Well ignores my offer to buy tomorrow’s lunch and leads us back toward the tables. I hold my breath to see which is “his table,” but he keeps walking until we reach the doors that open onto the lawn.

“Where are we going?” I ask when he doesn’t stop at the picnic tables.

He arches an eyebrow at me. “Where the cool kids eat, of course.”

As we cut across the baseball field, I watch my saddle shoes turn orange from the dugout dirt and try to breathe normally at the thought of meeting Well’s friends. He’s heading toward the football stadium. Even from a hundred yards away I can see three kids sitting in the bleachers, and I freeze, right in the middle of the outfield.

I’ve just started getting comfortable around Well. Other people, though… What if they ask me about my mom? Or what my old school was like? What if they make a joke about my skinny bird legs? Or what if they do something crazy like run up and down the bleachers? The sound of that bang, bang, bang of feet on metal is a bad one for me. More than a shiver. More like a scream.

“Why’d you stop?” Well asks, a few feet ahead now.

“I, uh, I think I’m going to go back in. I don’t want to be late for fourth period.”

“No. Uh-uh. Fourth period is theater, and I make it a habit to be fashionably late. Besides, see those jokers? They’re in theater too. We can all be late, or on time,” he adds when he sees me start to turn away, “together.”

“No, really. I’m going back.”

“Lou, stop or I swear to God I will eat your ice cream bar.”

I stop.

“Now sit down.”

I look at the wet grass covered in leaves. “What? Here?”

“Yes, here.”

Well takes off his navy school jacket and spreads it on the ground. He sits, then pats a spot next to him. When I keep standing, he unwraps both Snickers ice cream bars and holds one up under my nose, like a bouquet of roses. I sit.

“Now listen.” He hands me the Doritos to open. “I was saving this for later, because it felt like a perfect end-of-the-first-day thing to do, but you have forced my hand, Lou.” He looks at me from under a fringe of black hair. “So, if it falls flat, that is on you. Do you get me?”

“I do,” I say. Except I don’t, because I have no idea what he’s talking about. And I hate surprises for obvious reasons.

He pulls a phone from his pocket. I watch him scrolling through his music and can’t stop myself from leaning in to see what’s on his list.

“This, Louie Lou, is the Spotify app, which I noticed you do not yet have on your phone, and we will fix that posthaste, but for right now I am going to play you a song and you are going to love it, okay? Here,” he says, plugging in his earbuds and handing me one. “Don’t worry, they’re clean.”