She finds at-will employment cleaning rooms at the Aspen Leaf Lodge—$10.65 an hour—and picks up dinner shifts at the Pig N’ Pancake—$3.45 an hour plus tips. If no one is ordering pancakes, Mr. Burkett makes her clean the walk-in, and no one tips you for cleaning the walk-in.

Every weekday six-year-old Seymour gets off the school bus by himself, walks down Arcady Lane by himself, opens the front door by himself. Eat a waffle and watch a Starboy and do not leave the house. Are you listening, Possum? Can you touch your ears? Can you cross your heart?

He touches his ears. Crosses his heart.

Nonetheless, as soon as he gets home, no matter the weather, no matter how deep the snow, he drops his backpack, goes out the sliding door, ducks under the wire, and climbs through the forest to the big dead ponderosa in the clearing halfway up the hill.

Some days he only senses a presence, a tingling at the base of his neck. Some days he hears low, booming whooos riding through the forest. Some days there’s nothing. But on the best days Trustyfriend is right there, drowsing at the same guano-spattered intersection of trunk and limb where Seymour first saw him, ten feet off the ground.

“Hello.”

The owl gazes down at Seymour; the wind ruffles the feathers of his face; in the whirlpool of his attention spins an understanding as old as time.

Seymour says, “It’s not just the desk either, it’s the smell of Mia’s pickle stickers, the way it gets after recess when Duncan and Wesley are all sweaty, and…”

He says, “They say I’m weird. They say I’m scary.”

The owl blinks into the fading light. His head is the size of a volleyball. He looks like the souls of ten thousand trees distilled into a single form.

One afternoon in November, Seymour is asking Trustyfriend whether loud noises startle him too, whether sometimes it feels as though he hears too much—and does he ever wish the whole world were as quiet as this clearing is right now, where a million tiny silver snowflakes are flying silently through the air?—when the owl drops from its branch, glides across the clearing, and lands in a tree at the far side.

Seymour follows. The owl slips silently down through the trees, back toward the double-wide, calling now and then as though inviting him along. When Seymour reaches the backyard, the owl is perched on top of the house. It sends a big, deep hoo into the falling snow, then twists its gaze to Pawpaw’s old toolshed. Back to Seymour. Back to the toolshed.

“You want me to go in there?”