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Dedication

To Gwen and Henry and all their cousins,

who listened patiently to the first draft of this story

over one long Christmas holiday in Austin,

while waiting for the food to arrive.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

One

AFTER SCHOOL, the first thing I do when I get home is take off my jacket and tie and put on my home clothes—a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt.

“Just like your dad,” Mom says, standing in the doorway. “Want a snack?”

“Sure.”

Mom pops two Eggo waffles in the toaster. I grab them when they’re ready and eat in front of the TV. Then I do my homework. If I hurry up, I can see Jake before dinner. He lives on the seventh floor of our apartment building, three floors below us, and I take the elevator down and ring the bell and wait in the hallway until Mrs. Schultz answers the door. She knows me pretty well. I mean, she just says, “Hi, Ben,” and kind of stands aside, like a matador, so I can charge past.

Jake’s in his bedroom. It has a big window with all his trophies on the windowsill. Baseball trophies, basketball trophies. And behind them, and down below, you can see the people on the sidewalk and the taxis on the road, like toy people and taxis. Jake’s walls are covered in posters—he has a big Carmelo Anthony poster over his bed. Jake’s a huge Knicks fan. That’s one of the things he likes to talk about.

Today he’s in a bad mood because he got a 63 on his spelling test. He’s still wearing his school uniform. For boys it’s blue shorts or pants and a white shirt and a blue tie and a blue jacket that says Latymer on it, with a kind of oak tree or something stitched into the name. If you want, you can wear a bow tie instead of a regular one, but only a few kids do that, and everybody thinks they’re—I mean, either they’re joking or they’re weird.

Jake somehow manages to wear his uniform like it’s home clothes, like he’s just slouching around in them on a Saturday morning. His trousers hang down and drag against his shoes; his tie is always crooked.

“What’d you get wrong?” I ask, trying to be helpful. Spelling is one of the things I’m pretty good at, and I look at the paper on his desk.

“Everything.”

It was a contraction test—he put all the apostrophes between the words instead of where the missing letter should be. But he gets up and pulls the test away from me. He doesn’t want to talk about it, because when he gets a bad grade he’s not allowed to play on his Nintendo Wii.