Maybe, I thought, for one panic-stricken moment, Rob did see me in the back of Skip's Trans Am, and he was coming over to ask me if I was completely out of my mind, going around, spying on him like that.

But when I flung open the door, I saw that it wasn't Rob at all. My heart didn't stop its crazy gymnastics, though.

Because instead of Rob Wilkins standing on my front porch, it was Mark Leskowski.

"Hey," he said when he saw me. His smile was nervous and shy and wonderful, all at the same time. "Whew. I'm glad it was you. You know. Who answered the door. All of a sudden I was like, 'Whoa, what if her dad answers.' But it's you."

I just stood there and stared. You would have, too, if you'd opened up your front door and found your school's star quarterback standing there, smiling shyly.

"Um," Mark said, when I didn't say anything right away. "Can I, um, talk to you? Just for a few minutes?"

I looked behind me. There was no one in the house, of course. Looking behind me had been pure reflex.

The thing was, even though I'd never had a boy come over to my house to visit me before, I was pretty sure my parents wouldn't like it if I invited him in when they weren't home.

Mark must have realized what I was thinking, since he said, "Oh, I don't have to come in. We could sit out here, if you want."

I shook my head. I was still feeling a little dazed. It is not every day you open up your door and see a guy like Mark Leskowski standing on your porch.

I guess it was on account of this dazed feeling that I opened up my mouth and blurted, "Why aren't you at the memorial service?"

Mark didn't seem offended by my bluntness, however. He looked down at his feet and murmured, "I couldn't. I mean, the one today at school was bad enough. But to go back there, where it happened … I just couldn't."

Oh, God. My heart lurched for him. The guy was clearly hurting.

"The only time since all of this started that I've felt even semi-human was when I was talking to you," Mark said, lifting his gaze to meet mine. "I was hoping we could . . . you know. Talk some more. If you haven't eaten, I was thinking maybe we could go grab something. To eat, I mean. Nothing fancy or anything. Maybe just pizza."

Pizza. Mark Leskowski wanted to take me out for pizza.

I said, "Sure," and closed the front door behind me. "Pizza's fine."

Yeah, I know, okay? I know my mother said not to leave the house. I know I was being punished for trying to deviate Karen Sue Hankey's septum.

But look, Mark needed me, all right? You could see the need right there in his face.

And seriously, who else was he going to turn to? Who else but me had ever been in anything like the kind of trouble he was in? I mean, I knew what it was like to be hunted, like an animal, by the so-called authorities. I knew what it was like to have everyone, everyone in the whole world against you.

And yeah, okay, no one had ever suspected me of committing murder. But hadn't everyone at school been going around blaming me for Amber's death? Wasn't that almost the same thing?

So I went with him. I got into his car—a black BMW. It so totally figured—and we drove downtown, and no, I never once thought, Gee, I hope he doesn't drive out into the woods and try to kill me.

This is because, for one thing, I didn't believe Mark Leskowski was capable of killing anyone, on account of his being so sensitive and all. And for another thing, it was broad daylight. No one tries to kill someone else in broad daylight.

Furthermore, even though I am only five foot tall, I have bested bigger guys than Mark Leskowski. As Douglas is fond of pointing out, I feel no compunction whatsoever against fighting dirty if I have to.

Can I just tell you that the world looks different from the inside of a BMW? Or maybe it is just that it looks different from the inside of Mark Leskowski's BMW. His BMW has tinted windows, so everything looks kind of … better from inside his car.

Except for Mark, of course. He, I was discovering, always looks good.

Especially when, like now, he was worried. His dark eyebrows kind of furrowed together in this adorably vulnerable way . . . kind of like a golden retriever puppy that wasn't sure where it had put its ball.

"It's just that they all think I did it," he said as we started down Lurnley Lane. "And I . . . I just can't believe it. I mean, that they'd think that. I loved Amber."

I murmured something encouraging. All I could think was, Heather Montrose, please be downtown when we get there. Please see me getting out of Mark Leskowski’s BMW. Please see me eating pizza with him. Please.

It was wrong of me—so wrong—to want to be seen in the BMW of a boy whose girlfriend had, just days before, died tragically.

