“Well, I think I can wear this,” I heard Scarlett say as she came back down the hallway, a black dress over her arm. She looked at Macon, then at me, and walked to the closet as if it was the most normal thing in the world to have a strange boy in your bed at ten in the morning on a Thursday.

Macon lay back, letting one hand flop over his eyes. His boot, and his foot in it, had somehow landed in my lap, where it remained. Macon Faulkner’s foot was in my lap.

“Did you meet Halley?” Scarlett asked him, hanging the dress on her closet door. “Halley, this is Macon. Macon, Halley.”

“Hi,” I said, immediately aware of how high my voice was.

“Hey.” He nodded at me, moving his foot off my lap as if that was nothing special, then got off the bed and stood up, stretching his arms. “Man, I feel awful.”

“Well, you should,” Scarlett said in the same scolding voice she used with me when I was especially spineless. “You were incredibly wasted.”

Macon leaned over and rooted around under the sheets, looking for something, while I sat there and stared at him. He was in a white T-shirt ripped along the hem and dark blue shorts, those clunky boots on his feet. He was tall and wiry, and tan from a summer working landscaping around the neighborhood, which was the only place I ever saw him, and even then from a distance.

“Have you seen—?” he began, but Scarlett was already reaching to the bedside table and the baseball cap lying there. Macon leaned over and took it from her, then put it on with a sheepish look. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” Scarlett pulled her hair back behind her head, gathering it in her hands, which meant she was thinking. “So, you need a ride to the service?”

“Nah,” he said, walking to the bedroom door with his hands in his pockets, stepping over my feet as if I was invisible. “I’ll see you there.”

“Okay.” Scarlett stood by the doorway.

“Is it cool? To go out this way?” he was whispering, gesturing down the hall to Marion’s empty room.

“It’s fine.”

He nodded, then stepped toward her awkwardly, leaning down to kiss her cheek. “Thanks,” he said quietly, in a voice I probably was not supposed to hear. “I mean it.”

“It’s no big deal,” Scarlett said, smiling up at him, and we both watched him as he loped off, his boots clunking down the stairs and out the door. When I heard it swing shut, I walked to the window and leaned against the glass, waiting until he came out on the walk, squinting, and began those eighteen steps to the street. Across the street my mother looked up, folding her paper in her lap, watching too.

“I cannot believe you,” I said out loud, as Macon Faulkner passed the prickly bushes and turned left, headed out of Lakeview —Neighborhood of Friends.

“He was upset,” Scarlett said simply. “Michael was his best friend.”

“But you never even told me you knew him. And then I come up here and he’s in your bed.”

“I just knew him through Michael. He’s messed up, Halley. He’s got a lot of problems.”

“It’s so weird, though,” I said. “I mean, that he was here.”

“He just needed someone,” she said. “That’s all.”

I still had my eye on Macon Faulkner as he moved past the perfect houses of our neighborhood, seeming out of place among hissing sprinklers and thrown newspapers on a bright and shiny late summer morning. I couldn’t say then what it was about him that kept me there. But just as he was rounding the corner, disappearing from sight, he turned around and lifted his hand, waving at me, as if he knew even without turning back that I’d still be there in the window, watching him go.

When we got to the church, there was already a line out the door. Scarlett hadn’t said much the entire trip, and as we walked over, she was wringing her hands.

“Are you okay?” I asked her.

“It’s just weird,” she said, and her voice was low and hollow. She had her eyes on something straight ahead. “All of it.”

As I looked up I could see what she meant. Elizabeth Gunderson, head cheerleader, was surrounded by a group of her friends on the church steps. She was sobbing hysterically, a red T-shirt in her hands.

Scarlett stopped when we got within a few feet of the crowd, so suddenly that I kept walking and then had to go back for her. She was standing by herself, her arms folded tightly across her chest.

“Scarlett?” I said.

“This was a bad idea,” she said. “We shouldn’t have come.”

“But—”

And that was as far as I got before Ginny Tabor came up behind me, throwing her arms around both of us at once and collapsing into tears. She smelled like hairspray and cigarette smoke and was wearing a blue dress that showed too much leg.

“Oh, my God,” she said, lifting her head to take in me and then Scarlett as we pulled away from her as delicately as possible. “It’s so awful, so terrible. I haven’t been able to eat since I heard. I’m a wreck.”

Neither of us said anything; we just kept walking, while Ginny fumbled for a cigarette, lighting it and then fanning the smoke with one hand. “I mean, the time that we were together wasn’t all that great, but I loved him so much. It was just circumstances—” and now she sobbed, shaking her head—“that kept us apart. But he was, like, everything to me for those two months. Everything.”