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up to the sky, through the naked branches, to the places of blue patched between. Seen that their faces had questions on them, but you would not have known if those questions were about Gigi, or about themselves, or about whether the snow just might hold off after all.
    You might cry at the cemetery. That would be okay. Everyone would expect you to cry there. Lucy, in fact, bawled so hard her dads had to take her home.
    After that, for a few weeks, you might tear up or sniffle, and that would be okay too. But then Lucy would have moved on to thinking about her upcoming karate tournament, and the city council and the Night Owls and the Adelines and the Grannies would have gone on with their regularly scheduled meetings, and your parents would be back at Pepperdine Motors, working like they always did.
    Actually, even more than they always did, since nobody else really understood how Gigi had run the service center and that guy Maurice they had hired was lazy and ate more donuts than the customers, and there was all that legal stuff about how Gigi’s ownership shares were to be divided among all her kids and grandkids and even some of the employees who weren’t related, which was something Gigi had never talked to them about, that was for sure.
    By then everybody else was back to normal. By then, Ruby figured out, you were not supposed to be so sad.
    So she wasn’t.
    Instead, she went underwater.
    That’s what it felt like, at least. Every action, every movement, took twice as much effort, as if it were happening in slow motion. Voices sounded farther away, and it took such work to make herself heard that Ruby stayed quiet.
    Her family, being so busy, didn’t really notice. “You okay?” Lucy had asked a couple of times, but after that she didn’t bug Ruby about it. That’s the kind of friend she was.
    For almost three months Ruby stayed underwater, still doing all the things she was supposed to do. She had to go to Aunt Rachel’s after school now, instead of hanging out with Gigi or Lucy, so she helped with her cousins while she was there. At home she did her chores—folding the towels and taking out the kitchen garbage—and did her homework and wrote her Bunning Day Essay. Some things she did a little better than she had before. You can fold towels more neatly if you are slow about it. Write better essays, too, sometimes.
    It is possible that Ruby Pepperdine could have stayed underwater forever.
    If it hadn’t been for Nero DeNiro’s color wheel.

Wheels and Spokes
    When you are a sixth-grader at Bunning Elementary, you have Art with Mrs. Tomas, who has you make a color wheel. You can use whatever medium you want: crayons, pastels, paints, colored pencils. Your color wheel can be whatever size you want too. As big as a door or small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. You only have to follow a few rules. You need to include at least twelve colors. You need to keep them in color-wheel order, like a rainbow, with red turning to orange and then to yellow, green, blue, purple. And you need to identify in some way which colors are complementary.
    Complementary colors are the ones directly across the color wheel from each other. Orange and blue, for example. Or purple and yellow.
    Ruby’s color wheel fit on a regular-size sheet of paper—though the only unlined paper she could find at home was light blue. It didn’t matter, though. She did the assignment. She included twelve colors. She used lines—like bicycle spokes—across the middle to show the color complements, exactly like the example on Mrs. Tomas’s bulletin board.
    Most of her classmates did the same. Some of the wheels were a little messy. A few had clearly been done during indoor recess, when people suddenly remembered the assignment. Lucy had made hers poster-size, nearly big enough to cover the art table.
    When Nero sits down next to Lucy, however, it is Ruby’s color wheel that he