“When does he go back to school?” asked Landen, who did most of the day-to-day kidwork but, like many men, had trouble remembering specific dates.

“Next Monday,” I replied, having gone to retrieve the mail that had just fallen through the door. “Exclusion from school was better than he deserved—it’s a good thing the cops didn’t get involved.”

“All he did was throw Barney Plotz’s cap in a muddy puddle,” said Landen reflectively, “and then stomp on it.”

“Yes, but Barney Plotz was wearing it at the time,” I pointed out, thinking privately that the entire Plotz family stomped on in a muddy puddle might be a very good idea indeed. “Friday shouldn’t have done what he did. Violence never solved anything.”

Landen raised an eyebrow and looked at me.

“Okay, sometimes it solves things—but not for him, at least not yet.”

“I wonder,” mused Landen, “if we could get the nation’s teenagers to go on a serious binge of alcohol-inspired dopiness to use up the excess stupidity?”

“It’s a surplus of stupidity we have, not stereotypical dreariness,” I replied, picking up an envelope at random and staring at the postmark. I still received at least half a dozen fan letters every day, even though the march of time had, fortunately, reduced my celebrity to what the Entertainments Facilitation Department termed Z-4, which is the kind of celebrities who appear in “Whatever happened to…?” articles and only ever get column inches if arrested, divorced, in rehab or, if the editor’s luck is really in, all three at the same time—and have some tenuous connection to Miss Corby Starlet, or whoever else happens to be the célébrité du jour.

The fan mail was mostly from die-hard fans who didn’t care that I was Z-4, bless them. They usually asked obscure questions about my many adventures that were now in print, or something about what crap the movie was, or why I’d given up professional croquet. But for the most part, it was from fans of Jane Eyre, who wanted to know how Mrs. Fairfax could have been a ninja assassin, whether I had to shoot Bertha Rochester and if it was true I’d slept with Edward Rochester—three of the more persistent and untrue rumors surrounding the factually dubious first novel of my adventures, The Eyre Affair.

Landen grinned. “What’s it about? Someone wanting to know whether Lola Vavoom will play you in the next Thursday film?”

“There won’t be one. Not after the disaster of the first. No, it’s from the World Croquet Federation. They want me to present a video entitled The Fifty Greatest Croquet Sporting Moments.”

“Is your SuperHoop fifty-yard peg-out in the top ten?”

I scanned the list. “They have me at twenty-six.”

“Tell them ballocks.”

“They’ll pay me five hundred guineas.”

“Cancel the ballocks thing—tell them you’ll be honored and overjoyed.”