Somewhere inside Seymour a final defense crumbles. The roar, which has chewed at the edges of every waking minute since he found Trustyfriend’s wing, blitzkriegs the school. It swarms over the ridge above the football field, mashing everything in its path.

Mr. Bates dips a carrot into hummus. David Best belches; Wesley Ohman cracks up; the roar explodes across the parking lot. Locusts hornets chain saws grenades fighter jets screaming screeching fury rage. Patti bites off the barrel of her fish stick gun as the walls of the school splinter. The door of Mr. Bates’s room flies away. Seymour puts both hands on the projector cart and pushes.

A radio in the waiting room says, Nothing tastes better than a fresh-picked Idaho apple. The crinkling of the paper on the examination table borders on the untenable.

The doctor taps a keyboard. Bunny is wearing her Aspen Leaf smock with the two pockets in front. Into her flip phone she whispers, “I’ll work a double on Saturday, Suzette, I promise.”

The doctor shines a penlight in each of Seymour’s eyes. She says, “Your mother says you talked to an owl in the woods?”

A magazine on the wall says, Be a Better You in Fifteen Minutes a Day.

“What kinds of things would you tell the owl, Seymour?”

Don’t answer. It’s a trap.

The doctor says, “Why did you smash the classroom projector, Seymour?”

Not a word.

At checkout Bunny’s arm spelunks in the cavern of her purse. “Is there any chance,” she says, “you could just bill me?”

In a basket on the way out are coloring books with sailing ships in them. Seymour takes six. In his room he draws spirals around all the boats. Cornu spirals, logarithmic spirals, Fibonacci spirals: sixty different maelstroms swallow sixty different ships.

Night. He gazes out the sliding door, past the backyard, to where moonlight spills across the vacant lots of Eden’s Gate. A single carpenter’s lamp glows inside a half-finished townhome, illuminating an upstairs window. An apparition of Trustyfriend floats past.

Bunny lays a 1.69-ounce package of plain M&M’s on the table. Beside that she sets an orange bottle with a white cap. “The doctor said they won’t make you dumb. They’ll just make things easier. Calmer.”

Seymour grinds the heels of his hands into his eyes. The ghost of Trustyfriend hops to the sliding door. His tail feathers are gone; one wing is missing; his left eye is damaged. His beak is a dash of yellow in a radar dish of smoke-colored feathers. Into Seymour’s head he says, I thought we were doing this together. I thought we were a team.

“One in the morning,” Bunny says, “and one at night. Sometimes, kid, we all need a little help shoveling the shit.”

Konstance