In the overstuffed gloom of the shed the boy finds a dead spider, a Soviet gas mask, rusty tool boxes, and on a hook above the workbench, a pair of rifle-range ear defenders. When he puts them on, the din of the world fades.

Seymour claps his hands, shakes a coffee can full of bearings, bangs a hammer: all muted, all better. He goes back into the snow and looks up at the owl standing on the gable of the roof. “These? Are these what you meant?”

Mrs. Onegin allows him to wear the muffs at Recess, during Snack, and at Reflection Time. After five consecutive school days without reprimand, she agrees to let him switch desks.

Miss Slattery the counselor awards him a donut. Bunny buys him a new Starboy DVD.

Better.

Whenever the world becomes too loud, too clamorous, too sharp at the edges, whenever he feels that the roar is creeping too close, he shuts his eyes, clamps the muffs over his ears, and dreams himself into the clearing in the woods. Five hundred Douglas firs sway; NeedleMen parachute through the air; the dead ponderosa stands bone-white beneath the stars.

There is magic in this place.

You just have to sit and breathe and wait.

Seymour makes it through the Thanksgiving Pageant, through the Christmas Music Spectacular, through the pandemonium that is Valentine’s Day. He accepts toaster strudel, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and croutons into his diet. He consents to a bribe-free shampoo every other Thursday. He is working on not flinching when Bunny’s fingernails tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat on the steering wheel.

One bright spring day Mrs. Onegin leads the first graders through puddles of snowmelt to a light-blue house with a crooked porch on the corner of Lake and Park. The other kids swarm upstairs; a librarian with freckles all over her face finds Seymour alone in Adult Nonfiction. He has to lift one of the cups of his ear defenders to hear her.

“How big did you say he is? Does he sort of look like he’s wearing a bow tie?”

She brings down a field guide from a high shelf. On the very first page she shows him, there’s Trustyfriend, hovering with a mouse clamped in his left foot. In the next photo, there he is again: standing in a snag overlooking a snowy meadow.

Seymour’s heart catapults.

“Great grey owl,” she reads. “World’s largest species of owl by length. Also called sooty owl, bearded owl, spectral owl, Phantom of the North.” She smiles at him from inside her sandstorm of freckles. “Says here that their wingspans can exceed five feet. They can hear the heartbeats of voles under six feet of snowpack. Their big facial disk helps them by collecting sounds, like cupping your hands to your ears.”

She sets her palms beside her ears. Seymour takes off his muffs and does the same.