The professor was right there, right in his face. “Are you getting smart with me? Because if you’re getting smart with me—” A breeze came up then, mercifully, to cool the sweat on Fitz’s brow and under his arms, sweat he’d worked up for Tim—and for this man, this jerk he’d never seen before and would never see again. “I mean, do you have any idea what it’s going to cost to, to—”

Fitz cut him off. “No,” he said, “I don’t. I told you, I’m just a student.” And he turned and walked out the door and down the stone steps to where his car was waiting, thinking of one thing only: Mexico.

It was overcast and muggy the day they finally stuffed the last of their things in the car, humping up and down the stairs like coolies, Fitz going back up six times alone to check if they’d left anything behind. “Aren’t you glad now you never got that cat?” he said to Joanie as she settled into the front seat with the picnic hamper in her lap and Corey established himself in back with his comic books, baseball cards and the dollar and twenty-five cents’ worth of Milky Ways, jawbreakers, candy buttons and red licorice sticks he’d been allowed to select at the corner store especially for the trip—and as a reward for his final report card, which was all A’s and A minuses across the board. The reference was to the kitten Joanie had seen in the pet store window back in March and decided she couldn’t live without, even attempting to enlist Corey on her side (who, to his credit, seemed indifferent to pets of any kind except tropical fish, his entire tank of which had gone belly up two weeks back because of some malfunction of the heater, which solved that problem). Fitz had talked her out of it, emphasizing the destructiveness of the animal’s claws and the reek of the litter box—“You really want shit in a box under the sink with summer coming on? I mean, think of the flies alone.”

Now she said, “We could have taken it to my mother’s.”