Make me, Lizzie said. You can’t stop me. And then he felt so bad and scared he went and got in bed with his mom and stayed real quiet so she wouldn’t know, and he pretended he was back inside the tree with the bunny family. Jason said sometimes daddies go places and never come back and that’s just how it is. Jason said that’s why brothers are important. He said, “Don’t ask Mom about it,” and Harvey hasn’t, because if he starts to, Lizzie will pick up her axe and stare. If he asks, then she might start murdering again and it would be all his fault, so he thinks about all the things he can ask his mom about. There is the Maco Light, about the train engineer that lost his head and goes looking for it down near the beach, and there are the Munchkins throwing rocks, and the Dog House Girl, who wasn’t wearing any clothes at all, and Harvey hates that part of the story. He hates that part as much as he does to think about a needle stuck in her arm by that terrible man Super Monkey has not been able to make quit.

When they rode by one time, Harvey thought he saw her in the window looking out with a finger up to her lips—shhhhhhhh—just like the teacher in first grade, Mrs. Theresa Morgan. “Oh, no, you don’t, mister!” She was big up top with a puff of blond hair like cotton candy that everybody wanted to touch. “Don’t misbehave, you hear? I don’t want to have to tell your mother.” In story circle, she talked about how they should sow seeds of kindness and then she ended by saying, “So go and sow, you so-and-so,” and everybody laughed. She liked to use the same word spelled different and she liked to make cards of to, too, and two, and blue and blew, and new and knew. Harvey asked was it like but and butt, which Jason had taught him. I could hit your butt but Mom would get mad. Jason taught him that the same time he taught him You can tell it’s Mattel—just smell.

The blackberry patch is not far from where Harvey has the fish cemetery. Goldfish and guppies, and there’s a hamster in there: Skippy. Jason’s hamster, Kong, killed and ate part of Skippy. And that’s the day Harvey got in trouble for writing on the wall. Shit, he wrote. Dam. And then he threw some rocks as hard as he could at a tree and then he got a trash-can lid and marched in a circle with a big, sharp stick, like a sword fighter, and then Jason taught him how to say things in Klingon. He can write shit in Klingon and kids really like that a lot.