“He always made me feel like I was less than Connor. Back then I kept thinking I was being punished for something. So I assumed Connor was safe. . . . What an idiot I—”

“Stop,” I said. It was so hard to think and speak rationally about something so irrational, something that made me feel so full of rage and nausea.

I took out my phone, dialed Connor’s number. No answer.

“It’s a school day,” I said, and laughed. “I forgot all about school.” I must have been way more exhausted than I’d initially thought, because I laughed a lot longer and louder than the joke deserved.

“Almost eight,” Solomon said. “So he’s probably at the high school already.”

“We’ll get him,” I said. “When school lets out, we’ll be waiting for him. Okay?”

“Yeah,” he said, and looked out the window, to where the movie theater used to be. Everybody in town had a ton of happy memories of that place. I felt something die inside when it closed two years ago. “Can we go over to the old Greenport School?”

“Sure,” I said. “You’re missing your purple dinosaur?”

“Yeah.”

I let him eat the last hash brown, then started up the car. Outside the McDonald’s, three mummies stood around looking bored.

“What are those?” I asked Solomon.

“Mummies,” he said, like that was totally normal.

I watched them. Waited for the sun to come out from behind a cloud and reveal them as nothing more than our own harmless local meth heads.

Was I losing my mind? Was the trauma of learning what had happened to Solomon so extreme that my hold on reality had been broken? Was I falling under the spell of his world?

When we got to the Greenport School, four girls our age were sitting on skateboards and smoking cigarettes in the parking lot. I didn’t know them, though they looked familiar in that way everyone does in a small town.

“Hey, Solomon,” one of them said. “You got your guitar today? Gonna play us something?”

“Nah, sorry,” he said.

I waved awkwardly. So did they.

His allosaurus awaited us, looking rough. Paint mostly peeled off, rusted over everywhere. But he hugged her like she was the prettiest sight he’d ever seen.

I lay on my back on the gravel beside him. I tried to explain Sheffield’s Induction Ceremony. I wasn’t sure why. Exhaustion, mostly. My brain wasn’t working right. Made me talk a mile a minute. But then Solomon said, “He’s a very good student.”

“Who’s a student?”

“Sheffield. He’s like Mr. Barrett’s, what do you call it? Protégé. His power comes from him. Sheffield is nothing without Mr. Barrett, but it doesn’t go both ways. Why the hell is he still on the team if he doesn’t play anymore? Mr. Barrett probably sees something of himself in him.”