“I’ve been feeding it.”
I noticed the open can of tuna on the ground beside him. “Which explains why Weasley hasn’t come home for two days.”
“Weasley, huh?” The cat leaned into his fingers. “Ron, I presume.”
A fellow Harry Potter fan. “Well, he’s definitely not a Ginny. Eighty percent of orange cats are male.”
He raised an eyebrow in acknowledgement.
I uncrossed my arms. “I’m Jo March. I live down the road.”
He nodded. “I see you sometimes. You and your sisters. I’m Trey.”
Trey. Theodore Laurence III.
I’d heard of him, of course. In the country, you might not see your neighbors every day, but you talk about them plenty. Even I knew about old Mr. Laurence’s son, who ran off to Miami and married a club singer. He’d died a couple months ago, along with his Cuban-born wife—a boating accident, the gossips said.
“You’re old Mr. Laurence’s grandson,” I said.
“That’s right.”
I didn’t know what to say. I’d never known anybody before whoseparents had died. Our dad was in Iraq. If something happened to him, it would be like the sun had gone out of our sky, but our lives would basically go on as usual, anchored in our routine orbits by our mother’s steady gravity.
“Sorry about your folks,” I said.
He nodded once, shortly, his black-lashed gaze sliding away.
“Well...” I shifted my weight from foot to foot. “It was nice, uh, meeting you. I gotta run.” Like, literally.
He uncurled from his seat on the porch. He was taller than me, strong and lean. “What are you, in training or something?”
I stuck out my chin. “Yeah, actually. I’m on the cross-country team.”
“What’s your time?”
“Twenty-three minutes.”Give or take a minute.
“Pretty good.” His smile flashed, exposing nice white teeth. “For a girl.”
I grinned back. “Whatever. I don’t see you running.”
His dark eyes met mine. “Maybe you will.”
We stood a minute, awkwardly. Something about the way he was looking at me in my sports bra and running shorts made my face get even hotter.
“So.” I refastened my ponytail. My hair was thick and curly like my father’s, either my best or worst feature, depending on my mood and the humidity. “I guess I’ll see you around.”
“What about old Weasley here?”
I looked at the cat hunkered down at the tuna. “It’s fine. I mean, it’s not like I can carry him home with me. At least now I can tell Beth not to worry.”
“Beth. Is that your sister?”
“My middle sister, yeah.”
He nodded again.
With a little wave, I turned and loped away, aware of him watching behind me.
