I was shocked by this.

“You’ve seen feet that looked worse than this?” I cried. “Where?”

“I had sisters, remember?” he said, his dark eyes alight with something—I wouldn’t have called it amusement, because of course my feet weren’t a laughing matter. Jesse wouldn’t dare laugh at them…would he? “Occasionally they got new shoes, with similar results.”

“I’ll never walk again, will I?” I asked, looking woefully down at my ravaged feet.

“You will,” Jesse said. “Just not for a day or two. Those burns look very painful. They’ll need butter.”

“Butter?” I wrinkled my nose.

“The best treatment for burns like those is butter,” Jesse said.

“Uh,” I said. “Maybe back in 1850. Now we tend to rely on the healing power of Neosporin. There’s a tube of it in my medicine cabinet behind you.”

So Jesse applied Neosporin to my wounds. When he was through bandaging my feet—which, may I say, looked very attractive with about sixty-eight Band-Aids all over them—I tried to stand up.

But not for long. It didn’t hurt, exactly. It was just that it felt so strange, like I was walking on mushrooms….

Mushrooms that were growing out of the soles of my feet.

“That’s enough of that,” Jesse said. Next thing I knew, he’d scooped me up.

Only instead of carrying me to my bed and setting me down on it all romantically, you know, like guys do to girls in the movies, he just dumped me onto it, so I bounced around and would have fallen off if I hadn’t grabbed the edge of the mattress.

“Thanks,” I said, not quite able to keep all of the sarcasm out of my voice.

Jesse didn’t seem to notice.

“Not a problem,” he said. “Would you like a book or something? Your homework, maybe? Or I could read to you—”

He lifted Critical Theory Since Plato.

“No,” I said hastily. “Homework is fine. Just hand me my book bag, thanks.”

I was deeply absorbed in my essay on the Civil War—or at least, that’s what I was pretending to be doing. What I was really doing, of course, was trying not to think about Jesse, who was over on the window seat reading. I was wondering what it would be like if he laid a couple of kisses like Paul’s on me. I mean, if you thought about it, he had me in a really interesting position, considering that I couldn’t walk. How many guys would have loved to have a girl basically trapped in her bedroom? A lot of them. Except, of course, for Jesse. Finally Andy called me down to dinner.

I wasn’t going anywhere, however. Not because I wanted to stick around and watch Jesse read some more, but because I really couldn’t stand. Finally David came upstairs to see what was taking me so long. As soon as he saw the Band-Aids, he went running back downstairs for my mom.

May I just say that my mother was a good deal less sympathetic than Jesse? She said I deserved every blister for being so asinine as to wear new shoes to school without breaking them in first. Then she fussed around my room, straightening it up (although since acquiring a roommate of the hot Latino male persuasion, I have become quite conscientious about keeping my room in a fairly neat condition. I mean, I don’t exactly want Jesse seeing any of my stray bras lying around. And really, if anything, he was the one who was always messing things up, leaving these enormous piles of books and open CD cases everywhere. And then of course there was Spike).

“Honestly, Susie,” my mom said, wrinkling her nose at the sight of the big orange tabby sprawled out on my window seat. “That cat…”

Jesse, who had politely dematerialized when my mom showed up, in order to afford me some modicum of privacy, would have been greatly disturbed to hear his pet disparaged so.

“How’s the patient?” Andy wanted to know, appearing in my doorway with a dinner tray containing grilled salmon with dill and crème fraîche, cold cucumber soup, and a freshly baked sourdough dinner roll. You know, unhappy as I’d been at the prospect of my mom remarrying and forcing me to move all the way across the country and acquire three stepbrothers, I had to admit, the food made it all worth it.

Well, the food and Jesse. At least up until recently.

“She’s definitely not going to be able to go to school tomorrow,” my mom said, shaking her head despairingly at the sight of my feet. “I mean, look at them, Andy. Do you think we need to take her to…I don’t know…PromptCare, or something?”

Andy bent down and looked at my feet. “I don’t know that they could do anything more,” he said, admiring Jesse’s excellent bandaging job. “Looks like she’s taken pretty good care of it herself.”

“You know what I probably do need,” I said. “Some magazines and a six-pack of Diet Coke and one of those really big Crunch bars.”

“Don’t push it, young lady,” my mom said severely. “You are not going to loll around in bed all day tomorrow like some kind of injured ballerina. I am going to call Mr. Walden tonight and make sure he gets you all of your homework. And I have to say, Susie, I am very disappointed in you. You are too old for this kind of nonsense. You could have called me at the station, you know. I would have come out to get you.”

Uh, yeah. And then she would have found out that I was walking home not from school, like I’d told everyone, but from the home of a guy who had a dead Hell’s Angel working for him and who had, oh yeah, tried to put the moves on me with his drooling grandpa right in the next room. Moves I had, at least up to a point, reciprocated.

No, thanks.

I overheard Andy, as the two of them left my room, say softly to my mom, “Don’t you think you were a little hard on her? I think she learned her lesson.”

My mom, however, didn’t answer Andy back softly at all. No, she wanted me to hear her reply: “No, I do not think I was too hard on her. She’ll be leaving for college in two years, Andy, and living on her own. If this is an example of the kinds of decisions she’ll be making then, I shudder to think what lies ahead. In fact, I’m thinking we should cancel our plans to go away Friday night.”

“Not on your life,” I heard Andy say very emphatically from the bottom of the stairs.

“But—”

“No buts,” Andy said. “We’re going.”