Every day after school, eleven-year-old Seymour walks past the sign

COMING SOON

CUSTOM TOWNHOMES AND COTTAGES

PREMIER HOMESITES AVAILABLE

and drops his backpack on the love seat in the living room and postholes up through the snow to the big dead ponderosa, and every few days Trustyfriend is there, listening to the squeaks of voles, and the scratchings of mice, and the beating inside Seymour’s chest.

But on the first warm morning in April, two dump trucks and a flatbed carrying a steamroller stop in front of the double-wide. Airbrakes moan and walkie-talkies squawk and trucks beep, and by Friday after school, Arcady Lane is paved.

Seymour crouches on the brand-new asphalt at the tail end of a spring rain. Everything smells of fresh tar. With two fingers he tweezers up a stranded earthworm, hardly more than a waterlogged pink string. This worm did not expect rain to wash it from its tunnels onto pavement, did it? To find itself on this strange new impenetrable surface?

Two clouds separate and sunlight spills onto the street, and Seymour glances to his left, and the bodies of what might be fifty thousand earthworms catch the light. Worms, he realizes, cover the whole blacktop. Thousands upon thousands. He deposits the first at the base of a huckleberry bush, rescues a second, then a third. The pines drip; the asphalt steams; the worms thresh.

He rescues twenty-four twenty-five twenty-six. Clouds seal off the sun. A truck turns off Cross Road and approaches, crushing the bodies of how many? Faster. Pick up the pace. Forty-three worms forty-four forty-five. He expects the truck to stop, an adult to climb out, wave the boy over, offer an explanation. The truck keeps going.

Surveyors park white pickups at the end of the road and climb through the trees behind the house. They set up tripods, tie ribbons around trunks. By late April, chain saws are droning in the woods.

As he walks home from school, fear buzzes in Seymour’s ears. He imagines looking down at the forest from above: there’s the double-wide, the dwindling forest, the clearing at the center. There’s Trustyfriend, sitting on his limb, an oval with two eyes surrounded by 27,027 dots in rings.

Bunny is at the kitchen table, lost behind a drift of bills. “Oh, Possum, it’s not our property. They can do whatever they want with it.”

“Why?”

“Because those are the rules.”

He presses his forehead to the sliding door. She tears out a check, licks an envelope. “Know what? Those saws could mean good news for us. Remember Geoff-with-a-G from work? He says that lots at the top of Eden’s Gate might go for two hundred thousand.”

Darkness is falling. Bunny says the number a second time.