I grinned at my 99th-percentile-on-the-SAT friend. “It’s a different look for you,” I said.

“Different?” she said. She tossed her boxy bob, which Brianna had done up in a scarf for her because it was too short for a ponytail. “I feel like a reject from ‘Happy Days.’ ”

“I think these clothes are cool. Ooh, look at that pink car — that is so cool!”

That, of course, came from Cheyenne, the freshman in the group with the long, dark bangs, who pretty much thought everything was “cool.” I can’t say much for her taste, since she was entwined at the fingers with Fletcher. She thinks he’s cool, also — and he’s my brother.

Diesel, Cheyenne’s foster brother, grunted. “Except they painted it pink. You don’t do that to a vintage ‘57 Chevrolet.”

I fiddled with my locket and watched the pink Chevy go by. After standing on Virginia Street watching for an hour and a half, one cool vintage car was starting to look pretty much like another, no matter what color it had been painted.

Norie’s boyfriend, Wyatt, nudged me with his elbow. “I think you all look rad in these costumes. I wish we dressed ‘50s all the time.”

Ira rolled his eyes. Diesel grunted again and poked his finger at the parade. “There they are! You guys were so busy jackin’ your jaws you almost missed ‘em.”

I followed his point to the sleek, black ‘59 Lincoln convertible that was cruising past with two girls perched on the top of the back seat waving shyly to the crowd — blond, willowy Shannon and black-haired Marissa. They were the rest of our group, the Flagpole Girls. We waved and whistled and squealed until they both turned an identical red.

“Tell me again how they got to ride on that,” Cheyenne said.

“They won the drawing,” Norie told her. “Remember that day we filled out those things at the mall?”

“Oh yeah,” Cheyenne said. She watched wistfully as the Lincoln passed.

“Tell me you’re not wishing you’d won,” Norie said. “There is no way I’d go cruising down Virginia Street waving to a crowd without an egg-proof shield.”

“I’ll tell you who would be great doing it,” Brianna said. “I mean, not that Shannon and Marissa don’t look fabulous.” Brianna directed her very firm, brown eyes at me. “Tobey — you’re the perfect candidate for a beauty queen in a limousine.”

“I’m so sure!” I said.

“I’m serious girl. No offense to Norie and Cheyenne, but you’re the best lookin’ one of all of us.”

Everybody nodded, but as soon as the parade petered out and we all started scouting for the best food booth, I could see the three guys whispering to their respective girls, reassuring them that they were good-looking, too.

Which was fine. From the day we six girls had first met almost a year before at See You at the Pole, there had never been any competition among us, and especially not for looks. We’d always been too busy trying to help each other out of the stuff we managed to get into, and to do it the way Jesus would want us to do it.

So, no, it didn’t make any difference to me who was cute or smart or lucky enough to get to ride in the Hot August Nights Parade. What bothered me was that Cheyenne and Brianna and Norie all had a guy to tell them they were adorable and brilliant.

And I didn’t.

The Good Ol’ Days
“Candied apples!” Cheyenne was squawking in front of me.

“I promised Tassie I’d make you eat something halfway nutritious before you pigged out on junk,” Norie said over her shoulder.

“Okay — we’ll start with shakes,” Wyatt said, grinning. “Milk’s healthy!”

We stopped in front of a ‘50s Soda Shoppe booth, and Brianna cocked her head at Cheyenne. “I’m surprised Tassie let you come out here at all, girl,” she said.

Tassie was Cheyenne's foster mother, and she was strict with Cheyenne. Actually, most of our parents were, shall we say, protective. Christian parents tend to be that way.< br>

“You want to know what she told me?” Cheyenne said as she eyed the overflowing chocolate shake Fletcher handed her. “Here’s what she told me. She goes, ‘If it’s right, do it — if it’s wrong, don’t.”

“Hey, I like that,” Wyatt said. “I gotta write that down.”< br>

“Mmm-hmmm,” Brianna said. “If it’s that simple, how come we always got to be diggin’ one another out of some mess?”

They debated that as we walked toward the bandstand where the Coasters, whoever they are, were supposed to be playing in 15 minutes. I worked on the strawberry shake Diesel handed me and on what Brianna said.

“Simple” sort of fit with this whole ‘50s theme they got going every year at the big Reno Hot August Nights festival. It seemed like it had been simpler back then — not a lot of drugs, not a lot of kids drinking. Now it was like every other person, even kids in my honors classes or on the track team, turned out to have a drinking problem or secretly beat up on their girlfriend or something.

That was the main reason why I wasn’t dating anybody. Diesel — well, we weren’t romantic material for each other. He wanted a girl who would like to get grease up to her elbows while they tuned the engine of his pick-up truck side by side. I wanted . . .< br>

That was just it. I didn’t know. There I was, heading for my senior year, and I still didn’t know what I wanted in a guy other than the given that he had to be a Christian. Whatever else, he had to be — different. I was restless for someone who would — I don’t know — singe my eyebrows. Yeah, that was it.

The Night’s Still Young
There weren’t any seats left when we got to the bandstand, so we stood in a clump off to the side. Ira smeared the back of his hand across his forehead.

