“I don’t understand,” she said. “That’s not like him to leave without saying good-bye.”

“You don’t get it, do you?” I said. “How could you be so . . . so . . .”

“So what?”

“Never mind. Forget I said anything.” I reached over and took Moxie’s harness, putting it gently into her hand. “Better hold on to Amoxicillin,” I told her. “I have a feeling you’re gonna need him to make you feel better.”

“How could you have done that to him?” I asked Lexie after I had gotten her home.

She glared at me. Not with her eyes, but with her whole face, which was worse. “In case you’ve forgotten, you did it, too.”

I knew she was right, and it just made me angrier. We sat in the living room of her grandfather’s apartment, listening to the sudden November downpour. Crawley’s nurse, who had already made it clear that she was a cat person, had walked the dogs in the rain because I hadn’t shown up on time to do it. Now the whole apartment was toxic with wet dog, and the nurse gave me dirty looks every time she passed by.

“I thought he understood that we were friends,” Lexie said.

“I don’t believe you. Just because you couldn’t see the dopey love-look on his face doesn’t mean you couldn’t hear it in his voice.”

Lexie was getting teary-eyed, but I wasn’t feeling too sympathetic.

“Maybe I just didn’t want to hear it, okay? Maybe I wanted a little bit of both of you. Is that so terrible?”

Then something occurred to me. “You’ve never really gone out with boys before, have you?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

By her tone of voice, I knew it was true. “A lot more than you think,” I told her. See, I know girls and guys who have become masters of manipulation when it came to dating. Instinctively I knew Lexie wasn’t one of those slippery types. Yes, she had manipulated us, but there was an innocence about it. Like she got tossed too many boys to juggle, and so she was doing it not because she enjoyed it, but because she didn’t know what else to do.

She didn’t speak for a long time. She just wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, then reached down to pet Moxie. Moxie was pushed away by the sins and virtues, who wanted attention as well, and that just frustrated her even more.

“I tend to intimidate the boys at my school,” she finally said. “I’m very outgoing, and most of them aren’t. You see, it’s a very exclusive school, and a lot of the kids have been much more sheltered than me. I guess they just don’t know what to make of me.”

“What about your other escorts? The ones before me and the Schwa?”