"It's the Stalker," Carmen said irritably without picking up.

Christina sighed and strode past her. "Don't call Mr. Brattle the Stalker, Carmen."

Christina put on her slightly pinched office face and picked up the phone. "h.e.l.lo?"

Carmen was already bored with her mother's conversation, and they hadn't even started talking. Mr. Brattle was Christina's boss. He wore a cla.s.s ring and used the word proactive a lot. He always called with big emergencies like not being able to find the letterhead.

"Oh ... yes. Of course. Hi." Her mother's face unpinched. Her cheeks went pink. "Sorry. I thought you were ... No." Christina giggled.

It couldn't have been Mr. Brattle. Mr. Brattle had never once in his life said anything to cause anyone to giggle, even accidentally. Huh. Carmen was considering this mystery when the buzzer sounded from downstairs. Inadvertently, her eyes flashed to the evil wall clock. For once, the news wasn't bad: 8:21. Very good, in fact. She pushed the b.u.t.ton to open the lobby door. She wouldn't subject Porter to intercom trauma.

"Hi," she said to him, after waiting the appropriate number of seconds before answering the door. She tried to seem as though she'd just been belt-sanding a dresser rather than plain old waiting for him.

The state of his hair (smooth, medium long), the set of his face (alert, interested) didn't change now that he was standing inside her apartment instead of outside her locker in the hallway at school. She didn't see a more intimate version of him.

He was wearing a gray b.u.t.ton-down shirt and nice jeans. Which meant he liked her more than if he'd just worn a T-shirt.

"Hey," he said, following her inside. "You look great."

"Thanks," Carmen said. She shook her hair a little. Whether or not it was true, it was the right thing to say.

"You, uh, all set?" he asked brightly.

"Yeah. I'll just grab my bag."

She went into her room and grabbed the fuzzy turquoise bag from her bed, where it perched like a prop. When she came out, she expected her mom to pounce. Oddly, Christina was still talking on the phone in the kitchen.

"Okay, well. All set," Carmen said. She put her bag over her shoulder and hesitated by the door. Was her mom seriously going to miss this milestone chance to embarra.s.s her?

"Bye, Mom," she shouted.

Carmen meant to breeze out of there, but she couldn't help turning around to check. Her mother had appeared in the kitchen doorway, phone at her ear, waving eagerly. "Have fun," she mouthed.

Very strange.

They walked side by side down the narrow hallway. "I'm parked right outside," Porter informed her. He was looking at the Pants. His eyebrows were slightly raised. He was admiring them.

No, he was confused by them.

Was it possible that she couldn't tell his confusion from his admiration? Maybe that wasn't a good sign.

I've had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.

-Groucho Marx

Bee would have ordered a huge bowl of spaghetti. She wouldn't care if she had noodles hanging out of her mouth like tentacles. Bee didn't subscribe to the list of acceptable date foods.

Lena did. She would have ordered something neat. A salad, maybe. A neat salad.

Tibby would have ordered something challenging, like octopus. She would challenge her date with octopus, but she wouldn't order something that would end up between her teeth and cause true discomfort.

"Sauteed breast of chicken," Carmen said to the darkly freckled waiter, failing to acknowledge that he was a soph.o.m.ore in Tibby's pottery cla.s.s. Chicken was safe and boring. She had come within a breath of ordering a quesadilla, but had realized that could bring up annoying ethnicity issues. Momentarily she was struck with fear that Porter would order something Tex-Mex to make her feel at home.

"I'll have a burger. Medium rare." He handed in his menu. "Thanks."

Very no-nonsense and masculine. It probably would have bothered her if he'd ordered something girlish and trendy, like a wrap.

She bunched up her napkin in her hands and smiled at him. He was very nice-looking. He was tall. In fact, he seemed especially tall sitting across from her. Hmm. Did that mean he had short legs? Carmen had an irrational fear of short legs, since she suspected she herself had them. Her mind leaped about. What if she fell in love with him and they got married someday and they had children with very, very short legs?

"Do you want another Diet c.o.ke?" he asked politely.

She shook her head. "No thanks."

If she had another Diet c.o.ke, she would have to go to the bathroom right away and give him an opportunity to notice her short legs.

"So ... have you thought about where you're going to school?"

The question hung out there, and Carmen wished she could suck it right back in. This was the kind of question her mother would have asked him if she hadn't been on the phone when he'd arrived. You didn't ask that of a fellow sufferer. The trouble was, they'd covered all the "How many siblings do you have"-type bases before they'd even ordered.

Gabriella, Carmen's worldly cousin, had told her that you could judge the success of a date by how quickly it went. Maybe running out of things to say before you ordered your food was a bad sign.

Carmen glanced down at her watch. Her eyes froze. Uh-oh. Was that rude? Quickly she glanced back up.

Porter didn't look offended. "I'll probably go to Maryland," he answered.

Carmen nodded with great interest.

"What about you?"

This was good. This would buy at least three sentences of conversation. "Williams is my first choice. It's pretty hard to get in, though."

"Great school," Porter said.

"Yep," she agreed. Her grandmother hated it when she said "Yep" or "Yeah" or "Uh-huh" instead of straight-up "Yes."

Porter nodded.