“Is anybody else about to burn up?” he said.

“I’ll tell you why it’s so hot,” Wyatt said. “It’s the fire up there.”

We all looked up over the towering casinos toward the Sierra foothills. We’d been watching all day as the flames and smoke of the year’s first forest fire worked their way toward the little towns on the outskirts of Reno — Verdi and Mogul. Even downtown, the smoke was hanging ominously over the celebration, holding in the heat and dousing everything in gray.

“He walks in the classroom cool and slow,” several middle-aged men suddenly blurted out from the stage. “Who calls the English teacher Daddy-o?”

“Oh, please,” Norie said. “Do we have to stay here and listen to this?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” Wyatt said.

I was the first one headed for Norie’s dad’s Suburban.< br>

Marissa and Shannon joined us. We’d planned for all of us girls to spend the night with me — christen our new recreation room, my mom had suggested. As the seven of us—we kinda had to bring Fletcher since he lives there — packed into the car and got closer to my house on the foothills side of downtown, the smoke thickened. It clogged my nose, even with the windows rolled up, and Norie had to use the wipers to keep the windshield clear of ash.< br>

“Look at that,” Shannon said in her timid-soft voice. “Now that it’s dark, you can really see the flames.”

“Cool!” Cheyenne said. But before Brianna could get her mouth open, Cheyenne added, “Well, I mean, not ‘cool’ like I’m glad it’s happening, but ‘cool’ like doesn’t it look neat — you know, if nobody gets hurt.”

“We get you, Cheyenne,” Norie said dryly. “No need for a dissertation.”

“What’s a dissertation?” Cheyenne whispered to Marissa, who struggled and tossed a grin at me.

All grins faded, however, when we got to my house and found five strange people huddled in our living room with my parents.

It was a family with two little girls and a teenage son. The parents and the little ones looked pretty bewildered, like a lot had happened to them in a short time, and they were still reeling from it. But not the boy.

Not the tall, birch tree of a guy with the sensitive mouth and the very, very blue eyes and the thick curly hair.

He did not look bewildered, confused or anything but very much on top of the situation. I could almost feel my antennae going up. This boy is definitely different.

“They’re evacuating Verdi and Mogul,” Dad said. “People with no place to go are camping out at the school, so I went over and brought these folks home.”

My mother, bless her heart, said, “Why don’t all of you teenagers go up to the rec room and I’ll scare up some food?”

Nobody had to ask us twice. Except for Shannon and Marissa, who stayed in the kitchen to help “scare up” Mexican food and chocolate chip cookies, we were scattered on the carpet around the boy, pelting him with questions, before anybody could even say quesadillas.
“So what’s your name?”

“How bad is it up there?”

“Is your house, like, about to burn down?”

“I’d be so freaked out — aren’t you freaked out?”

Most of that came from Cheyenne and Norie. I personally sat back and gazed like a drooling fool as the boy calmly answered.

His name, first of all, was Ethan. And, no, he definitely wasn’t freaked out.

“It’s part of the cycle of life,” he said.

“Somebody tossing a cigarette into a stand of Douglas firs is part of the cycle of life?” Norie said.

“It wasn’t necessarily man-caused,” Ethan said. “A lot of the time, these big fires are part of nature’s way of enriching the soil.”

“I wish nature would find itself another way,” Brianna said.

“Well, God doesn’t always see it the same way we do.”

Different Dilemmas
Shannon and Marissa came in then with the food, and the conversation turned to really intellectual stuff like, “Did you put jalapenos in there, Marissa?” and “Hey, your cookie has more chocolate chips than mine!” I was nibbling at the tip of a quesadilla when Ethan looked across the circle at me and said, “So, what’s your name again?”

“Tobey,” Cheyenne answered for me.

Poor Cheyenne was sitting between Norie and Brianna. She got elbows from both sides.

“Okay, so, dude, here’s what I want to know,” Fletcher said. “In my Sunday school class we had this discussion about if your house were on fire, what would you save. Did you, like, grab anything on your way out?”

“Yeah, I picked up one thing,” Ethan said. For some reason, he looked at me, and his blue eyes seemed to mix in with mine.

“Do you want to know what I’d take?” Cheyenne said.< br>

“Do we have a choice?” Norie said.

A long discussion ensued, which after an hour wound its way into, “If we were all in a lifeboat and somebody had to be thrown overboard, who should it be?” Toward 11 o’clock , people started yawning and crawling off to their sleeping bags. Fletcher finally stumbled off downstairs and it was just Ethan and me. I wouldn’t have gone to sleep if you’d injected me with Demerol.< br>

“You’ve got pretty cool friends,” Ethan said.

“They’re the best,” I said.

“I’d say you’re the best.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“I put that wrong.” His thick, dark eyebrows crunched together over those eyes. “What I mean is — you’ve got something they don’t have. I don’t know — I can just spot things right away.”< br>

I laughed and rolled my eyes all over the ceiling. “I have nothing that they don’t have, believe me.”

“Yeah, you do. You’ve got an open mind. You’re like, thirsty to know things. I can see it.”

