So that’s normal. Fortunately, with my pension from the FBI—yeah, I was on salary. I wasn’t an agent, or anything. But they had to pay me. Are you kidding? Like I was going to work for them for free?—and the interest from my investments from the TV show, plus what Mom and Dad send from home, I get by fine.

Plus, you know, it’s not like I’m out here on my own. Ruth and I split everything, the cost of groceries, the rent—which is pretty high, even though we only have a one bedroom, which we also split. Still, it’s in Hell’s Kitchen, which, in case you didn’t know, is in New York City, the most expensive place to live in the world—everything, down the middle.

Anyway, the job…I guess it’s cool. It helps kids, which, in a weird way, is what I was doing when I first started out with the whole lightning thing, and all (before I started ruining kids’ lives, instead of saving them, by helping to arrest their dads). Ruth got a job at this not-for-profit group. She heard about it off the Summer Employment board at school. She ended up going to Columbia, after being admitted to every single school she applied to.

A lot of people—like Ruth’s parents, and her twin brother, Skip, who went to Indiana University, and who is here in New York for the summer, working as an intern at a company down on Wall Street—think Ruth could get a better, more highly paid summer job, considering she goes to Columbia, which is an Ivy League school, and all.

But Ruth’s all, “I’m making a difference,” which is cool, because she is. What she does is, she organizes musicians and actors and stuff to go around to inner-city day-care centers and camps, and they help the kids put on plays or musicals or whatever, because the city doesn’t have enough money to hire actual, certified teachers for this.

At first I thought this was stupid—Ruth’s summer job, I mean. What can putting on a play during day camp do for some kid whose mom is a crackhead?

Then one day Ruth forgot her wallet at home and needed me to bring it to her. So I did, even though this put a major cramp in my practicing.

But it ended up being worth it. Because I saw right away that I was wrong. Putting on a play at camp can make a huge difference to a kid, even a kid with serious problems at home (not like having a dad in a U.S. detention center, but like having a junkie grandma, or whatever). It’s pretty cool to see a kid who’s never seen a play before suddenly ACTING in one. Or—which is the part where I come in—a kid who’s never played a musical instrument suddenly PLAYING one.

And it’s cool for me, too, since I get to do what I love doing best, which is play my flute. I mean, I suppose I could have gotten a summer job doing this in an orchestra.

But have you ever hung out with people in an orchestra? I’m not talking about kids who are in orchestra at school. I’m talking about actual, paid classical musicians.

Yeah. Well, since I started going to Juilliard last year, I have.

And believe me, it is MUCH more fun to do what I’m doing, which is teach kids who’ve never seen a flute before how to play one. This rules. Because their eyes get so big when I rip through something really fast, like “Flight of the Bumblebee” or some Tchaikovsky, and then I tell them I can teach them how to do it, too, if they just practice.

And they’re all, “No way, I could never do that.” And I’m all, “No, seriously. You CAN.” And then I show them.

That part kills me every time.

Skip says Ruth should have gotten an internship at some advertising company, and that these kids are never going to amount to anything no matter how much art we throw at them. He doesn’t say that kind of thing to me, but that’s only because he wants to get into my pants. The company he’s interning for is paying his rent for the summer (which is why he is crashing on our couch: to save his rent stipend for something he really wants, which, knowing him, is probably something completely asinine, like a Porsche). He’s here right now, as a matter of fact, sacked out on our couch (or, should I say, hisbed ), watchingJeopardy! with my brother Michael, who’s also interning in New York for the summer, and also crashing at our place. (He gets the floor. Skip called dibs on the couch first.)

Mike—who ended up at Indiana University, as well, after having deferred admission to Harvard, due to being in love with a girl who later dumped him for a guy she met doing summer stock in the Michigan dunes. We are no longer allowed to mention the name Claire Lippman in our house—is in New York for a summer job that involves a think tank and computers and tracking cyber-terrorists. Sort of like what I was doing during the war, only he gets to do it from a cubicle on the Columbia campus instead of a tent in a sandy desert.

Sometimes Mike talks about his job to us. We all wish he wouldn’t.

Both Skip and Mikey are yelling the questions to theJeopardy! answers at the TV screen. Skip is getting most of them wrong. Mike is getting most of them right.

It’s cool having one of my brothers around for the summer, even if it isn’t my favorite brother. That’d be Douglas, and he’s back in Indiana, renting a room from my parents.

But at least he doesn’t LIVE with them, which is an improvement. He’s renting a studio apartment above one of their restaurants, Mastriani’s, which was rebuilt after a fire there. He works in a comic-book shop and has been doing some drawing of his own. I think he could have a career as a comic-book writer/illustrator. Seriously. I don’t know if it’s the voices he used to hear in his head, or what, but his stuff is really good.

So that’s cool. Because for a long time, we thought Douglas wasn’t going to make it at all, let alone on his own.

I personally never thought Skip would make it—without someone killing him for being such an annoying parasite—but according to him, when he graduates from the Kelly School of Business, which he is now attending, he will land a job making over a hundred thousand dollars a year.

So I guess I was wrong about Skip, too.

He’s still annoying, though. Sometimes I let him take me out anyway, because, whatever, free food. A girl could do worse. That’s what my mom keeps saying. She would LOVE for me to hook up with old Skip, the hundred-thousand-dollar man.

Yeah. That’s the other normal thing about me: I have no boyfriend. Not that Juilliard—not to mention the nonprofit summer job community—isn’t rife with hot heterosexual guys. (I’m kidding. Because they totally aren’t.) I guess I just haven’t found Mr. Right. I thought I had, once, a long time ago.

