I glanced down at the sheet of paper again. “So you used to send book reviews?”

“I had a laptop and a few wireless Internet cards,” he said. “We would post book reviews online. It was the only way we could think of to talk without them catching on.”

He leaned over, covering the paper so only the first column of words was visible. I’m out can’t get to you can meet anywhere name place and time missed you love you.

“Oh.”

“I wanted to write it out now,” Chubs said. “In case I can get online, but only have a few minutes.”

“You’re pretty genius,” I said slowly. “Your whole family.”

I got a snort in response. Duh.

The question I really wanted to ask him was inching its way up my throat when he pulled a deck of cards out of his briefcase.

“Want to play a few games?” he asked. “We’re going to be here a while.”

“Sure…but I only know Old Maid and Go Fish.”

“Well.” He cleared his throat. “We don’t have the right deck for Old Maid and, unfortunately for you, I excel at Go Fish. I won the Go Fish tournament in fifth grade.”

I grinned, waiting for him to deal my cards. “You are a star, Chubs, a—” His nose wrinkled at the name. “I can’t call you by anything else if I don’t know your real name.”

“Charles,” he replied. “Charles Carrington Meriwether IV, actually.”

I tried to keep my face as straight as possible. Of course he would be named something like that. “Okay, Charles. Charlie? Chuck? Chip?”

“Chip?”

“I don’t know, I thought it was kind of cute.”

“Ugh. Just call me Chubs. Everyone else does.”

I figured it out.

It must have been half past five in the morning, well after several delirious games of cards and charades that had been brought on by too much candy and too little sleep. Both of us had been waiting for the other shoe to drop, to be proven right about the other boys. We kept the baseball bat beside us and never once turned our backs to the tents. When exhaustion finally set in, we took turns curled up on the ground, trying to steal a few minutes of sleep here and there.

I picked up Zu’s notebook again in an attempt to avoid being lulled to sleep by Chubs’s rhythmic snores, and added a few clouds and stars to the first page of doodles. The pages fanned out under my fingers as I flipped through the notebook again, not catching until I found what I was looking for.

540.

It was an area code for this part of the state, I was sure of it. Grams had lived down near Charlottesville for a time, and I had a very vague memory of standing in the kitchen of my parents’ house, staring at her number printed on a notepad beside the phone. But the area it covered—that was no small bit of land, and there was no real guarantee that it was supposed to represent an area code in the first place.