Frank lifted up the bottom of his T-shirt and dried his face with it, and I felt my feet tangle. Frank Porter, for some reason, was in incredibly good shape—he was thin, but with really defined stomach muscles, his mesh shorts sitting low on his hips. I swallowed hard and looked away quickly, trying to concentrate on walking in a straight line. The second I got home, I had to tell Sloane—

Except, of course, that I couldn’t. At least, not yet.

“Hey, can I ask you something?” Frank said after we’d been walking for a few minutes. I glanced over at him, trying to see the person he’d been not that long ago, Frank Porter, the nice class president, not the secretly ripped guy walking next to me. I nodded, even though it had been my experience that when someone asks you if they can ask something—instead of just asking—it means it’s going to be a hard question to answer. “The other night, at the Orchard,” he said. He looked away from me and shook his head. “I’m really sorry if this is intruding,” he said. “I just keep thinking about it, for some reason. But when I drove you to get gas . . .” He looked back at me, and I could tell he was trying to figure out how to put this. “Were you by yourself?”

I felt my cheeks flood with heat, and I knew it had nothing to do with the running. So Frank had noticed that I was there, all alone, like a huge loser. “Not that I wasn’t happy to drive you,” he added quickly. “Seriously, I didn’t mind at all. I guess I was just wondering.”

I gave him a tight smile, then looked ahead to the road, trying to figure out what to do, wishing with everything that I had that I’d just forced myself to keep running when he’d given me the opportunity to go. Could I just leave? Did I have to answer this question? What would happen if I just started running home? It wasn’t like we were friends, after all. And then, suddenly, I realized that there was another option—I could tell him the truth.

Maybe it was because we weren’t friends, or because I knew I would probably not see Frank Porter again this summer, but I found myself nodding. “Yeah,” I said. “It was . . .” I let out a breath, trying to figure out how to put this. “Do you know Sloane Williams?”

“Of course I know Sloane,” Frank said, which I’d been expecting. “You two are kind of a package deal, right?”

“Yeah,” I said slowly. I realized I hadn’t told anyone about this yet, and didn’t have a practiced explanation. But for whatever reason, I had a feeling that Frank would be willing to wait until I figured it out—maybe because of all the open forums I’d seen him moderate, standing patiently in the auditorium with his microphone while some stoner stumbled through a grievance about the vending machines. “Well . . . she left at the beginning of the summer. I don’t know where she went, or why. But she left me this list. It’s . . .” I stopped again, trying to figure out how to describe it. “It’s this list of thirteen things she wants me to do. And going to the Orchard was one of them.” I glanced back at Frank, expecting him to look confused, or just nod politely before changing the subject. I didn’t not expect him to look thrilled.

“That’s fantastic,” he enthused. “I mean, not that Sloane is gone,” he added quickly. “I’m sorry about that. I just mean that she left you something like this. Do you have it with you?”

“No,” I said, looking over at him, thinking that this should have been obvious, since I was running. “Why is it fantastic?”

“Because there has to be more to it than that, right?” he asked. “It can’t just be the list. There has to be a code, or a secret message . . .”

“I don’t think so,” I said, thinking back to the thirteen items. They had seemed mysterious enough already to me without needing to go looking for extra meanings.

“Will you take a picture and send it to me?” he asked, and I saw he was serious. “If there’s something else in there, I can tell you.”

My first response was to say no—it was incredibly personal, and plus, there were things like Kiss a stranger and Go skinny-dipping on the list, and those seemed much too embarrassing to share with Frank Porter. But what if there was something else? I hadn’t seen anything myself, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t. Rather than telling him yes or no, I just said, “So I guess you really like puzzles.”

Frank smiled, not seeming embarrassed about this. “Kind of obvious, huh?”

I nodded. “And at the gas station, you practically took over that guy’s word search.”

Frank laughed. “James!” he said. “Good man. I know, it’s a little strange. I’ve been into them for years now—codes, puzzles, patterns. It’s how my brain works, I guess.” I nodded, thinking this was the end of it. I’d shared something, he’d shared something, and now we could go back to running. But a moment later, Frank went on, his voice a little hesitant, “I think it started with the Beatles. My cousin was listening to them a lot, and told me that they had secret codes in their lyrics. And I became obsessed.”

“With codes?” I asked, looking over at him. We weren’t even walking fast any longer. Strolling would probably be the word for what we were doing, just taking our time, walking side by side. “Or the Beatles?”

“Well . . . both,” Frank acknowledged with a smile. “And I got Collins into them too. It was our music when we were kids.” He nodded to the road ahead. “What do you think?” he asked. “Should we try running again?”

I nodded, a little surprised that he wanted to do this, since he’d really seemed to be struggling. But this was Frank Porter. He’d probably be training for a marathon by the end of the summer. We started to run, the pace only slightly slower than what it had been before.

“God,” Frank gasped after we’d been running for another mile or so, “why do people do this? It’s awful and it never gets any easier.”

“Well,” I managed, glancing over at him. I was glad to see that he was red-faced and sweaty, since I was sure I looked much the same. “How much have you been running?”

“Too much,” he gasped.

“No,” I said, taking in a breath while laughing, which made me sound, for an embarrassing moment, like I was choking on air. I tried to turn it into a cough, then asked, “I mean, how long?”