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“Harris,” Denis said, “I understand the difficulty—”

“That’s Mr. Pasternak,” my father said, and I felt so embarrassed for us.

“Mr. Pasternak,” Denis said, his first attempt at a more cordial tone. “Believe me when I say I can imagine how difficult this is.” He was talking slowly now. “But the only way I can help you find your boy is to take an utterly unflinching look at the situation. In some very preliminary poking around, I’ve heard your son could be a bit of a bully at times. Any truth to that?”

“Not that I know of,” my father said.

“He was very popular,” my mother said.

Denis looked at me, a flash again of that sly knowing.

“He pushed kids around sometimes,” I said. “The nerds. He used to pick on my best friend. Well, the kid that used to be my best friend. He’s not really my best friend anymore.” I was stammering. “Danny shoved kids around sometimes. Gave them swirlies. Called them names. You know?”

My mother puffed on her cigarette as if it were an oxygen machine. My father shifted in his chair, the rubber bottoms of the legs braying against the floor.

“He wasn’t the worst of them,” I said. “There are meaner jocks. And I don’t really think anyone he picked on was capable of revenge. It was mostly like the wimps.”

Kimberly jotted down notes. Denis nodded at me. “Thank you, Lydia,” he said, with heavy emphasis on the first word, an unmistakable
see there
tenor to his voice, as if he were just shy of holding a thumb to his nose, twiddling his fingers, and spitting a raspberry at my parents.

“You’re welcome,” I said, and already I was a little in love.

Denis was there all the time in the beginning, asking additional questions, searching the files of Danny’s computer, examining the meager contents of his bookshelves, mining the depths of my mother’s disordered file cabinet. Of Melissa Anne’s dirty scraps of letters, he said simply, “Nutter. One. Hundred. Percent.”

Most of the time Kimberly came too, taking notes as Denis talked in shorthand.
Sublit,
he said after paging through one of Danny’s school notebooks;
Agro,
he said after examining the football trophies. He and Kimberly could often be found standing in a corner, their heads tipped together, their faces inches apart, murmuring low murmurs. Even though he was probably twenty years older than she, whenever I saw them like that, I wondered if maybe they were sleeping together.

There were times, too, he showed up without Kimberly. He’d
come in my room and ask questions. Honestly, how did I get along with Danny? Was there rivalry? Who did my parents prefer?

“Prefer?” I said. “Parents don’t prefer anyone,” though even as I said it, I pictured the way my dad and Danny glad-handed each other, all the tussling-type hugs that involved grabbing each other’s necks and shoulders and wrestling around until they were panting and laughing, cheek to cheek. I thought of my mother at the washing machine, pulling Danny’s dirty shirts out of his basket and holding them in front of her, admiring the stains as if they were art, every once in a while pressing them to her nose.

I worried that my cheeks were reddening, that Denis could somehow detect the warmth rising through my throat. It’s not that the answer was particularly difficult to formulate. Or even revelatory. It had just been so long unspoken, whether out of politeness or denial or sheer obviousness (who needs to confess something that everyone already knows?), that it felt suddenly shameful to say, “Danny.”

Denis smiled his sly, me-and-you-against-the-world smile. “Likability is overrated,” he said simply and then shrugged, as if parents loving one kid more than another were no big deal. Win some, lose some. It was a generous gesture, one I appreciated, even if I knew neither of us fully believed it.

Sometimes he would run his fingers along the spines of my books. He picked up my copy of
The Sun Also Rises.
“Misogynist or truth-teller?” he said.

“Both, I guess,” I said, surprised by the question.

“I read somewhere that Hemingway modeled his writing after Turgenev, of all people. You read much Turgenev?”

“Um …” I said, stumbling a bit. Did private investigators even go to college? I assumed they were the sort of people who couldn’t hack it in the police academy, a rung or two above bounty hunters.

I must’ve betrayed something in my expression, because Denis said, “Yep, chimps can read.”

“No, no,” I said stupidly. “Haven’t read much Turgenev.” In fact I’d read nothing at all.

