“Don’t even think about it, Grace. But don’t you love that syllable—Aus? If you didn’t know it came from Austin, you’d think it was peculiar, but since you do know, it’s so cute.”

They settled into a discussion of Austin’s mind, body and soul, and the various ways in which these were cute.

On Friday, Macey had a rare study hall, but so many people were asking about her hair that she got a media center pass. In the media center there were so many people who hadn’t seen her hair yet that she hid in a carrel with a computer.

She clicked Netscape and checked her mail, but there was none. She sloshed around the Internet. It had never occurred to her to look up anything local. Who cared? She was local already. Now she tried to find a hook, a way into whatever sources there were for her history project, and up came the town newspaper. Cool.

A few minutes on that site and she discovered the newspaper had its index online. She entered “fires.”

There, in chronological order, were the fires reporters had covered since the newspaper was founded in 1924. They were listed by date, and next to the date was the address of the fire, and next to that the issue, page and column of the newspaper article. Wow, thought Macey, with the shiver of awe she often felt when she was using the Net.

December 4, 1959 … Shell Road …

It was as easy as that.

She could read about the barn fire.

But not, of course, on the Net. It was too cruel. You could look stuff up and find out it existed. But it didn’t exist on the Net. And it didn’t exist in the school media center. To read the article, she’d have to go to the town library and find the right microfilm. How annoying.

Oh, well, at least her first hairless week was over. Macey spent a while in the girls’ room, admiring her cap from various angles. She was not in fact interested in college basketball, and whether UConn got to the Final Four or died early in the season meant zero to Macey Clare.

But this was a gift from Austin. The first present she had gotten from a boy since her last boy-girl birthday party, in second grade. Now she had an Austin clothing collection. T-shirt and cap.

Macey took her shortcuts to Nana and Papa’s, hoping to cross paths with Aus, but she didn’t. It was a cloudy day, the kind where the entire sky is a slab of slate, lowering to crush your spirits. The swamp was ugly, and rain began just as she reached the road.