She found Liz, the groundskeeper, raking the lawn in front of the courthouse. “I brought you a cigarette,” Alex said.

“What’s wrong?”

“How did you know something was wrong?”

“Because you’ve been working here for how many years, and you’ve never brought me a cigarette.”

Alex leaned against the tree, watching leaves as bright as jewels catch in the tines of Liz’s rake. “I just wasted three hours on a case that never should have made it to a courthouse. I have a splitting headache. And I ran out of toilet paper in the bathroom in chambers and had to call the clerk in to get me a roll from maintenance.”

Liz glanced up at the tree as a gust of wind sent a new score of leaves onto the raked grass. “Alex,” she said. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“When was the last time you got laid?”

Alex turned, her mouth dropping open. “What does that have to-”

“Most people who go to work spend their time wondering how long till they get back home to do whatever it is they really want to do. For you, it’s the other way around.”

“That’s not true. Josie and I-”

“What did you two do for fun this weekend?”

Alex plucked a leaf and shredded it. In the past three years, Josie’s social calendar had become crammed with phone calls and sleepovers and packs of kids going to a movie or hanging out in someone’s basement lair. This weekend, Josie had gone shopping with Haley Weaver, a junior who’d just gotten her driver’s license. Alex had written two decisions and cleaned out the fruit and vegetable drawers in her refrigerator.

“I’m setting you up on a blind date,” Liz said.

There were a number of business establishments in Sterling that hired teenagers for after-school employment. After his first summer at QuikCopy, Peter had deduced that this was because the jobs mostly sucked, and they couldn’t find anyone else to do them.

He was responsible for photocopying most of the course material for Sterling College, which professors brought in. He knew how to shrink a document down to one-thirty-second of its original size, and how to add toner. When customers paid, he liked to guess what size bill they were going to pull out of their wallets just by the way they dressed or wore their hair. College kids always used twenties. Moms with strollers whipped out a credit card. Professors used crumpled singles.

The reason he was working was because he needed a new computer with a better graphics card, so that he could do some of the gaming design he and Derek had been into lately. It never failed to amaze Peter how you could take a seemingly senseless string of commands and-magic!-it would become a knight or a sword or a castle on the screen. He liked the very concept: that something the ordinary person might dismiss as gibberish was actually vibrant and eye-catching, if you knew how to look at it.

Last week, when his boss said he’d hired another high school student, Peter had become so nervous that he actually had to lock himself in the bathroom for twenty minutes until he could act like it was no big deal. As stupid and boring as this job was, it was a haven. Peter was alone here most of the afternoon; he didn’t have to worry about crossing paths with the cool kids.

But if Mr. Cargrew was hiring someone else from Sterling High, then that person knew who Peter was. And even if the kid wasn’t part of the popular crowd, the copy center would no longer be a comfortable place. Peter would have to think twice about what he said or did, because otherwise, it would become fodder for rumors around school.

To Peter’s great surprise, however, his co-worker turned out to be Josie Cormier.

She had walked in behind Mr. Cargrew. “This is Josie,” he said, by way of introduction. “You two know each other?”

“Sort of,” Josie had replied, as Peter answered, “Yeah.”

“Peter will show you the ropes,” Mr. Cargrew said, and then he left to go play golf.

Occasionally when Peter walked down the hall in school and he saw Josie with her new group of friends, he didn’t recognize her. She dressed differently now-in jeans that showed off her flat belly and a rainbow of T-shirts layered one over the other. She wore makeup that made her eyes look enormous. And a little sad, he sometimes thought, but he doubted she knew that.

The last major conversation he’d had with Josie had been five years ago, when they were in sixth grade. He had been certain that the real Josie would come out of this fog of popularity and realize that the people she was hanging around with were about as scintillating as cardboard cutouts. He was sure that as soon as they started ripping on other people, she’d come back to Peter. Oh my God, she would say, and they’d laugh about her journey to the underworld. What was I thinking?

But Josie never came crawling back to him, and then he started to hang out with Derek from the soccer team, and by the time he was in seventh grade he found it really hard to believe that once, he and Josie had spent two weeks coming up with a secret handshake that no one else would ever be able to duplicate.

“So,” Josie had said that first day, as if she’d never met him before, “what do we do?”

They had been working together for a week now. Well, not together-it was more like they were doing a dance punctuated with the sighs and throaty grumbles of the copiers and the shrill ring of the telephone. Mostly, if they spoke, it was informational: Do we have any more toner for the color copier? How much do I charge someone to receive a fax here?

This afternoon, Peter was photocopying articles for a psychology course at the college. Every now and then, as the pages whipped through the automatic collating machine, he’d see brain scans of schizophrenics-bright pink circles at the frontal lobes that reproduced in shades of gray. “What’s that word you use when you call something by its brand name instead of what it really is?”

Josie was stapling together another job. She shrugged.

“Like Xerox,” Peter said. “Or Kleenex.”

“Jell-O,” Josie answered after a moment.

“Google.”

Josie glanced up. “Band-Aid,” she said.

“Q-tip.”

She thought for a second, a grin spreading over her face. “FedEx. Wiffle ball.”

Peter smiled. “Rollerblade. Frisbee.”

“Crock-Pot.”

“That’s not-”

“Go look it up,” Josie said. “Jacuzzi. Post-it.”

“Magic Marker.”

“Ping-Pong!”

By now they’d both stopped working. They were standing next to each other, laughing, when the bell over the door chimed.

Matt Royston walked into the store. He was wearing a Sterling hockey cap-even though the season wouldn’t start for another month, everyone knew he would be tapped for varsity, even as a freshman. Peter-who’d been reveling in the miracle that here was Josie, again, like she used to be-watched her turn to Matt. Her cheeks pinkened; her eyes leaped like the brightest part of a flame. “What are you doing here?”

He leaned against the counter. “Is that how you treat all your customers?”

“Do you need something copied?”

Matt’s mouth cocked up in a grin. “No way. I’m an original.” He glanced around the store. “So this is where you work.”

“No, I just come here for the free caviar and champagne,” Josie joked.

Peter watched this exchange from behind the counter. He waited for Josie to tell Matt that she was in the middle of doing something, which might not necessarily be true, but they had been having a conversation. Sort of.

“When do you get off?” Matt asked.

“Five.”

“Some of us are going over to Drew’s tonight to hang out.”

“Is that an invitation?” she said, and Peter noticed that when she smiled, really hard, she had a dimple he’d never noticed before. Or maybe she just hadn’t smiled that way around him.

“Do you want it to be?” Matt answered.