There is about a month left to the school year. In Western Civ, we’re well into the twentieth century now, talking about fascism and communism and the Cold War. French IV is still the best. Mlle. O’Shea has started calling it French 4 Fun. We play games, we cook, we go on picnics, we listen to her rhapsodize about Paris, and we learn French. There’s just me and the teacher and the exchange student from Kenya and two quiet girls who are going to be doctors when they grow up.

Mom’s first year as principal is coming to a close, so she’s a little less agitated. Aaron is pitching for the baseball team and spends his spare time with his friends building skateboard ramps on the unused driveways of Versailles. Robyn leaves, and Allegra has started to help Scot with the business, lining up subcontractors for a new house that’s going in. She looks impressively professional when she’s on the phone. She sits there at our kitchen table and purses her lips and gets quotes on loads of fill for the new site. Scot gives cocktail parties on the patio in the backyard for prospective clients and pays me to hostess. The new Serena, I’m happy to announce, is post-ironic. I smile and pass around cheese cubes and smoked almonds and say how marvelous it is that Nora and Zack have so many sand piles to choose from, and Scot’s prospective clients beam at me and say isn’t it nice to see a young person with real manners.

I see nothing of Grimshaw, of course. She lives less than a mile away, but she might as well be on a different planet. Rack and Angel are off living their new lives, but I have no more idea what Grimshaw is doing than if she did live in LA. I know one thing, though: the rising star of the Over Easy isn’t going to put up with chasing Whitney and Dallas through the junkyard for very long. Past that, I don’t know.

I don’t like to think about how we got here, but the memory intrudes. It wakes me up in the night, and I try to keep it away from my throat. I lie there with my heart pounding. I should have told her everything in LA.

“How’s the independent study going?” Mr. C. asks me one day as I’m leaving his class. “The due date is May twenty-fourth, remember. That’s Monday.” He had no idea I’d hitchhiked across the country during my vacation. He gets really excited about it. He says hardly anyone under thirty-five even knows what hitchhiking is anymore.