"My dad went there," she said, unable to keep a note of pride out of her voice. She recognized that she worked that tidbit of information into conversations a little too often. When you didn't have an actual father around, you tended to rely more on the facts.

Just then Kate Barnett walked into the restaurant with Judd Orenstein, wearing the shortest skirt Carmen had ever seen. It was denim with a lime green hem. In this case, the hem kind of was the skirt.

Carmen wanted to laugh about this. Badly. But glancing at Porter, she somehow doubted that he would want to laugh with her. Carmen squeezed her eyes shut so she wouldn't start laughing and took a mental snapshot to share with Tibby later.

A date was good. A date was fine. But if she said "Kate Barnett borrowed a skirt from her four-year-old sister," her date would think she was catty and possibly even mean.

One problem with her date, she realized, was that he was a boy. She didn't know much about those. The regular cast in her life consisted of her mother, Bee, Tibby, and Lena. Just beyond that circle were her aunt, her female cousin, and her grandmother. In the old days she'd hung out with Bee's brother, Perry, but that was before they'd hit p.u.b.erty, so it didn't totally count. There was Paul. But Paul was different. Paul was as st.u.r.dy and responsible as any forty-year-old man. He was on a higher plane.

The truth was, Carmen loved the idea of boys. She liked how they looked, how they smelled, how they laughed. She'd read enough magazines to know the rules and intricacies of dating. But when you got right down to it, having dinner with one was kind of like having dinner with a penguin. What were you supposed to talk about?

Dear Kostos,

How are you? How is your bapi? How is the football team?

So guess what? I got a job. At a clothing store about a mile from our house. It pays $6.75 an hour plus commissions. Not bad, huh?

Effie is a busgirl at the Olive Vine, did I tell you that? She charmed them by using all seven of the Greek words she knows (most of them having to-do-with making out). Last night I heard her in the shower practicing the Olive Vine birthday serenade.

Say h.e.l.lo to the old people from me.

Since February, when she'd broken it off with Kostos, Lena had written these brief, chatty, pal-to-pal letters once a month or so. She didn't know why she wrote him at all anymore, really. Maybe it was that girl thing of wanting to stay friends with old boyfriends so they wouldn't go around spreading bad rumors about you. (Not that she really believed Kostos would do that.) Or maybe it was so they couldn't get over you completely.

Her old letters had been different-frequent and agonizing. She wrote in pencil before pen. She held the paper up to her neck so that it might absorb a little of her. She put it in the envelope but didn't seal it for a few hours. She sealed it but didn't stamp it for a day. She always hesitated at the mailbox, hovering before opening the door, hovering before closing it, as if her future were in the balance.

Lena had thought that since she'd broken it off, she would stop thinking about him and missing him so much. She'd thought she'd be free. But it hadn't quite worked out that way.

Well, it might have worked out that way for Kostos, ironically enough. He'd apparently stopped thinking about and missing her. (Which was fine.) He hadn't written her a letter in months.

Lena studied the bottom of her paper, wondering how to sign off.

If she hadn't actually feared that she loved Kostos, she would have written Love, Lena, no problem. She wrote Love at the end of notes and letters to people she didn't love at all. She signed thank-you notes to Aunt Estelle (her uncle's needling ex-wife) Love, Lena. When you stopped to think about it, there was terrible love inflation in letters generally. It was easy to write Love when the word was meaningless.

Did she still love Kostos?

As Tibby liked to say, give Lena a choice of A or B and she'll always choose C.

Did she love him?

A: No.

B: Yes.

C: Well, you might suspect that, considering she did think about him a lot. But maybe it had just been attraction last summer. How did you separate attraction from love? And how could you possibly think you loved someone you barely knew and hadn't seen in almost nine months and quite possibly would never see again?

In those last hours in Santorini, Lena had certainly believed she loved him. But what lunatic would base her whole life on a few hours? And anyway, she knew better than to trust her desire-drenched memory. The Kostos she remembered probably had less and less in common with the actual Kostos as the months pa.s.sed.

She pictured the two Kostoses as being like the film-strip of mitosis she'd watched in ninth-grade biology. The film had started with the one cell that spread and expanded, stretching and pulling apart until-foop-two cells. And the more time those two cells spent apart (one going off and helping make a brain, maybe, and the other going off and helping make, say, a heart) the more different they became....

Yes, her answer was a resounding C.

Lena signed the letter Yours, folded it carefully, and slid it into its envelope.

On her way down the hall with Porter, Carmen reviewed the major points of the evening so she could answer what were sure to be a million questions from her mother.

"h.e.l.lo?" she said quietly as she opened the door.

There she was, Carmen Lucille, sixteen, almost seventeen, in her darkened apartment with a date. She waited for her mother to pad around the corner, all worried about catching them kissing.

Carmen waited. What was going on? Had her mother fallen asleep in front of Friends reruns again?

"Mom?" Carmen checked her watch. It was after eleven.

"Sit down," she invited Porter, pointing to the sofa. "I'll be right back."

She checked her mother's room. To her astonishment, she wasn't there. Carmen was starting to feel slightly afraid when she flicked on the light in the kitchen. Her mother was not there, but a note was sitting in the middle of the table.

Carmen,

I went out to dinner with a friend from work. Hope you had a fabulous time.