Lindy wasn’t in the first room, an all-white room like a hotel room with a bathroom that was about the size of Jillian’s whole bedroom, and a sitting room with a fireplace; nor in the next, which had bunk beds and walls painted like outer space, with rockets and planets.

Jillian found her flopped onto a big bed in a huge room painted spring green. It was crammed full of stuff—a website’s worth: a bright blue couch piled with flowered pillows, a computer, a television, a couple of soccer balls, a box of stuffed animals, an iPad, a purple bean bag chair, a pink chandelier, model horses, heaps of inside-out pants and shirts, and a high shelf full of smiling American Girl dolls. Jillian counted ten of them. Ten! Molly, and Felicity, and Samantha, and Kit among them. Jillian only had Elizabeth, the Colonial doll.

“What are you looking at?” Lindy said.

“Nothing.”

“My dad’s going to let me drive soon,” Lindy said.

“But you’re too young . . .”

“Once we were at the beach and he made a bonfire and the fire department came . . .” She got a funny smile on her face. “That’s what she said,” she said. “Get it?”

Jillian smiled, not getting it.

“Our TV is like five feet wide.”

“That’s really big.”

“That’s what she said,” Lindy said.

“Who?” Jillian said.

Lindy scoffed. Maybe she had ADD. A lot of kids at her school did—so many that it was a regular cafeteria conversation: what kind of meds they took, how much. It made Jillian think of conversations she’d overheard between her grandmother and her bridge-playing friends about arthritis and cholesterol medications.

“How old are you?” Lindy said.

“I’ll be thirteen in January,” Jillian said.

“I’ll be fourteen in July.”

“Oh.” Rumor about being held back confirmed.

“Sit down.” Lindy shoved the bag of cookies she’d taken from the kitchen at her.

Jillian perched on the edge of the bed, ate one, her hand under her chin.

“Why are you doing that?” Lindy said.

“So I won’t make crumbs.”

Lindy raised her eyebrows, as though crumbs were something Jillian had just invented. Lindy tore a piece of paper out of her notebook and made a dot in the middle of it with a pencil. “Know what that is?”

“No.”

“A Greek pimple.”

“What?”

“Pimple. Temple. Get it?”

Jillian laughed even though it wasn’t funny.

Lindy crumpled up the paper and tossed it in the air. “My dad’ll do it for us. Well, he’ll get someone to.”

“What?”

“Make the temple. He’s a builder. Look! Rubber pencil!” Lindy said. She held her pencil between her thumb and forefinger and shook it up and down.

“Weird!”

They shook their pencils, Lindy showing her just how to hold it, loosely, between her thumb and forefinger, to make it look rubbery.