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She asks a follow-up question about everything. What color was the old garage? Where did the creek go? What flavor of freeze pop? Did the neighbor kid get in trouble? She stands in the old kitchen with her hand on the yellow tile and asks me how high the snow was the day I broke my wrist, and I tell her it was up to my knees, and she nods like that matters, like she’s going to remember that detail.

And I keep talking. I don’t know how to stop. I talk more in the old part of my own house than I’ve talked to anybody about it in my whole life.

She isn’t asking because it’s impressive. There’s nothing impressive about it. It’s a creaky hallway and some yellow tile and a lighter square on the floor where a table used to be.

She’s asking because it’s mine.

It’s getting dark by the time we go back up the three steps and through the white door into the new part of the house. The floor changes under our feet again. The ceiling goes up. Everything goes quiet, pale, and smooth, like walking out of a movie theater into a mall.

She looks back once at the door when I close it.

We stop in the hall, between the guest room and mine. Her duffel is still on the floor of the guest room, by the cedar chest, where she put it. I can see it from here.

“You want to hang out?” I ask.

It comes out more casual than I meant. Or maybe exactly as casual as I meant. I don’t know.

She looks at my door. Then at me.

“Okay.”

She follows me in. She goes straight to the couch and sits on the same end she sat on at Thanksgiving. Except she isn’t sitting on the edge of it this time. She kicks her shoes off, the canvas ones, and leaves them on the rug, and pulls her feet up under her.

I sit on the other end.

The room is warm. It’s getting dark outside, the snow going blue on the lawn, the lights coming on along the drive. I don’t turn on the TV.

“So what are we going to do all break?” she asks, looking out the window. She doesn’t notice what she said. She doesn’t notice she said we.

I notice.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I usually see my friends. We play hockey on the lake.”

She turns her head. “On an actual frozen lake?”

“Yeah.”

“Is that safe?”

“No.”

She looks at me like she’s waiting for the rest.

“It’s fine,” I say. “It’s Palinski’s lake. His family’s place. His dad checks the ice. If it’s under four inches, nobody goes out.”

She goes still. “Lucas Palinski?”

I look at her. “You remember him?”

“Of course I remember him.”

She says it like I asked if she remembered her own name. And I think about Palinski in high school, loud and big and always somewhere near me, laughing at whatever I said in the cafeteria or the hallways. I don’t remember him ever saying anything to her. I don’t remember him ever not being there when I did.

“What’s he going to think,” she says, “about you bringing me around?”

I shake my head. “I don’t care what he thinks.”

It’s out before she’s done asking.