He herds them behind the three bookcases, and Rachel gathers the pages of her script and sits in a folding chair and Olivia stows the crumpled green tissue paper in a bag and Alex crawls beneath the rack of costumes and sighs. Zeno stands at the center of them in his necktie and Velcro boots. At his feet the microwave-box-turned-sarcophagus transforms momentarily into an isolation box behind the headquarters at Camp Five—he half expects Rex to rise from it, emaciated and filthy, and adjust his broken glasses—and then it becomes a cardboard box once more.

“Do any of you,” he whispers, “have a cell phone?”

Natalie and Rachel shake their heads. Alex says, “Grandma says not till sixth grade.”

Christopher says, “Olivia has one.”

Olivia says, “My mom took it away.”

Natalie raises a hand. Onstage, on the other side of the bookshelves, the submarine gurgle still bubbles out of her speaker, disorienting him.

“Mr. Ninis, what’s a jiff?”

“A what?”

“Miss Marian said she’d be back with the pizzas in a jiff.”

“A jiff’s like a fight,” says Alex.

“That’s a tiff,” says Olivia.

“Jif is peanut butter,” says Christopher.

“A jiff is a short time,” says Zeno. “A little while.” Somewhere out in Lakeport, sirens rise and dip.

“But hasn’t it been more than a jiff, Mr. Ninis?”

“Are you hungry, Natalie?”

She nods.

“I’m thirsty,” says Christopher.

“The pizzas were probably delayed because of the snow,” Zeno says. “Marian will be back soon.”

Alex sits up. “We could drink some of the Cloud Cuckoo Land root beer?”

“Those’re for tomorrow night,” says Olivia.

“I suppose it won’t hurt,” says Zeno, “if you each have a root beer. Can you get them quietly?”

Alex hops to his feet and Zeno rises to his tiptoes to watch over the tops of the shelves as the boy walks around the stage and ducks into the space between the painted backdrop and the wall.

“Why,” asks Christopher, “does he have to do it quietly?” and Rachel reads her script with one index finger tracing the lines and Olivia says, “So about the swearing, Mr. Ninis?”

Is Sharif bleeding to death? Should Zeno be acting faster than this? Alex crawls out from the far end of the backdrop in his bathrobe and shorts carrying a case of twenty-four Mug root beers.

“Careful, Alex.”

“Christopher,” whispers Alex, as he rounds the apron of the plywood stage, all of his attention on fishing a can from the top of the case, “here’s one for—” and he catches a toe on the riser and trips and a dozen cans of root beer take flight over the stage.

Seymour

He stares at the phone, thinks: Ring. Ring now. But it remains inert.

5:38 p.m.