Free Stealing Parker by Miranda Kenneally

fall through the ceiling! At least…not then anyway.”
    I laugh. “I gotta hear more.”
    “Up in the ceiling, the wall between the two locker rooms was made of concrete.”
    “Concrete.”
    “My friend Evan got this idea that we could chisel through the concrete. Like make a tunnel.”
    I laugh.
    “We spent two months chiseling through the concrete.”
    “Weren’t you worried about structural damage? Why didn’t you just run into the locker room or something if you wanted to see the girls so bad?”
    “I was sixteen. I wasn’t thinking about structural damage. I was thinking about how if Evan and I ran in the locker room all the girls would scream and yell.”
    “I’m sure you were hot in high school. Why’d you need to spy on girls to see them naked?”
    I cannot. Believe. I said that.
    Brian’s face goes redder than the ketchup. “That’s beside the point.”
    “Oh really?”
    “It was about the adventure!”
    “The adventure of chiseling through concrete to spy on girls?” I snorggle.
    He gives me a look. “Do you want to hear the rest of the story?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then behave.”
    I salute. “Yes, sir.”
    “Would you stop calling me that?”
    “Tell the story already.”
    Our drinks sit untouched as Brian and I move closer and closer, leaning across the table toward each other. We’re laughing as Brian goes on to explain that after they chiseled through the concrete, he edged onto the ceiling tiles on the other side, they couldn’t support his weight, and he fell straight down into the locker room. Girls wearing nothing but bras and panties ran screaming while he sprained his wrist and got suspended for a week.
    “Now I get to ask you an important question,” he says, once I’m done wiping tears of laughter off my face. “What’s your earliest memory?” he asks.
    The Waitrix brings the cheese fries, and we dive in. He invited me out, so screw the calories. I nod, I listen, I ask him questions, I laugh.
    To be here with me—a seventeen-year-old, and having a great time, he must truly be living in the now. And so am I.
    •••
    It’s not my earliest memory, but it’s my favorite.
    When I was eleven, I packed up my suitcase and went to sleep-away camp for the first time. Cumberland Creek church camp. Laura and Allie went too. We spent the week canoeing and cooking burgers over a crackling campfire and doing three-legged races in Field Olympics. I spent a lot of time in this outdoor chapel, praying and writing in my journal about how much fun I was having and how I loved being a Christian because it made me feel good about myself. I liked being a good person.
    During night devotion, the counselors allowed us to write prayers on slips of paper and burn them, so whatever we prayed for would be just between us and Him. I hoped for things like relief for Gramma’s arthritis and for Dad and Ryan to stop being allergic to animals so my parents would let me adopt a yellow lab puppy already.
    Campers received mail, but if you received more than three pieces of mail, you had to sing a song in front of the entire camp. On Wednesday, I sang “Twinkle, Twinkle” in front of three hundred kids. But I didn’t care. My parents loved me enough to send fifteen postcards.
    That’s my favorite memory.
    On the last night of camp, a dance took place and everyone could bring dates. Nobody asked Laura and Allie, and they felt disappointed because that was the activity we’d been looking forward to most. This boy J. C. and I went together and held hands. I’d never done that before. At the end of the night, he kissed my cheek.
    I never saw the boy again because he was from Nashville, but Laura and Allie saw the kiss, and I saw the envy in their eyes. Laura told me that I was moving too fast and should be careful or I would end up pregnant, or worse, I would sin. After that, I worried what other girls thought of me. I knew how pretty I was, I knew that boys liked me. But I didn’t so much as hold