“So sloppy the teacher can’t read it. You don’t believe me? Give me a pen and I’ll show you.” Fiona sounds proud to write so sloppy a teacher can’t read it.

“I only have a pencil.” I give her my pencil.

Fiona turns the pages. “It’s more than half full.”

“I’ll be eleven in August.”

She finds a blank page near the back and writes for a while. I watch her write. No one else has ever written in my notebooks. When she’s finished, she passes the notebook to me. She writes in cursive, but the loops and curves on the letters get bigger and bigger each sentence she writes.

“See, the more I write the sloppier it gets.”

“I wonder why. You could do an experiment. Like stop after every sentence and see what happens. Or print instead of cursive.”

“Print is worse. We do experiments in school. In science last year we made sedimentary rock in milk containers. In all these layers. It was really fun.”

“We have a big outcrop of sedimentary rock in the family cemetery. I’ll show you sometime, if you want.”

“You have your own cemetery?”

There’s a sudden noise on the stairs behind us as Birdie jumps her way up from one step to the other, shouting as she jumps, “I CAN KEEP A SECRET. I CAN KEEP A SECRET.”

“Hi, Birdie,” Fiona says.

“Hi, I can keep a secret.”

“That’s good.”

“Mom says come down,” Birdie tells us.

“Now?”

“YES. I can keep a secret.”

“Okay.”

Birdie leads the way downstairs, holding on to the railing, as she calls out, “I DIDN’T TELL. I DIDN’T TELL. I DIDN’T TELL.”

Birdie can hardly contain herself as she runs into the kitchen.

“SEE!” she yells, pointing.

I can’t believe my eyes.

James is sitting at the kitchen table, in the same seat he sat in when the brick came through the window. Wendell is there, too. James doesn’t have a bandage on his head, but when he turns to look at us, I see that part of his hair in back is missing.

Seeing James in Nana’s house again feels like watching the fireball light up the field. It’s completely unexpected and amazing.

“JAMES! JAMES!” I yell louder than Birdie. “You’re back!”

“I can’t wait to tell everyone at school.” Fiona claps her hands.

“Why are you all up here at Nana’s house?” James asks, looking from me to Mom to Wendell to Birdie to Fiona.

“The water flooded our house, remember? We live up here now,” I say.

Wendell holds up a hand. “James doesn’t remember everything that happened before the, you know…”

“Don’t fall on the floor,” Birdie tells James.

“What?” James looks even more confused.

Wendell shakes his head at us from behind James.