At camp, the teacher asked what kids like and when Harvey said turtles, they spent lots of time on turtles. The teacher told things that Jason already told Harvey, about how they lived with dinosaurs and how they could be huge, like two thousand pounds, like a car, and how they can get really old if nothing kills them. But what he didn’t know is how a cool nest makes a boy turtle instead of a girl, and a girl named Bailey said that wasn’t fair until somebody else said when the world heats up then there will only be girl turtles and then she laughed and said, “Well, okay then. See? See?”

The best part was how a turtle can sometimes swim twenty miles an hour and that’s faster than this one kid says he can go in his granddaddy’s wheelchair that runs like a car. He said he can go ten miles an hour and do doughnuts when his granddaddy is in the bathroom and can’t stop him. He says his granddaddy goes to the bathroom all the time too. He said his granddaddy goes to the bathroom when his grandma talks too much, which is all the time. Even the teacher laughed about that and it made Harvey wish he had a granddaddy with a wheelchair, or just a granddaddy. He is the only kid he knows without any grandpeople at all, not even an old one in bed sleeping, like a bunch of them that live near here. He has peeped in their windows before. Not too many kids have half people or if they do they don’t tell, and he knows they don’t have ghosts in their house so he tells he’s got half of a brother and he’s got a ghost that’s probably a dead old person trying to get back to that place they all stay or to the cemetery. He asks if anybody has ever heard about those boys that killed their mama and daddy while they were watching TV, and one new girl named Molly started crying. She’s from somewhere far enough that she talks funny and she has a hamster named Cheeks. He asked why she was crying like a baby—was she scared somebody would kill her while she was watching TV?—and she ran to tell the teacher, and the boy who drives the wheelchair fell back laughing.

“Guess what?” the teacher says and pulls Harvey by the arm. He said Harvey had another chance yesterday. Harvey wants to say what Jason taught him: Guess what? Chicken snot—

“What?” Harvey asks, and closes his eyes so he won’t have to see how mad Mr. Stone is looking.