QUOTE : Is something wrong?” he asked.<br /><br />“You seem to have forgotten that someone cut my bike in half.”<br /><br />“And you seem to have forgotten that I have a truck,” said Miles. “I can give you a ride. To school, at least.”<br /><br />“No thanks,” I said.<br /><br />“Really. I’m not joking. Unless you’re that against having anything to do with me. I don’t care. You can get in line.”<br /><br />He turned onto the main road. The line from the notebook felt like a dead weight in my stomach.<br /><br />“No, not against it.” I realized with a strange sort of happy dread that we were falling back into the easy conversation we’d had at the bonfire. “But I’d like to know why you’re offering.”<br /><br />“What do you mean?” Honest confusion crossed his face. “Isn’t that the good thing to do?”<br /><br />I burst out laughing. “Since when have you been good? Are you feeling guilty or something?”<br /><br />“A little sentimental, maybe. My first idea was to drive up and down in front of you a few times to prove I had a car and you didn’t.” His tone was light and he was smiling.<br /><br />Holy crap, he was smiling. A real, teeth-showing, nose-scrunching, eyes-crinkling smile.<br /><br />The smile slipped off his face. “What? What’s wrong?”<br /><br />“You were smiling,” I said. “It was kind of weird.”<br /><br />“Oh,” he said, frowning. “Thanks.”<br /><br />“No, no, don’t do that! The smile was better.” The words felt wrong coming out of my mouth. I shouldn’t say things like that to him, but they hung neatly in the air and cleared out the tension. Miles didn’t smile again.