Horace reached for the door handle, sure the door would be locked, that the being had perhaps walked through it like mist, and with the same surprise as the women at Jesus’s tomb, he opened it. He did not consider this to be supernatural; he did not think the demon had fiddled with the lock; nor did he wonder whether Mr. Unger, in his usual disorganized huff, had hurried out of the building without locking the door behind him. He rushed in after the being, ruled more by curiosity than by terror.

Which way? Quiet and shadows confronted him, the regular everyday shadows that curved around corners and stretched out in elongated arcs and bends. Nothing supernatural in these dark, dim walls, the empty staircase, the reflectionless windows, the corridors that gave up no light. He remembered the footsteps he had heard just hours before of the students and their brash loudness and the business of education.

Then the telltale rustle at the top of the stairway. Horace leapt up the stairs three at a time. Again, nothing. A door gently went, Click.

He stood before the door of Miss Clarissa Hedgeson’s biology classroom and paused for the first time in this chase. His breath came in short puffs and he wondered what horrid, hideous, malevolent, bone-crushing, evil beast he might meet. What unenviable end might he find? What pain lay here? What torture? He opened the door.

You’re late, Mr. Cross.

Sunshine beamed through the windows. There stood Clarissa Hedgeson, wearing her old maid’s print dress, her silver steel-rimmed specs, and her authoritarian snarl. His fellow ninth graders all looked up at him, save those who were busy reading the latest Spider-man comic book inside their biology texts, or those who were gossiping in the back of the room, or those who, lost in daydreams of being spies in Russia or of having love affairs in Victorian England, peered out the window to Moscow, to London, to some cool swimming hole.

Well, take a seat, young man. We don’t have all day.

No one snickered at his nudity. In fact, he had forgotten his lack of clothing. Clutching his book bag and muttering apologies for his tardiness, he sat down with relief and looked forward to a lecture on cell division, full of questions about mitosis and osmosis and membranes.

Miss Hedgeson droned on and Horace looked around, seeing Gideon and John Anthony and Edmund Clinton, and in a double-minded instant Horace knew that he was here and that he was not here. He looked down, and he was naked in their midst and three years older. They were the same. Not nostalgia, but regret and sadness tugged at him, yet he was still baffled: is this real?

He looked over at Gideon, brown and sweet, as complex as calculus and as direct as a bare fist. Horace remembered romance. He wouldn’t call it love, but it had been intense and real.