“I thought you weren’t going to debate this?”

“I’m not.”

“Aren’t you?”

All that in me for so long, and here was someone who had it in him, too—like finding the only other person in the world who speaks the same dialect of a language I’ve made up—and now I had someone to talk to about what I love most and he loves it most, too. I was breathing fast and trying so hard to not smile.

I failed.

He looked relieved.

“Do you want to go see a movie or something?” he said. “With me? Sometime?”

Go out, not date. “Okay.”

Huge smile. “What’s your number?”

“I’ll ask, I don’t remember.”

“No, yours, your phone.”

Here we go. “I don’t have one.”

“You don’t— How?”

“I move every few months, and phones are expensive.”

He leaned his bike against a tree and stepped nearer to me. “Here,” he said, and took my hand in his. He opened a Swiss Army knife, and for a second I thought, Oh, for crap’s sake, this madman is going to carve his number into my skin; have I lost all my human survival instincts because he is so beautiful and can quote Muir and Pinchot—what is wrong with me? But he pulled a tiny pen from between the knife blades and wrote his number on my palm.

“Okay,” he said. “Well. ‘The mountains are calling…’ ”

I frowned. “You going to finish that?”

“ ‘…and I must go’?”

I waited. “And?”

“And…what?”

The bus arrived. “Do not reduce my namesake’s words to hipster T-shirt, bumper sticker quotes you can’t finish. Pinchot lackey.”

The bus doors opened, and, still smiling, he watched me climb in and fall into the front seat. Through the window I watched him get back on his bike, no helmet, and ride until we turned a wide corner, through the forested hills back to Francine’s house, and the whole way I thought about one thing. Who is he hiking with?

I carry with me an Allen wrench. Because you never know.

All my life I have only ever slept in bunk beds. You know who makes a really sturdy, affordable one? IKEA. They look nice, too, the wooden ones. Give me thirty-eight minutes and an Allen wrench (or hex wrench, as some people call them), and I can have a MYDAL (birch wood, good headboard height for night reading) perfectly assembled, beds made with hospital corners, pillows fluffed. By myself. (I’m really not kidding, parents love me.) The NORDDAL is good, too. It has darker wood and people tend to use it more for boys’ rooms. But for bottom-bunk headroom, the MYDAL is best. Also that’s the name—albeit with a different spelling—of period medicine that stops cramps, so the girls laugh at it, which makes it even more great.