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“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be right over.”

“You don’t have to take the time to come over,” she said. “It’s okay if you just DM him and ask him to…” She stopped when she realized Leo was no longer on the line. By the time she’d gone to William to mime that everything was going to be okay—she couldn’t speak out loud, since he was talking into his Beats to someone while emailing someone else on his laptop, a feat of multitasking Shira still felt a little bit in awe of—the front door was opening.

“Hello?” Leo was calling inside.

Shira wondered if he’d knocked and nobody had responded, or if he was popping in the way he used to. She slipped out of her bedroom, closed the door gently behind her, and tiptoed a few steps down the hall before daring to shout “Hey!”

She hadn’t really looked at him in detail during their first run-in of the year—too nervous—but now that she knew they were still friends, she couldn’t help but think, He looks good. He wore his hair a little longer than it had been last year so that the curls showed themselves, and while his switch from the warehouse job to QA meant that he’d exchanged lifting boxes and running around for sitting, he was clearly keeping fit, because his chest had filled out and the biceps flexing from underneath his black T-shirt were toned and tight. He grinned at her, and she couldn’t stop the warmth that rushed through her. “Thank you again,” she said. “I really appreciate it.”

The corners of his eyes crinkled. “What would the neighbors think of a Hanukkah party without doughnuts? I could never bear it.”

She knew he was making fun of her, but also it was true. “What a great point, I didn’t even think about it,” she said with a mock gasp. “So did you already message Theo?” Theo and Leo. They rhymed. Maybe that was why they’d been friends as kids. “Have you heard back?”

But he wasn’t listening. “Hey, can I borrow a sweatshirt or something?”

That was weird. Why didn’t he just bring his own? “Um, sure, I guess?” she said. “My dad has a bunch of sweatshirts and old jackets in the coat closet if you want to grab one.”

He opened the coat closet and immediately rocked backward on his heels, almost knocking his head into the wall. “Jesus Christ!”

For a moment Shira was confused, and then she let out a burst of laughter. “Oh, right,” she said. “I almost forgot about Uncle Moishe. He’s shy.” She stepped up so that she could see the Mensch on a Bench, who was not actually on a bench but perched atop the hanging rod, his big white teeth luminescent in the dark, like a shark’s, and his fists balled, as if he might spring out and punch whoever was hanging up their coat. “Also a tad insane.”

“Who isn’t these days?” Leo grabbed a black coat off the rod, then bowed elegantly to the creepy stuffed man. “Very nice to meet you, Uncle Moishe. Now back into the dark with you. Ideally forever.” He shut the door, shaking his head. “Where did you even find that thing? Why did you buy it? Or was it thrust upon you by some kind of curse?”

Her cheeks couldn’t help but warm from Leo’s word choice. “Come on, like Elf on the Shelf isn’t just as creepy,” Shira said. “It’s just normalized in our society.”

“The surveillance state,” said Leo. “Right, it’s much better to normalize locking your creepy uncle in a closet.”

“Better than letting your creepy uncle loose at the party,” Shira said. “Come on! No time to waste.”

The bakery was a good twenty minutes away, down winding roads lined with pine trees that were obstacle courses full of deer whenever the sun wasn’t high in the sky and sometimes even when it was. Fortunately Leo was a safe driver, calm and slow and not quick to jerk the wheel whenever a squirrel darted across the road, which had been the source of Shira’s one and only car accident. The squirrel had lived to climb another tree, but alas, her car’s hood had ended up crumpled. Shira propped her chin on her hand as she gazed out the window. Last year, he’d driven more recklessly. Maybe now that he was happier in his life, he was calmer behind the wheel. She couldn’t help but note the lack of metal music, too; she’d entered the car to a podcast about sports playing. She glanced back at him. “So how are your classes going?”

His eyes lit up. “Pretty good! You know, I took a bunch of classes in computer science before I dropped out of college in Michigan, so I had the basics down already, and now I’m taking some specifically in game development. I have some great professors, and I’m making connections through my QA job. My one professor, he’s an adjunct while he makes indie games, and he says I have a lot of promise. He’s actually been helping me with this game I’ve been working on for my final project—well, it started out as a final project, and then it turned into more…”

Leo spent the rest of the ride telling her about his game, which seemed to be set in a fantasy world but didn’t involve fighting or war or boss battles—players could advance or level up by fixing up their homestead or running errands or making connections with other characters.

“It sounds so fun,” Shira said. “Very gentle and chill.”

“Exactly,” he said. “But it’s in a big sweeping fantasy world like a World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings, and there is this big overarching story, and you find out as you play that there is a world-ending catastrophe and a climactic battle against a dark lord coming, and there are people fighting it, but you’re not one of them. You’re just trying to live your life against the backdrop of the world ending.”

Sounds depressing, Shira didn’t say. But Leo was her oldest friend, so didn’t she owe him some honesty? If he wanted it? “Do you want feedback?”

“Sure,” he said, glancing over at her as he coasted to a stop at a red light.

“Obviously I’m not a big gamer or anything, but I was thinking, what if you don’t realize that you’re helping with the big battle, but maybe you actually are without knowing? Like it turns out that two of the people you fix up are the two people who need to combine their powers to defeat the Dark Lord. Or in your garden you grow the powerful herbs the hero needs to heal themselves after a critical moment. You know, something like that.”

Fortunately, he didn’t roll his eyes. He wrinkled his brow thoughtfully, eyes trained ahead on the road, and mused, “Interesting. So you are helping, just not in the traditional way.” He flipped on his turn signal, which wasn’t really necessary, considering there was nobody behind or ahead of them on this side road, but perhaps that was just the suppressed New Jerseyan driver in her speaking. “Maybe it turns out that every little task you do is a help in some way or can be made to help.”

“Yeah,” she said and then realized they were in the bakery’s parking lot. It was empty, the small bakery shuttered and dark, no cakes on display in the picture window. “Is Theo meeting us here?”

Leo turned off the car. “No.” He reached behind him for the coat he’d borrowed from Uncle Moishe’s closet and shrugged it on as he got out of the car. It was black, so now he was wearing a black jacket over black jeans, which was funny because it looked kind of like how a burglar would dress.

And then Shira realized he was holding lockpicks.

Honestly, her first thought was not to put it all together. It was to marvel at the fact that she apparently knew what lockpicks looked like. Maybe she’d seen them in a movie? Or a TV show where the characters were breaking in somewhere? She gasped as it finally hit her. “Leo! We are not breaking into the bakery.”

“It’s not really breaking in,” he said, and now he had gloves on, too, also black, tight, and flexible, like the ones she wore when she used to go running in the cold. “It’s not like we’re stealing anything or vandalizing anything. We just need to pick up what you bought and paid for.” He flashed her a devilish grin. “Just think of it as an ice-cream heist.”

Well, those were words she hadn’t heard together in years. Despite the fact that she was apparently about to be dragged into breaking several laws, her cheeks cracked open in a wide smile.