He approaches every debriefing officer he can about a British lance corporal named Rex Browning, last seen at Camp Five in May, but they say, we’re not Royal Marines, we’re the United States Army, we have enough men to keep track of. At the docks in New York there are no brass bands, no flashbulbs, no weeping families. On a bus outside of Buffalo, he begins to cry. Towns flash by, followed by long stretches of dark. Six floodlit signs, each twenty feet apart, wink past:

THE WOLF

IS SHAVED

SO NEAT AND TRIM

RED RIDING HOOD

IS CHASING HIM

BURMA-SHAVE

Seymour

Mr. Bates, the sixth-grade teacher, has a dyed mustache, a blazing, godlike temper, and zero interest in his students wearing ear defenders during class. Every morning, to start the day, he switches on his This-Is-Very-Expensive-So-You-Kids-Better-Not-Touch-It ViewSonic projector and shows videos of current events on the whiteboard. The class sits, uncombed and yawning, while at the front of the room landslides smash Kashmiri villages.

Every day Patti Goss-Simpson brings four fish sticks to school in her Titan Deep Freeze lunch box and every day at 11:52 a.m., because the cafeteria is being remodeled, Patti puts her terrible fish sticks in the terrible microwave at the back of Mr. Bates’s room and presses the terrible beepy buttons and the smell that pours out feels to Seymour like he’s being pressed face-first into a swamp.

He sits as far from Patti as he can, plugs his nose and ears, and tries to daydream Trustyfriend’s forest back into existence: lichen hanging from branches, snow slipping from bough to bough, the teeming settlements of the NeedleMen. But one morning in late September, Patti Goss-Simpson tells Mr. Bates that Seymour’s behavior toward her at lunch hurts her feelings, so Mr. Bates mandates that Seymour eat beside her at the center table, right beside the projector stand.

11:52 a.m. arrives. In go the fish sticks. Beep boop beep.

Even with his eyes closed Seymour can hear the fish sticks rotating, can hear Patti snap open the microwave door, can hear the fish flesh sizzling on her little plate as she sits back down. Mr. Bates sits behind his desk chomping baby carrots and watching mixed martial arts highlights on his smartphone. Seymour hunches over his lunch box trying to plug his nose and cover his ears at the same time. Not worth eating today.

He is counting to one hundred in his head, eyes closed, when Patti Goss-Simpson reaches and taps him with a fish stick on his left ear. He jerks backward; Patti grins; Mr. Bates misses the whole thing. Patti squints her left eye and points the fish stick at him like a gun.

“Pow,” she says. “Pow. Pow.”