“Ricky Martin Knupps,” I corrected. “Don’t exclude your brother like that, La.”

Ricky Martin Knupps, tragically, didn’t live out the night. It turned out that the clay Lola had used to make his grand palace wasn’t exactly fish-safe, and we found him floating belly-up in the morning, already long gone from this world.

“It’s me,” I whispered when Grace showed me his tiny corpse. “It’s my fault. There’s a fish-killing curse upon my family.”

“He’s with Toby and Gloria now,” La said, resting a hand on my shoulder.

Grace carried RMK in a Tupperware container in her backpack until lunchtime, and we held a small yet solemn funeral for him under the bleachers, all of us humming “Livin’ la Vida Loca” as we filled in his tiny grave, which is marked to this day with a fishing hook (poor taste, I know).

After scrubbing out the tank and ditching the murder castle in favor of several more plants and some aquarium-safe Ewok figurines, we finally brought home our forever baby, Ricky Martin Knupps II, also captured from the train station fishpond.

“He has your eyes,” Grace said as we all sat in the office and watched him swim around his new nontoxic home.

“He has your fins and gills,” I said, and the playfulness of the situation sent a surge of adrenaline through me and I reached out and held her hand, like new parents might, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

“You guys are really fucking weird,” Lola said.

“You’re going to be a great dad to Ricky Martin Knupps II,” Grace said, her fingers still knotted with mine. I wondered, in that moment, if it was possible for human beings to go supernova—my atoms felt like they were emitting a shock wave of heat and light as they came unstuck from each other. “Let’s never tell him about the first Ricky Martin Knupps, though.”

After that, I decided unconscious body language was bullshit, probably dreamed up by some crackpot psychologist that’d been dead for half a century (I’m looking at you, Freud). Grace never really gave me any solid hints that she like liked me, and she never asked me to hang out alone again like we had the first night we went to the abandoned train station. But she drove me home every day after school. And on the weekends we texted constantly, even though we didn’t see each other.

So body language must be crap. It didn’t matter that she didn’t unconsciously cross her legs toward me; she consciously held my hand as we watched the fish swim around his bowl, for much longer than she needed to, the pad of her thumb moving back and forth across my skin.

Fake family noms de plume and adopted pets were what really counted, and in the world of Randy Knupps, Grace was already my wife and the mother of our fabulous aquatic child, Ricky Martin Knupps II.

THE DECISION TO engage the services of Madison Carlson, supersleuth/interschool rumrunner, came about on a Tuesday in the second week of October, after Murray had failed to hear from his ex-girlfriend for nine consecutive days, and playing “Wonderwall” (very poorly) on his guitar outside her house had resulted not in reconciliation but several phone calls to the police and a low-speed foot chase through suburbia.

Sugar Gandhi, the love of Murray’s life (who’d broken up with him at the end of junior year), was a girl actually named Seeta Ganguly, whose name he’d either misheard entirely or flat-out refused to pronounce. Either way, he’d taken to calling her Sugar Gandhi (I was 99 percent sure it was super racist, but Sugar Gandhi had insisted we call her that after she’d heard it for the first time, so I guess it was okay?) and so had we. Their relationship had been brief—five months of Murray learning to cook biryani and samosas, and “You’re a top sheila, honest” posted to her Facebook wall on a fairly regular basis.

Alas, as teenage relationships are wont to do, their grand love story didn’t last. Seeta told Murray her parents wanted her to date a “nice Indian boy” (this was, I suspect, an elaborate lie inspired by Bend It Like Beckham, constructed in order to spare Murray his feelings).

Muz had been trying to win her back ever since, but to do that, he needed insider information. Enter Madison Carlson.

Of all the girls in our high school, Madison was the most terrifying, the most blond, the most curvy, the girl who made you feel the shittiest about yourself just by existing because girls like her and guys like you were creatures from different tiers of the animal kingdom. Her Instagram account had an absurd amount of followers, and designers sent her free stuff all the time, and she flew to New York every month to do fashion shoots and have meetings with Very Important People. Rumor had it she already made more money than her parents and was going to pay for her college degree outright.

“Uh,” I said when I approached her at her locker on Tuesday morning.

“Hey,” said Madison, giving me a weird look, which I suppose was warranted considering my smooth greeting.

“Christ, Henry, you’re never gonna cop a root at this rate,” Murray said, elbowing me out of the way before taking Madison’s hand and curtsying deeply. “Miss Carlson. Like a boomerang, I keep coming back to you.”

“What do you want?” Madison said.

“Intel. From East River. Price is no object, and by that I mean we have eight dollars and seventy-five cents between us and will happily treat you to a supersized meal at a fast-food chain of your choosing.”

“You want gossip? We aren’t in middle school, Murray. I don’t do that anymore.”

“Mads. Mate. You still date that clodhopper of a bloke that goes there—which is a travesty, by the way—so that means you know a thing or two. Seeta Ganguly. Senior at East River. Suss out the sitch with her love life. Your payment”—Murray slipped something into Madison’s jeans pocket—“will be lucrative.”

Madison took out the folded paper and inspected it. “This is an expired coupon for Pizza Hut.”

“There’s plenty more where that came from.” Murray leaned in and whispered close to Madison’s ear. “Rendezvous tomorrow afternoon at your locker. You know where it is. Oh, and if anyone asks—we were never here.” Murray walked backward into the crowd then, and tried to do one of those Jason Bourne disappearing-into-thin-air tricks, but we both saw him dive into the girls’ bathroom.