I ducked and held my breath as a soccer ball soared low over Jeremy and smacked into the wall. The rebound caught the side of his head.

"Relax, man. It's just Fowler." Vince DiMorello recovered his lost ball and dribbled it back through the crowd.

"Do you mind?" I hollered.

"Blow me, Boswell," Vince called back, following it up with the finger. I bit back a mouthful of choice insults that would have been completely wasted on Vince's stunted vocabulary and pathetic IQ, and watched as a manicured hand smacked the back of Vince's head. Hard. To anyone else, it might have seemed like a casual flirtation, but I knew this particular cheerleader, and the look on Emily Reinnert's face wasn't romantic.

"Don't be such a dick," she muttered as she stepped out from behind him to head toward the gym.

She didn't look at me when she passed. Not directly. Instead, the corner of her mouth turned up, curling the Wild Cats logo on her cheek. The throng of people narrowed around us and pressed into the wide gym doors. She discreetly slipped a note into my hand and I shuddered at the unexpected contact. A wave of her complex emotions rippled through me. A nauseating prickle I attributed to stage fright. Then the cool wash of gratitude that followed.

I crumpled the note and pulled my hands inside my sleeves while Jeremy watched the hem of her cheerleading skirt disappear into the gym. "Is it just me, or is it shorter than usual?"

"Jeremy!" I tugged on his camera strap. "Why don't you take a picture? It'll last longer."

"I plan to take a few dozen," he said. "You know, for the school paper. Think she'd give me an interview?"

I snorted. "Sure, if you can get past her boyfriend. For your next reckless act of rebellion, you can ask TJ's girlfriend out on a date. Then we can see how long it takes him to beat you to death with his leg brace."

"You wouldn't let that happen."

He said it quickly. Easily. Like he didn't have to think about it. Jeremy was a pacifist-the opposite of his dad- where I tended to react for both of us. When we were fourteen, I'd stood in his kitchen, holding his phone, waiting for social services to answer. Jeremy's hand was on mine, his wrist ringed in bruises, tasting remorseful and uncertain, like maybe he'd deserved it. Drowning out my own feelings and making me uncertain too. I hung up the phone, and Jeremy let go, and I still hated myself for it.

"Are you coming?" he asked, shaking me from the memory. Music and shouts blared behind him, a sea of blue-andwhite jerseys and pom-poms.

"No, it's not my thing. Anh's working the store for her brother after school. I wish we could hang out. Just the two of us," I said hopefully. Maybe if it we hung out like we used to, then he'd open up and tell me what was wrong.

"I can't. I'm covering the game at North Hampton." He held up his camera case and waved an apologetic good-bye. People crested around him in blue-and-white waves, and his blond head bobbed over them like the sun. I squeezed my hand where I'd held his a moment ago, and hoped he'd be okay without me for a while. I waved back, walking backward as the gym swallowed him up.

Emily's note crinkled against my palm. I ducked into the nearest girls' bathroom and opened it. Everything about it bubbled, from her loopy letters to the obnoxious circles under multiple exclamation points.

79% on my algebra test. I passed!!!

I sighed, crumpled her note, and tossed it in the trash. It was almost a thank-you. A passing grade meant she could keep her place on the squad, her seat in the social pyramid. Unfortunately, her passing score would do nothing for mine, even though I had been the one to tutor her after school.

Every week.

For three months.

Community service. Five days a week. One hour a day. A mandatory requirement of all scholarship candidates. Students with cars and bus money got to volunteer in labs, or hospitals, or at the Smithsonian. Oleksa's dad hooked him up cracking math codes for some government agency. Meanwhile, we who were vehicularly challenged had to tutor students after school.