“You talk about thirsty to know,” I said, “that would be Norie. She’s always got her face in the Internet . . .”

“Not that kind of knowledge,” Ethan said. He stretched his legs out and leaned back on his elbows. “Remember when Fletcher asked me if I grabbed anything from the house?”

“Yeah.”

“I kinda dodged the question because I didn’t think they were all, like, open to it. I think you’d dig it, though.”

I laughed again. “If you’ve got marijuana stashed in your pockets, uh, no thanks.”

“Man, no, drugs are for idiots. This is something that — well, I’m gonna go downstairs and get it. Will you wait?”

Would I wait? Would I breathe? Swallow? Blink?

As his footsteps padded down the stairs, I flopped down on the carpet and grinned up at the ceiling fan. Well, God, < /i>I thought, You did it again. I just have to think what I need and—boom—You’re there with it.

It was stupid, of course. I mean, for Pete’s sake, I’d only known Ethan three hours. But different was what I needed and different was what he was — and he thought I was different, too. How long did a person need to figure that out?< br>

He met my one criterion, too. He obviously believed in God. He’d said that when we were talking about the “cycle of life” thing. Who was I to doubt what was obviously a major gift dropped right in my lap?

I heard him coming back, so I sat up and raked my fingers through my tangle of hair. Too bad there wasn’t a mirror up here.

Ethan sat down across from me and put a square, flat box between us.

“What is it?” I said.

Prized Possession
He watched me with his eyes intense as he lifted the lid. “Ever seen a Ouija board?” he said.

For a minute I thought something was actually crawling up my spine. I stared from him to the shiny board with its assortment of numbers and letters and its large YES and NO.

“Guess not,” he said. He gave a soft laugh. “Look, don’t be freaked out.”

“I’m not freaked out,” I said. “But . . .”

“I know your dad’s a pastor and all that.”

“I'm a Christian!”

“Right. But I can tell you’re open.”

I shook my head. “This is sort of an occult thing, though.”

“Nah. A lot of people say that, but when you feel the energy that comes off of this thing — it’s, like, so positive. I think it’s God-energy.”

I tried to laugh, but it came out like a squeaky screen door. “I’ve been around ministers all my life,” I said. “I never heard that term before.”

“Here,” he said. He leaned across the board and took one of my hands. His fingers were long and smooth but surprisingly strong. I didn’t pull away.

“Just put your fingertips real lightly on this,” he said. He pressed my fingers onto a moveable flat piece. “I’m going to ask it a question, and you just feel the energy.”

“No,” I said. I shook my head. “I heard this was, like, evil or something.”

“All right — look,” he said. “You have a strong faith, right — just like I do.”

I nodded.

“Okay, your faith will tell you whether it’s right or wrong. Just do this question, and if it feels ‘evil’ to you, then I’ll pack it up.”< br>

Deep inside I knew feelings couldn't determine right or wrong. “Yeah, but why should I do this?” I said. I wasn’t laughing. I was just watching his eyes.

“Because — well, no offense to your father or anything — but I think kids who are brought up in these really strict Christian homes get limited. They don’t see all the power that God has, if only they could tap into it.”

He rubbed the tops of my fingers softly with his. “Just one question.”

My spine stopped crawling. All I could feel were his warm fingers sliding off of mine and onto the edge of the piece so that our fingertips touched.

“I guess it can’t hurt anything,” I said.

“Okay.” He breathed really deeply, like he was pulling the right question in through his nose.

“Who will be the next significant person in Tobey’s life?” he said.

I waited. Nothing happened, which was almost a relief.

“Close your eyes,” he said. “Focus on the question.”< br>

Who will be the next significant person in Tobey’s life, I thought. You’d do really nicely for starters.

The piece moved. I jerked my eyes open and looked down, and it stopped.

“We had it going,” Ethan whispered. “Just let the energy flow. Don’t try to control it. You can’t control God’s energy. You can only use it.”

I nodded and closed my eyes again. Under my fingers, the piece moved again, and this time I’d barely touched it. When the piece stopped, Ethan whispered, “Look.”

I did. The piece had halted on E.

“What does that mean?” I said.

“It’s only the first letter. We have to keep going,” he said.

I nodded, but this time I kept my eyes open. As if it had a mind of its own, the piece moved again and stopped — on T. Then again — on H. By the time we got through A < /i>and N, my heart was racing. I pulled my fingers off the piece and rubbed two clammy hands together. My thoughts were nipping at me like little flames.

It spelled it! It spelled Ethan!

It couldn’t have—it’s just a game!

But I felt it. I felt the—energy.

But this is weird. This is . . .

My heart raced as I weighed the danger. Despite my excitement, I knew what I was doing was wrong.

“That felt, like, so real,” Ethan whispered to me. “I’ve never felt it that strong before.”

He reached across the Ouija board and tilted my chin up with his long fingers. “You don’t mind, do you?” he said. “That I’m supposed to be a significant person in your life?”

His blue eyes melted over mine. Slowly I shook my head. My eyebrows were singeing.

Read Part Two