I expect Jason and Carter to jump out from the weeds and throw rocks at us. They’d have their dogs with them. Barking ferociously, the dogs would chase our bikes and bite our legs while Jason and Carter laughed.

If I were with anyone else, I’d turn around right now and go home. But I don’t want Skylar to know I’m scared of those houses, and the kids who might or might not live in them, so I keep my mouth shut and keep pedaling. I really don’t care what’s at the end of a dead end anymore. Or what’s beyond the town limits. All I want is to see a road with a familiar name and follow it home.

A few minutes later Marie Drive stops at a wooden barrier painted with diagonal yellow and black stripes. On the other side is a field of waist-high weeds. A trail of ruts made by cars leads across the field to the woods on the other side. Even though people must use it sometimes, it’s not a real road, so I declare it the official end of Marie Drive.

Skylar stares across the field, saying, “It’s hardly worth riding all this way.” We let our bikes fall on their sides, and we collapse in the shade of a huge oak tree.

“I sure wish I hadn’t drunk all my water,” I say.

“The next time we take a long bike ride,” Skylar says, “we should bring a gallon jug.”

I lean against the tree and look up into its branches. High over my head, I see what looks like a platform. I nudge Skylar. “Is that a tree house?”

“Where?” Skylar peers up, and I point. “Wow,” she says. “Let’s find a way to climb up there.”

On the other side of the tree, a few old pieces of wood are nailed to the trunk like a ladder. Skylar reaches for one and hangs from it to test her weight. The nails hold. I inch my way up the tree behind her.

Once we’re high enough to grab a branch, we abandon the ladder and climb from limb to limb like monkeys.

Skylar and I have had a lot of practice doing this. When we were nine or ten, we climbed every tree in our neighborhood. We even built a flimsy little tree house at the end of our street where we thought no one would notice. It was just big enough for us to sit in and read on hot summer days.

For a few weeks it had been our secret place. We even talked about finding a way to spend the night there. But before we could do it, our neighbor saw it and tore it down. Our mothers had no idea that the tree house Mr. Bowman called an eyesore was ours.