7 of last year.”

“You remembered something?”

He nods.

Frozen windshield forgotten, I turn, scrabbling for my backpack. I reach in and pull out my little notebook, hovering my pen over the blank spot for that Sunday. “What?”

“Luisa’s dad died.”

I let out a hard breath of air. It’s still so cold inside the Jeep that it puffs out as a white cloud between us. “Her dad is dead?”

He nods.

I didn’t know that. Or maybe I did, once. I only knew her father from the few times he’d shown up at school concerts. Mostly, he worked. He was a workaholic. “From the heart attack?”

“So you can remember that, but not that he died?”

“Yeah, because that happened months before. In September, I think. She told her mother she was going to stay overnight with me because she didn’t want to be alone. And then she went to stay with you.”

“No. I was asleep. She tried to get in, but I was dead to the world. That goddamn Gatsby book drained me of my will to live.”

“You never finished it?”

“I skimmed the good parts—all three pages of them—before the test. I think I passed.” He stares through the defrosted circle that has appeared on the windshield. “She probably knocked on my door, but I didn’t answer. So she must have gone back to your house.”

I remembered her coming in my bedroom that night, so late that I didn’t bother to check my phone to see what time it was. She had to come back anyway, because despite how many times they defied the rules, the Weeks boys weren’t technically allowed to have girls in their rooms overnight. “I was dead to the world by then too.”

“Yeah. Fucking Gatsby.”

I don’t bother to tell him that I actually liked the book, once I read it. I liked Jay, the way he was so dedicated to Daisy and zealous about pursuing his dream of being with her. Tragic, yes, but I guess I understood him. I understood how reality was often tainted and never could match up with the dream.

I write down the new information about Luisa’s father dying. “Do you remember anything else?”

“Just that it really messed with her. She came to my house that night, talking crazy. She was saying shit about you, unbelievable stuff. I don’t remember. We all wanted to go to her dad’s funeral, which was a couple days after that, but by then she wouldn’t even talk to me. She told me she didn’t want any of us there.”