“Try
A Sportsman’s Sketches.
It is pretty uncanny, the similarity. Same cadence. Same knack for understatement. It’s not like you immediately think Turgenev when you’re reading
The Old Man and the Sea,
but you’d be surprised.”

I nodded. “That sounds neat.” I hated myself for saying
neat.
Already Denis had a way about having conversations, a way most adults didn’t, that made you feel important, as if what you said might actually matter. This could be daunting. “I mean, cool,” I said, which was no better. I tried to think of something smart to say. I tried to think of other Russian writers. “Do you like Chekhov?”

“Sure,” he said. “Who doesn’t like Chekhov?” He slapped my book casually into his open palm. It made a soft, splutting noise against his skin.

I tried to think of something smart.
“The Seagull,”
I said.
“Three Sisters.”
As he nodded, waiting for me to continue, suddenly I was unsure how people made conversation, how anyone strung coherent sentences together. “Those are good ones,” I finally said, and his nodding turned quick and charitable, like we were both agreeing to pretend that I had just said something clever.

I told Lola Pepper about him. How his eyes were dark enough to be pupilless, the deep brown blending into his irises and lending him a brooding quality, even when he was making a joke. How he had an aggressive, nearly hieroglyphic system of note-taking, full of deep
slashes and jagged peaks. How he put his hand on the small of Kim-berly’s back as they walked down our front steps together. How his old sedan burped smoke out of the exhaust as it pulled away. Lola was always attentive in her Lola way, nodding at me from my bed where she lay with various combinations of rescue beagles, chewing loudly on her cherry or sour apple gum and paging through a
Seventeen
magazine instead of doing her homework. But she never seemed particularly interested. She never asked follow-up questions.

One day he popped his head into my room while she was there.

“Oh,” he said when he saw I was not alone. “Sorry to interrupt.”

“No problem,” Lola said. “You’re the private investigator.” She untangled herself from Olivia, sat up on the bed, dusted the dog hair off her, and reached out a hand. “Lola Pepper,” she said, grinning. “Nice to meet you finally.” I felt a by-now familiar, though admittedly more potent, wave of animus for the bubbly, ingratiating way she had of presenting herself to all guys without even appearing to try.

Denis shook her hand and flipped through his notepad, repeating her name. “I’ve got you on my list somewhere,” he said. Then, muttering to himself, “Friends with him, a cheerleader.”

“Flag girl,” Lola said, in a tone that indicated she was long sick of making that correction.

He found the notebook page he was looking for. “Lola Pepper-right. Do you have a couple minutes? I’d like to chat with you.”

“Sure,” Lola said.

“Maybe next door.” He nodded toward Danny’s room. “A little privacy.” I felt stung. Lola bounced off the bed, Olivia yipping at her. Lola picked up the dog and slung her over her shoulder like a potato sack. Olivia licked Lola’s ear. The rescue beagles loved Lola.
Denis nodded quickly to me as he closed the door behind them. “Kiddo,” he said.

I listened to the murmur of their voices through the wall. It was impossible to make out the words, though I could hear Denis’s baritone and the rise and fall of Lola’s chirpy sentences.
Kiddo,
I thought, looking down at the T-shirt that hung limply over the barely visible bumps of my chest. I had grown over time immune to Danny’s insults
—flat as a board and pancake—if
only for their repe-tition and predictability. But now, looking down at myself, scrawny as a child, I felt an unusually venomous heat, almost a sizzle beneath my skin, so deep and sudden was my self-hatred.

They were in there for a long time.

I paged through Lola’s geometry notebook, looking at the vines doodled in the margins, the
i
’s dotted with circles, the half-played tic-tac-toe games, all in the same pen, Lola against herself. My watch made a soft but insistent ticking.
Pih-pih-pih-pih-pih.
I wanted her to come back and report what had happened. I wanted to hear Denis described in the easy, unashamed way Lola had of describing boys. But when it finally quieted next door and she opened my door, her eyes looked glazed and unfocused. She was silent when she sat back on the bed. Olivia was no longer with her.

