“Oh yes, didn’t I tell you?” Allie jumped again, this time over the steps onto the grass. “My dad fixes up old houses. Everybody talks about having a new home but, you know, Leo, a lot of people out there like old houses more. They don’t admit it, though.” Allie put her hand loosely inside his and they began walking across the grass to Paper Boulevard. Leo wondered when she thought she would have told him anything, being this was the first time they’d ever said two words to each other. Once or twice her hip rubbed his and Leo felt the beginnings of an erection that he hoped wouldn’t point in any sort of way noticeable.

“You’re moving moving?”

“Yep. My mom and dad and three-year-old brother and me. All four of us, and we’re going to be living in a trailer home on this grand plantation while my dad rebuilds a real Southern mansion with a bunch of other men.”

“Then you’ll come back.”

“Come back? Why? What in the world is going on in Heywood, Massachusetts? Do you know I’ll probably meet some disgusting Ku Klux Klan men face to face? And with all that waterhosing and dogging going on down there with the Negroes, why, I’ll be in a very exciting place, Leo. Very exciting.”

“Waterhosing and dogging?”

“Don’t tell me you don’t watch the news, Leo Suther. You’re one of the smartest kids around.”

“We don’t have a television set.”

“Us either, but I bet you read the whole newspaper every day.”

“Sometimes.” Which was true. If he was finished with his homework and if Jim was done with the Globe, had maybe gone to bed already, Leo would sit at the kitchen table with a Coke and glance through the pages about this and that; what Governor Volpe was doing at the State House, what movies were coming out, and he had seen things in the national news section about trouble in the South and lately Michigan and New Jersey, even Boston-but he found himself most interested in U.S. soldier stories over in Asia, stories with headlines like U.S. PLANES POUND CONG, RIOTS RIP SAIGON, YANKS HURL BACK BIG RED FORCE. And there were lean-and-mean-sounding army maneuvers with names like Operation Nathan Hale, Operation Paul Revere, and Operation Junction City. “I read about the Asian conflict a lot.”

“You mean war. I know we haven’t declared one but my dad says when we bomb people and send in the army to shoot who’s left, that’s war. You burn your card yet?”

“Don’t have one. My birthday’s in August. How come you drew a hangman’s noose in your picture?”

“Because I did.”