“No,” Lucas said. “Don’t put off writing this thing until the last minute. Write a little bit every day. That will take the pressure off.”

“Nothing is going to take the pressure off!”

Lucas grinned.

“Weren’t we just talking about an attitude adjustment?” he said.

“Can’t I just borrow yours?” Ryan said.

“Don’t think it works that way,” Lucas said.

He asked if Ryan wanted to stay for dinner, saying he’d already cleared it with his mom. Ryan said he couldn’t, his grandparents were coming over to his house for dinner. Lucas walked downstairs to the front door. Before Ryan left, they pounded fists.

“You’re the dude,” Ryan said.

“You’d do the same for me,” Lucas said.

“You don’t quit,” Ryan said.

“Never,” Lucas said.

It’s why the next day he planned to go through the boxes in the attic.

FOURTEEN

When Lucas’s mom hadn’t finished her classes by the time Claremont Middle dismissed its students—something that usually only happened two days a week—one of his mom’s students would stay at the house until Lucas’s mom did come home.

Lucas’s favorite babysitter, even though he refused to ever call her that, was Lucy McQuade. She was more like an older sister. She was a sophomore at St. Luke’s College, and wanted to be a writer. When Lucy was in the house, she’d usually sit at the kitchen table doing her schoolwork and Lucas would go upstairs and do his, especially if he had basketball practice later.

But he didn’t do homework the next afternoon after school. He told Lucy that he was going upstairs to poke around in his dad’s old stuff up there.

“Is it okay with your mom?” Lucy said.

“Yeah,” Lucas said. “My mom hardly ever goes up there anymore, because I think it just makes her sad, even though she says she’s never going to get rid of those boxes. But sometimes when I’m up there, I just feel as if I’m hanging with him for a few minutes.”

Lucy looked at Lucas over the screen of her laptop.

“I’m sure those boxes are full of some very nice memories,” she said.

“Sometimes even the nice ones make me sad,” Lucas said.

Even though they called it an attic, it wasn’t spooky or full of cobwebs. There was a small window that faced the backyard and let a fair amount of sun in. And Lucas’s mom, being his mom, had kept everything neat and organized. There was even a desk that had belonged to his dad.

Sometimes Lucas would bring his laptop up and sit at the desk and write, and imagine his dad, the one he only knew through everybody else’s memories, looking over his shoulder.