“What?” I said. “What’s wrong?”

“He’s an
asshole
,” she said. She whispered the last word. Lola wasn’t one to call people assholes. “So. Rude.”

“Why?” I said. “What happened?”

“Just his questions,” she said. “He’s like some FBI interrogator. And it doesn’t even seem like he
likes
Danny. He doesn’t even
know
Danny. How’s he supposed to find him, acting like that?”

Lola was really upset, her voice insistent, her cheeks speckled.

“He’s supposed to be excellent,” I said. “He knows what he’s doing.” I tried to keep my own voice even, to betray nothing.

Lola looked at me like I was crazy, and I felt even more than usual the expanse between us buckling and straining. I was reminded of the old black-and-white filmstrip Mr. Fosback had shown us in AP physics of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse, its concrete twisting and swaying as the winds of the Puget Sound blew. A lone man scrambled from his car to safety just before the cables snapped and the roadway wrenched apart and a whole span of the bridge, surreal as a nightmare, fell into the choppy waters below.

Denis began showing up at school. He stood in the hallway before first bell talking to Coach Kinsborough outside Coach’s social studies classroom. He staked out the parking lot during lunch, catching Tip or Kent Newman or Gregory Baron or Dale Myerson before they left or as they returned to campus. There was a rumor going around that Principal Garver had given him permission to pull people out of classes, and another that Denis had made Dawnelle Ryan describe all of the sexual positions Danny used to like. “He separated me and Gregory,” Tip said to a huddle of people gathered around his locker, repeating a story I’d heard him tell twice already. “Dragged each of us to different sections of the parking lot to question us. The guy’s watched one too many episodes of
Matlock.”
Min Mathers complained that Denis stood
this close—
she held her thumb and index finger centimeters apart—and that his breath smelled like a gutter.

People weren’t so much upset by Denis as they were annoyed by his presence. No one acted like a painful wound was being reopened. There were no tears or sorrowful reminiscences. In fact, there was little talk of Danny at all. Instead, everyone seemed fixated on the idea of Denis as an irritant, like the guy who kept repeating
a worn-out joke or who eagerly showed up in an outfit everyone knew had gone out of style several seasons earlier. His biggest offense appeared to be that of inconvenience. Min had been pulled out of a student council meeting. Tip had missed half of lunch. “Me and Gregory,” he reported indignantly, “had to eat in the caf.” No one seemed particularly heartened that the investigation was getting a fresh infusion of energy. Missing football players, apparently, were so 1995.

There was something both liberating and chilling in this. It gave me an unfettered feeling, an almost dizzying sense of freedom, like I could do anything: take flight, disappear, breathe fire. At the same time, it stranded me. I was alone—probably no more so than I’d ever been, but I felt it more acutely—as I walked down long hallways or sat at crowded lunch tables between Lola and the rest of the flag team, whose names I knew now (the familiar Bayard, plus Penny and Rochelle and Beth and Alexis and Diana), or listened to Ms. Villara recite the varied uses of
detrás
and
atrás.
The normalcy that had returned to Franklin High was at times smothering. There were moments I was convinced I was choking, in the middle of class or as we cleared away our lunch trays or as I marched to sixth period, when my heart beat loudly against my rib cage and my breath shortened and I was sure the color was draining from my face and my lips were turning blue. But no one paid particular attention, and by looking at the faces around me, the easy smiles or facile expressions, it appeared that everything was fine, just fine.

Some lunches I still spent outside. The ground was often slick with ice. Snow had been plowed to the edges of the parking lot, and it stood now as a heaping, chest-high, gray perimeter wall.

“Howdy, pardner,” David Nelson said one day as I leaned against the building, eating my sandwich with mittens on. I started a little. I’d been watching Denis in the far end of the lot, talking to one of the guys I’d played euchre with at that first party. Martin, I thought his name might be. Or Marvin. Martin/Marvin was a tall, wiry kid, but he stood now with his chin down, his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his letter jacket, tilting far back, as if avoiding a right hook to the chin.