I had actually started believing Ezra was like everyone else, normal, healthy, a regular fifteen-year-old boy, when late one afternoon the firehouse siren went off.

The thin wail from the fire station barely penetrated the farmhouse walls, but Ezra heard the sound and froze. His knuckles went white around his pencil. The pencil snapped.

“Shut the curtain!” he cried. “Quick. Shut the curtain.”

“It’s just a fire, Ezra,” I said. “A chimney fire somewhere. They happen a lot this time of year.”

“You don’t know that,” Ezra insisted. “Just shut the curtain!”

I got up and did as he asked.

Ezra shrank before my eyes. He pulled himself into the corner farthest from the window, pressing his back against the striped wallpaper.

Maybe this was another release. The sirens kept howling, dying down, starting up again.

But then the last moan faded to silence and the silence held. Within moments a single fire truck sped past on the main road.

I felt silly with relief. It was a fire, just a fire. And terrible as that might be for the people watching their house burn, it sure beat another nuclear accident.

The afternoon remained still. If it had really been another radiation release, the sirens wouldn’t have stopped. I knew that. Ezra knew it too.

“Nyle?” Ezra’s voice sounded hoarse.

“Ayuh.”

“Thanks.”

“For what?”

Ezra stared at me. “You must think I’m a jerk.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

“Well, I am a jerk,” Ezra said, standing up, opening the curtain.

“If you say so.”

“You’re okay, Nyle, for a sheep girl.”

“You got something against sheep?” I asked, crumpling a piece of notebook paper and making a basket in his trash can.

“Only that sheep follow,” said Ezra. “Never lead, just follow.”

“It’s a good thing for sheep farmers they do.” I shifted position, leaning back against Ezra’s bed.

“I don’t want to be a sheep anymore,” Ezra said.

I stroked the puppy as it chewed the eraser on the end of my pencil. How had we gone from sheep farming to being sheep? I had trouble following his train of thought sometimes.

“The government herded us from our homes, millions of us,” Ezra said. “They knew someday there would be an accident. If they hadn’t believed it could happen, they wouldn’t have made such elaborate plans for when it did. They knew how awful it would be too. I really think they knew. But it didn’t stop them. And we just let them do it to us. Like sheep. I don’t want to be a sheep anymore. I want to control my life. I want to live outside their system. Like you and your grandmother do.”

“We’re as dependent as anyone, Ezra. We all still have to breathe the same air.”

“No,” Ezra insisted. “You’re not as dependent. They just have you brainwashed into believing you are.”

He was wrong. Mrs. Haskins said the accident would touch us all. She knew. We had changed; the way we shopped, the way we ate, the way we worked. We changed the way we thought about things too. No more confidence in the future, no more blind trust, all because of the accident at Cookshire.