As we walked up to our front porch, my grandfather put his arm around my shoulder and said, “It was nice walking with you, Bryce. I enjoyed myself very much.”

“Me too,” I told him, and we went inside.

Right away we knew we’d stepped into a war zone. And even though no one was yelling or crying, from the look on my parents’ faces I could tell there’d been a major meltdown while my granddad and I were out.

Granddad whispered to me, “I’ve got another fence to mend, I’m afraid,” and headed into the dining room to talk to my parents.

I wanted nothing to do with that vibe. I went straight to my room, closed the door, and flopped through the darkness onto my bed.

I lay there awhile and let the dinner disaster play through my mind. And when I’d totally burned a fuse thinking about it, I sat up and looked out the window. There was a light on somewhere inside the Bakers’ house and the streetlights were glowing, but the night still seemed really dense. Like it was darker than usual and, I don’t know, heavy.

I leaned closer to the window and looked up into the sky, but I couldn’t see the stars anymore. I wondered if Juli had ever been in the sycamore at night. Among the stars.

I shook my head. Flat, glossy, iridescent. What was up with that? Juli Baker had always seemed just plain dusty to me.

I snapped on my desk lamp and dug the newspaper with the article about Juli out of the drawer where I’d tossed it.

Just like I thought — they made it sound like Juli was trying to save Mount Rushmore or something. They called her a “strong voice in an urban wilderness” and “a radiant beacon, shedding light on the need to curtail continued overdevelopment of our once quaint and tranquil community.”

Spare me. I mean, what’s wrong with letting a guy cut down a tree on his own property so he can build a house? His lot, his tree, his decision. End of story. The piece in the paper was gag-me gush.

Except. Except for the places where they quoted Juli. Maybe it was just in contrast to the reporter’s slant or something, but Juli’s parts didn’t come off oh-woe-is-me like I was expecting. They were, I don’t know, deep. Sitting in that tree was seriously philosophical to her.

And the odd thing is, it all made sense to me. She talked about what it felt like to be up in that tree, and how it, like, transcended dimensional space. “To be held above the earth and brushed by the wind,” she said, “it’s like your heart has been kissed by beauty.” Who in junior high do you know that would put together a sentence like that? None of my friends, that’s for sure.

There was other stuff, too, like how something can be so much more than the parts it took to make it, and why people need things around them that lift them above their lives and make them feel the miracle of living.

I wound up reading and re-reading her parts, wondering when in the world she started thinking like that. I mean, no kidding, Juli Baker’s smart, but this was something way beyond straight A’s.

A month ago if I’d read this article, I would have chucked it in the trash as complete garbage, but for some reason it made sense to me now. A lot of sense.

A month ago I also wouldn’t have paid any attention to the picture of Juli, but now I found myself staring at it. Not the one of the whole scene — that was more emergency rescue equipment than Juli. The other one, on the bottom half of the page. Someone must’ve used a killer telephoto lens, because you can tell that she’s in the tree, but it’s mostly from the shoulders up. She’s looking off into the distance and the wind is blowing her hair back like she’s at the helm of a ship or something, sailing into the sun.

I’d spent so many years avoiding Juli Baker that I’d never really looked at her, and now all of a sudden I couldn’t stop. This weird feeling started taking over the pit of my stomach, and I didn’t like it. Not one bit. To tell you the truth, it scared the Sheetrock out of me.

I buried the paper under my pillow and tried to remind myself of what a pain Juli Baker was. But my mind started to wander again, and pretty soon I had that stupid paper out from under my pillow.