Zach stared at the ground. “That’s what makes it fun, right?”

“Especially when you beat jerks like Gavin and Crosby,” Caleb said.

Zach grinned. He and Caleb shared a fist bump. And he made a decision.

“No way,” Caleb muttered in disbelief. Zach’s bedroom was a shrine to skateboarding, surfing, and gaming. Three skateboards were lined up in a wooden rack. Helmets on pegs jutted from the wall. On a small desk sat side-by-side monitors. Posters of surfers and skaters hung on the walls.

Almost everything in the small room had a homemade feel. The desk looked like it was once part of a door. The bookcase was built out of mismatched pieces of plywood. Even the skateboards looked like they’d been constructed by hand.

Caleb had never been in a trailer home before. Truth was, he didn’t even know there was a trailer park in Ironville. He could tell that Zach was nervous about him being there. The kid was blinking fast, one finger under his hair digging at his scalp, clearing his throat loudly over and over. Caleb had learned that getting Zach to talk helped calm him down. His eyes traveled to the ceiling, where an honest-to-God surfboard hung in an overhead rack with a rope attached to a pulley.

“You surf?” he asked.

Zach shook his head. “Found it in someone’s garbage. But maybe someday.”

Caleb reached up and touched the rack holding the board. “How’s it work?”

Zach untied the pulley rope from a cleat and let the rope slide through his fingers. The rack slowly dropped until it was waist high. Now Caleb could see why the board had been thrown out. One of the fins was broken, and the fiberglass deck was cracked and peeling away from the foam underneath. Zach pulled the rope, and the rack rose back up to the ceiling. The design was both homemade and ingenious.

“A month ago, I would have asked who made this rack,” Caleb said. “But now I’m pretty sure I know.”

Zach stopped blinking and smiled. Strangely, now it was Caleb who felt stressed. He turned to the homemade bookcase stuffed with paperback books. The paperbacks were old, with cracked spines and tattered covers. Caleb checked the titles: Snow Crash, Neuromancer, Feed, Ready Player One, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? He’d never heard of any of them. Nor did he recognize them as required reading for school.

“You read for fun?” he asked.

Zach nodded. “Mostly cyberpunk. I get ’em used.”

Caleb pulled Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? off the shelf and flipped through the stiff yellowed pages. “I would have figured you for ebooks,” he said. He expected Zach to say that he liked real books because his eyes needed a rest from screens. Or that ebooks were too expensive. But Zach said, “I like to look at them. Sometimes I don’t even take them off the shelf. I just look at the spines and daydream about a scene I really liked. Know the movie Blade Runner?”