“Maybe he’s just friendly. He tried to be friendly with me, when I first got here. I didn’t know anyone, and…”

“Maybe he wants something from you.”

“What could he want from me? Will you think it over—Chatterton’s proposal?”

“What for?” A shadow of annoyance crept across his narrowed eyes.

“There are certain precedents, you know. Joshua at the battle of Jericho—”

“He also made the sun stand still,” he said. “If you believe that you’d believe anything.”

“But what about… what about…?”

“There are no precedents in defiance of gravity.”

“If sufficient thrust were generated…”

“Sure,” he mocked, “with a fipple flute.”

I decided, for the moment, to press him no further. Why, you might be wondering, did I press him at all? Here’s why:

Valerie had returned, to be sure, but for all I saw of her lately she might still have been in Florida. Not precisely true: I glimpsed her once, floating like a wraith down the hall, chewing abstractedly on a pencil. I called to her but my vocal chords fogged up; what emerged was a kind of fluttery bleat. She disappeared inside her room with a great, resounding slam of the door before I caught up with her. It occurred to me that because of my dustup with Derek, perhaps he was determined to keep her away from me. If so, he had gained her total cooperation.

She never appeared for meals in the commons refectory. I didn’t know when she ate (or what; roses, perhaps). Presumably she dined with Daddy Mop Head, and I could imagine, if that were the case, the bleak atmosphere they shared. I never saw him either.

Patience, I told myself, have patience. But patience is a lonely virtue; a depressive emptiness consumed me after the sweet fire of seeing her so briefly.

And then the unkind, uncaring, and ceaselessly vigilant stars that wrote my destiny veered off course. Suddenly I looked up, Grady looked up from his newspaper, and there she was. She walked into that room of mismatched furniture and everything went aglow. She clutched a notebook against her breasts; it didn’t know how lucky it was. She came right to the point.

“Something’s wrong,” she said to Grady. Reluctantly, he put down his paper. “I’m writing the story of my life,” she went on, “for school. What you call an autobiography.” She opened the notebook and frowned at it. “I’m up to ‘once I went to camp when I was a little kid’ and I dunno, something’s wrong.”

“Valerie,” Grady said, “if I understand the academic process, your teacher meant for you, not me, to figure it out. That,” he went on, uncharitably and unmoved, “is the way to learn.” And he stuck his nose back into the kettle of print.

She turned abruptly toward the door. “Maybe I can help…?” I heard my voice saying.

She hesitated and, with a lovely, what-have-I-got-to-lose shrug, settled beside me on the floor. I shot a fleeting glance at Grady. Immersed in his paper, he didn’t give a damn that our respective philosophies of education were at variance.