On the other hand, it was wrong of Heather—so wrong—to have been so mean to me about something that was in no way my fault.

"But these Feds . . . ," Mark went on. "Well, you know them. Right? I mean, they seem to know you. They're just so … secretive. It's like they know something. Like they have some kind of proof I did it."

"Oh," I said as we turned onto Second Street. "I'm sure they don't."

"Of course they don't," Mark said. "Because I didn't do it."

"Right," I said. Too bad I didn't have a cell phone. Because then I could make up some excuse about how I had to call Ruth, and then I could tell her I was with Mark. Mark Leskowski. That I was with Mark Leskowski in his BMW.

Why does every sixteen-year-old girl in the entire world have a cell phone but me?

"That's right," Mark said. "They don't. Because if they did, they'd have arrested me already. Right?"

I looked at him. Beautiful. So beautiful. No Rob Wilkins, of course. But a hottie, just the same.

"Right," I said.

"And they'd have told you. Wouldn't they? I mean, wouldn't they have told you? If they had something on me?"

"Of course they wouldn't have told me," I said. "Why would they have told me? What do you think I am, some kind of narc?"

"Of course not," Mark said. "It's just that you seem to be, you know, real friendly with one another...."

I let out a bark of laughter at that.

"Sorry to disappoint you, Mark," I said. "But Special Agents Johnson and Smith and I are not exactly friends. Basically, I have something they want, and that's about it."

Mark glanced at me curiously. We were stopped at an intersection, so it was okay that he was looking at me and not at the road, but I'd noticed that Mark also had a tendency to stare at me when he should have been paying attention to where we were going. This, in addition to his seeming to think that stop signs were mere suggestions, and that it wasn't in the least bit necessary to maintain a distance of at least two car lengths from the vehicle in front of him, led me to believe Mark wasn't the world's best driver.

"What," he asked me, "do you have that they want?"

I looked back at him, but my look wasn't curious. I was amazed. How could he not know? How could he not have heard? It had been all over the local papers for weeks, and most of the national papers for about the same amount of time. It had been on the news, and there'd even been some talk about making a movie out of the whole thing, except of course I wasn't too enthused about seeing my personal life transferred to the big screen.

"Hello," I said. "Lightning Girl. Remember?"

"Oh," he said. "That whole psychic thing. Yeah. Right."

But that wasn't the only thing Mark had forgotten about. I figured that out when he swung his car into the parking lot for Mastriani's. Mastriani's is one of my family's restaurants. It is the fanciest of the three, though it does indeed serve pizza. I thought it was a little weird that Mark was taking me to my own family's restaurant, but I figured, well, it is the best pizza in town, so why complain?

It wasn't until we'd walked through the door—Heather Montrose had not, unfortunately, been downtown to see me get out of Mark Leskowski's BMW—and the waitress who had been assigned to show us to our table went, "Why, Jessica. Hello," that I realized what a huge, colossal mistake I had just made.

Because of course Mark wasn't the only one forgetting things. I'd forgotten that the new waitress my dad had just hired for Mastriani's was none other than Rob's mom.



C H A P T E R

8

Yeah. That's right. Rob's mom.

Not that my dad knew she was Rob's mom, of course. I mean, he might have known she had a kid and all, but he didn't know that I was sort of seeing that kid.

Well, all right, that I was madly in love with that kid.

No, my dad had hired Mrs. Wilkins because she'd been out of work after losing her job when the local plastics factory closed down, and I'd told him about her, saying she was a real nice lady and all. I never said how I knew her, though. I never went, Hey, Dad, you should hire the mother of the guy I am madly in love with, even though he won't go out with me because he considers me jailbait and he's eighteen and on probation.

Yeah. I didn't say that.

But of course up until the moment I saw Mrs. Wilkins standing there with a couple of menus in her hand, I totally forgot she worked at Mastriani's . . . that she had been working there most of the summer while I'd been away at camp, and had been doing, from what I'd heard, a real good job.

And now she was going to get to wait on me—the girl who might, if she played her cards right, one day be her daughter-in-law—while I ate pizza with the Ernie Pyle High quarterback who, by the way, appeared to be a suspect in his girlfriend's murder.