But it turned out I was wrong.

So you can imagine my surprise when—just as Ruth was going, “Okay, seriously, you guys, we HAVE to get a share somewhere this summer. I mean it. Skip, are you listening? You’re the one saving all the money, sleeping on our couch, you have to pony some up for the rest of us. I am not spending August sweltering in the Manhattan heat. I am talking Jersey Shore on weekends at least,” and Skip and Mike were both yelling, “Orion! Orion!” at the television—there was a knock at the door and I went to answer it, thinking it was the pizza delivery guy, and instead found my ex-boyfriend standing there.

You would think a psychic would have a little warning about these things.

But then, that’s what sucks about being me: I’m not a psychic anymore.

Two

“Jess,” Rob said, looking past me into the living room, where Skip and Mike were sprawled across the couch like a couple of beached tunas. “Is this a bad time?”

Jess, is this a bad time?

That is what my ex-boyfriend says to me after what turned out to be two years or so of radio silence. Not so much as a phone call.

And okay, yeah, I’m the one who went to Afghanistan. I will admit that.

But need I remind you that it was TO HELP FIGHT A WAR?

It wasn’t like I was out there HAVING FUN.

Not like HE was having, the entire time I was gone. Or so I can only assume, since when I got back, I found him in a liplock with some bleached blonde in a tube top outside of his uncle’s garage.

Oh, sure. He said SHE’D kissed him. For fixing her carburetor. He said if I had stuck around, instead of just taking off like a coward and running, I’d have seen him tell her off.

Yeah. I bet. Because guys just so hate it when blondes in platform heels with spray-on tans and boobs bigger than my head lean over and plant big wet ones on them.

Whatever. It wasn’t like things had been going so great with him before I’d left for Washington and points east. My mom had not been, shall we say, thrilled by the fact that her then not-yet seventeen-year-old daughter was dating a guy who had not only already graduated from high school, but was

a) not going to college.

b) working as a mechanic in his uncle’s garage.

c) from the “wrong side of the tracks,” or, in the local vernacular, a “Grit.”

d) on probation for a crime, the nature of which he would never reveal.

She didn’t exactly make it easy on the two of us. The first (and only) night Rob came over for dinner, she pointed out to him how in the great state of Indiana, it is considered statutory rape if a person eighteen years of age or older engages in sexual intercourse with a person sixteen years of age or younger, a crime punishable by a fixed term of ten years with up to ten years added or four subtracted for aggravating and mitigating circumstances.

It didn’t matter how many times I insisted that Rob and I were not engaging in sexual intercourse (much to my everlasting regret and sorrow). Mom just had to say the words “statutory rape” and Rob was gone, with a promise he’d be back when I turned eighteen.

I never even got to go to his uncle’s wedding with him, the one he’d promised to take me to.

And then the war came.

And when I came back, having turned eighteen and lost the one ability I’d had that set me apart from all the other girls in town (besides my refusal to grow my hair out), I found him with Miss Thanks-for-Fixing-My-Carburetor-Here-Getta-Load-of-These-Head-Sized-Boobs.

He didn’t see me. See him with her, I mean. He only found out I was back in town because Douglas told him when he stopped by the comic shop later that day, which, according to Douglas, Rob does periodically, to pick up the latest Spider-Man (which is funny, because I didn’t even know Rob liked comic books) and shoot the breeze if Douglas is working the counter.

So Douglas told him I was home, and Rob came by my house that very afternoon, purring up on the self-same cherried-out Indian on which he’d given me that very first ride, so many years before.

He seemed pretty surprised when I told him to get the hell off my property. Even more surprised when I told him I’d seen him with the blonde.

At first I think he thought I was kidding. Then, when he saw I wasn’t, he got mad. He said I didn’t know what I was talking about. He also said the Jess he’d known wouldn’t have run away just because she saw some girl kissing him. He said the Jess he’d known would have stuck around and knocked his (not to mention the girl’s) block off.

He also said that I didn’t know what it had been like for him, with me gone and him not knowing where I was, if I was getting blown up or what (because of course it wasn’t like they’d let me call and tell people where I was, or anything like that, when I’d been overseas).

I guess it never occurred to Rob that it hadn’t been any big picnic for me, either. You’d think he might have been able to tell, what with all of the newspapers trumpeting my ignominious return home, and return to normalcy (“Spark’s Gone for Lightning Girl” and “Hero Comes Home, Psychic No Longer—Gave All to War Effort”).

I guess it never occurred to Rob that I WASN’T the Jess he’d known, the one who’d have knocked his block off. Not anymore.

I was the one who’d suggested a cooling-off period.

He was the one who said that maybe that would be a good idea.

And then I got the call from Juilliard: my spot on the wait list—I barely remembered auditioning. It had been during one of my leaves home—had come up. Classes started the very next day. Did I still want it?

Did I still want it? A chance to lose myself in music? The opportunity to get away from myself, the nightmares, the blonde with the head-sized boobs, my mother?

Did I ever.

So I left. Without saying good-bye.

And I never saw him again.

Until today.

Well, okay, that’s not quite true. I guess I should confess that I couldn’t resist forcing others (I would never do it myself, for fear that he might see me) to drive by the garage where he worked, so I, sunk low in the backseat, could try and catch a glimpse of him now and then. Like when I came home from school, at Christmas, and spring break, and stuff.