I was on your porch last night.
—The Format

SIX MONTHS EARLIER

I was sitting outside on the left-hand porch, and according to the faint green glow of the numbers on my watch, I’d been waiting for two hours. The mosquitoes had taken advantage of this and had been slowly devouring me. It was the Amy all-you-can-eat buffet. I’d given up the fight, choosing instead nonviolent resistance, simply scratching the bites every now and then.

My father said this porch was one of the architect’s many follies. Our house was designed with two porches on the second story that faced the street. They looked nice. And the second porch, the one to the right of the one I was currently being eaten alive on, was functional. It was connected to the guest room by a set of French doors, giving our theoretical guests a lovely view of the driveway. But the left-hand porch wasn’t connected to anything—it was purely decorative. However, Charlie and I had discovered long ago that both of our windows—which flanked the porch—were close enough to it that you could climb out your window and make it onto the porch, if you did it quickly and without looking down. When we were younger, we used to sneak out at night occasionally, at a predetermined time. We’d eat candy, or play handheld video games, or just stay up and talk, reveling in the fact that we were breaking the rules, that we were awake when we shouldn’t have been. It had been one of the few times we were united in something.

I scratched at my ankle hard enough to draw blood just as a pair of headlights rounded the cul-de-sac. As usual, they went too far past our house and then just swung around the circle again, stopping in front of our driveway. The driver of the car—it looked like an SUV—turned off the headlights, but left the engine running. I looked toward Charlie’s window and waited. Sure enough, I heard the rasp of the sill being pushed up, and a second later Charlie’s leg emerged from the window, stretching over the railing, and then the rest of him followed, backing out of his window. I waited until he was all the way on the porch before I spoke.

“Hey.”

Charlie whirled around while simultaneously making a high-pitched squeaking noise that I wished I’d somehow been able to record. “Amy, what the fuck,” he said, talking in low tones, his breath coming quickly. “Don’t do that. Jesus.” He glanced down to the waiting car, then back at me. My eyes had adjusted enough to the darkness that I could see he was calculating how to try and spin this. “What are you doing out here?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” I said.

“Come on, don’t be naive,” he said, glancing out toward the car again, and when he looked back at me it was with a smile. Clearly he had decided to go for charm. “I’m just going out with my friends. Is that such a crime? Hey, you want to come?”

For a second I thought about saying yes, just to freak him out and see how he would try to dance around the fact that our social circles didn’t exactly intersect. “You’ve been going out with your friends a lot lately,” I said, then rolled my eyes at myself. You would have thought that after waiting for two hours, I’d have come up with a better way to say this. But apparently not. “Look, Charlie, I’m just worried.”

“Worried?” Charlie frowned, the picture of innocence. “What about?”

“Cut the crap,” I said. “I just think that maybe you should slow down or something. Or at least limit this stuff to the weekends. You do realize it’s a Tuesday night?”

“Hey, my GPA was better than yours last semester, if I recall. And just because you don’t know how to party—” The SUV at the bottom of the driveway flashed its lights on and off, causing both of us to look in its direction. “My friends are waiting,” he said, shouldering his backpack.

“I just think you should cut this back a little,” I said, my voice getting louder. I saw Charlie glance back to the house and realized I held some cards here.

“Amy, Jesus,” he said, his voice low. “Keep it down. I’m fine. You didn’t have to—”

“I’ll tell Mom and Dad,” I said, interrupting him.

He stared at me for a long moment. “No, you won’t.”

I looked up at him. “I will, I—” I slapped at my leg, knowing it was futile.

“No,” he said, crossing the porch to where, I saw, he’d attached a rope ladder. It looked like the one that used to be on our old tree house before it was torn down; I wondered where he’d found it. “If you were going to tell them, you’d have told already. And it’s not like they’d be able to do anything anyway. The only thing that would accomplish would be that I’d be pissed at you, and Mom and Dad wouldn’t trust either of us.”

“Why wouldn’t they trust me?”

“How long have you known about this?” he asked. “Without telling them?” It had been a few months. Maybe four. The answer hung between us for a moment, unsaid. “Exactly,” he said. “So don’t be a narc, okay? Just try to be cool, for once in your life.” He tossed the rope ladder over the railing and threw one leg over, then the other. Then I watched as his head disappeared, and a second later I heard a soft thump as he hit the ground and hustled over to the rumbling car. He got in, and the car peeled away, not putting its headlights on until it was all the way around the cul-de-sac.