It took me a while to get up the nerve to ask Luna what I wanted to ask her. I don't know why I got nervous; it's just my usual fear of confrontation, I suppose, though I hardly expected Luna to be the confrontational type. (We've never even had an argument.)

Finally, though, I got up the nerve to ask her "Are you okay?"

It doesn't sound like a scary question to ask somebody, but it is if you're expecting the answer to be "No".

Luna didn't answer me at first. She seemed taken aback by the question. "Yeah," she said finally. "I'm fine."

"You sure? Everything's okay?"

"Yeah. We're having fun, right?" Luna looked at me as if fearful that I'd say no.

"Definitely," I reassured her. "It's just that..." I wasn't sure how to explain my doubts as to her mental state to her. Everything seemed a little odd in ways I couldn't quite put a finger on.

Lately, Luna's been acting kind of anxious. She spends a lot of time staring out the windows at, so far as I can tell, nothing in particular; or, if we're outside, up at the sky. Sometimes she'll seem totally normal and happy, other times she'll be inexplicably melancholy, and she can move between the two states in the course of a single day. She doesn't seem to have as much energy as she used to. There are darkening circles under her eyes.

Then there's the actual incidents of truly weird behavior; the trancelike states induced by staring at where her old house once stood, the time she showed up unexplained outside my house late in the evening.

"It's just that you seem a little down lately," I finished lamely.

Luna considered. "I'm okay," she said. "I'm not, like, depressed. I don't think. How do you tell if you're depressed?"

"I don't know. You feel sad all the time?" I really know next to nothing about clinical depression. "Look, Luna, you know you can tell me anything, alright? Anything. I want to be able to help you. That's what friendship is about, after all."

There was a long silence. Luna appeared to be thinking things over. She fidgeted nervously, clasping and unclasping her hands in her lap.

"Can we talk somewhere else?" she asked me.

We were sitting out on Luna's sagging back porch. She got up, grabbed my hand — for a kid her size, she's pretty strong — and pulled me to my feet, then led me inside the house and up the stairs to her bedroom.

Once we were inside, she shut the door, then turned the skeleton key in the lock. The door made a rusty clicking noise. For a crazy second I felt as though I was in a horror film and Luna was about to get out an axe and chop me to bits.

"Okay," Luna said, turning to me with a very serious expression on her face. She gestured for me to sit down on her bed. I did so.

"I've been having trouble sleeping," she told me quietly.

I felt almost disappointed. That was it? I'd expected something much more dramatic — I wasn't sure what, but definitely more exciting than a little insomnia.

"I can't sleep when it's dark out," Luna continued. "If I go to bed when it's still light, sometimes that's okay. But then I wake up in the middle of the night and I can't go back to sleep until the sun starts rising."

"Why do you think that is?"

Luna shrugged and looked pensive. "Um... maybe because it's so quiet here at night, compared to the city?"

"You'd think you'd be used to that by now," I pointed out. "It's been months since you moved."

"It's not just the quiet, though. It's the dark. It wasn't so dark at night in the city, either." Luna frowned. "I had trouble sleeping almost ever since we moved, up until around the time you and me started going to the movies together. Then it got better and I could sleep normally again. Then it got worse again and now it's even worse than it was to begin with."

"So has this been happening every night?"

"Almost every," Luna said. Then she leaned forward confidentially, her eyes shining. "It's better when I talk to you or hang out with you before bed. You really help, Jack, even if you don't know it. It was awful when you were gone."

I remembered suddenly that I'd never told her about my upcoming vacation.

"Thanks," I said awkwardly. "Anything I can do to help, you know..."

"You could talk to me more," Luna ventured. "We could call on the phone when you can't come over. Talking to you makes me feel safer. You know..." She trailed off, looking as though she wanted to say something more, but didn't.

"I can definitely talk to you more," I reassured her, "if that helps."

"It really does." Luna was smiling widely. "Thanks, Jack!"

She sounded so sincere and happy, I couldn't help but grin back at her.