Of course, it would all have been worth it if they'd paid me. If I didn't have to slip money from my mother's tip jar for my newspaper and depend on Jeremy's Twinkie donations for my junk food fix

I closed my eyes and thunked my head against the wall, which didn't do anything for the tension headache blooming inside it. Touching Jeremy had stressed me out. The headaches, the nausea . . . they were the reason I'd stopped touching my mother after my father left five years ago. I'd tried, thinking that I could fill the void. That holding tightly to her might ease her pain, and maybe ease my own. But I wasn't enough, and she'd turned so bitter that when we did touch, the pain stayed with me for days and the taste of her made me vomit. I lost weight and missed school, withdrew under blankets and hid inside long sleeves. Worried, my mother took me to neurologists who told her there was nothing physically wrong with me. They suggested I was suffering from stress, that I was emotionally fragile because my father had left us. Relief clung to the stench of my mother's grief- maybe, at least partly, because the doctors had given her one more reason to blame him.

But she was wrong. They were all wrong. What I was feeling wasn't my father's fault. It wasn't coming from inside me. It was coming from anyone I got close enough to touch. I wasn't exactly sure how it worked-it's not like they teach this stuff in AP Physics-but I had a theory. Emotion is energy, and if energy is strong enough, it can travel between two points. Maybe I was like a channel, someone other people's energies could pass through. I was somehow experiencing truths about people that others just couldn't. Most of those truths left a sour taste on my tongue that made me wish I'd never gotten close to them at all. So I didn't. I didn't do sports, I avoided parties and crowds, and I didn't date.

And I never told anyone.

I washed two aspirin down with a palm of tap water. Then I leaned on the sink basin and looked hard in the mirror, the bits and pieces I remembered of my father staring back at me through cross sections of my mother's face. Almost, but not entirely either one of them.

I was still just nearly.

3.

After school, I spread the newspaper out on my bedroom floor. I wasn't interested in the whole paper, just the section of personal ads called Missed Connections. I'd only had time to skim them, sparing glances between labs and lectures, and I clung to the possibility that maybe I'd missed something important.

"What do you think, Doc? Will I find him this week?" I asked the poster on my wall. It had been a birthday gift from Anh, who thought it was hilarious that Albert Einstein was the only guy who'd ever been in my bedroom, until I'd pointed out that this accounted for one more than had ever been in hers.

I'd never told Anh about all the Friday nights Jeremy and I had spent sprawled across my bedroom floor, eating Twinkies and cackling over the personals when we were younger. That was before the two of us had become the three of us.

Looking at the paper now, I saw that the few ads that had resonated with glimmers of hope that morning turned out to be nothing more than empty pick-up lines.

I saw you on the Blue Line. You got off at Van Dorn.

You have red hair and a great rack. I think you might have noticed me too. If so, same time, same place tomorrow. I'll save you a seat.

I snorted into my hand, careful not to attract my mother's attention through the paper-thin walls of our trailer.

You dropped your stamps at the post office on Wythe. I picked them up for you. I was too nervous to think of something to say. If you're out there, tell me what I was wearing so I know it was you.

I fell backward on the threadbare carpet with an exasperated sigh. Five years gone and still no sign of the man who spent every Saturday with me at Belle Green Park, pulling dandelions out of thin air and making quarters vanish with a wave of his hand.

I reached one hand under my mattress until I grasped a small plastic bag containing a carefully folded personal ad dated five years ago, a worn brown wallet, a gold wedding band, and a train ticket. The wallet and the ring were all that was left of my father's personal effects. My mother'd found them in his car, abandoned in an airport parking garage.

I'd watched Mona cut up the IDs and credit cards and toss everything, even his ring, in the trash. While she wept, locked in her bedroom, I'd fished the remaining scraps of my father out of the wastebasket and tried to tape them back together. There had been far too many pieces. They fit together like a puzzle and when I was done, I had four driver's licenses, each with a different name, all of them similar in looks to my father, but only one of them was him. I'd had all these theories about why he had those phony IDs. I imagined he'd been swallowed up by the Witness Protection Program and that's why he had so many aliases. We lived close to Langley and the Pentagon. I told myself he could have worked covertly for the CIA. My father wouldn't have just left. He must have had a reason. And I believed that one day, he'd come back. That it was all some necessary sleight of hand, and he'd turn up like a card in a trick, right back where he was supposed to be.

I'd returned the broken pieces of the phony IDs to the garbage can and tucked everything else in a plastic bag.