“I like walking through corn,” Grimshaw says as she reaches the graveyard. “I think it’s my favorite crop to walk through.”

“I’m leaving for Maine tomorrow,” I tell her.

“Tomorrow?” Her eyes widen in surprise. “Did you get in trouble for last night?”

“No, but I’m banished anyway. Something very weird is going on at my house. Scot wasn’t home, and my mom was on the phone, praying. Five o’clock in the morning. I just walked right by her and went to bed. There’s no way Scot’s not having an affair.”

“With that secretary?”

“Yes. With the heinous, hideous, and hateful Nanci Lee.” What I don’t tell Grimshaw is that my mother interrupted her prayer to tell me that she already hired a babysitter and they’re putting me on the bus for Maine tomorrow, and that if my attitude doesn’t improve, I can do my senior year there in Maine and not bother coming home, which is ridiculous. They don’t even like me in Maine.

Grimshaw reclines on the Helmers, and her hair spills over the edge. I sit on Mr. Sprague, who died in 1901, aged seventy-eight. She stares up at the sky.

“I don’t have any cigarettes,” she announces.

“Me neither.”

“You never do.”

“I don’t smoke.”

“You smoke mine.”

“Dancers aren’t supposed to smoke,” I remind her. “It cuts down on their wind.”

“It’s too late for me, anyway. I read you’re supposed to start training when you’re eight.”

“Hold fast to dreams,” I quote Langston Hughes, with my finger in the air. “For if dreams die—”

“I’m not interested in dreams,” she interrupts. “I’m interested in reality.” She props her head up on her elbow, and we watch gusts of wind chase each other across the corn, making dark streaks against the brilliant green.

“Remember when we used to make a game of running through Mizerak’s corn?” I ask. We’d start at opposite corners of the cornfield, pretend we were lost and had to find each other in the corn. The rules were that you had to keep running, and you couldn’t break the stalks. You could only change rows if there was a break in the row or you had come to the end. It was really fun, running down the endless rows through the weeds, the blades whipping by your face, especially when you’d see the other person running by a couple of rows away, and then you’d start to laugh so hard you couldn’t keep running. It was easy to miss each other. We’d play at the end of every summer, when the corn was way over our heads. By October it all gets cut to silage.