Right in front of his horrified eyes, the man began to fade in the afternoon heat, like a photograph. In a moment, he had vanished, and there was nothing to see but the rounded hills of Bodega, and the hot blacktop leading westward to the beach.

A scuffling noise right behind Toby made him jump. He looked up and it was Mrs. Novato. She said, with patronizing patience, “Are you deigning to join us, Mr. Fenner, or are you going to spend the rest of the day admiring the landscape?”

Toby was pale, and his face was sweaty. Mrs. Novato, instantly regretful of her sarcasm, asked, “Toby—are you all right?”

Toby felt as if his face was being pressed into a pillow. There was a terrible lack of air, a terrible closeness. He felt his legs turning black, and the blackness rose up in him and engulfed his brain. Mrs. Novatocaught him as he fell in a dead faint.

*

That evening, as he lay tucked up in bed, his mother came upstairs with a bowl of Philadelphia pepper pot soup and a plate of crackers. He was feeling much better already, but Doctor Crowder had insisted that he should rest. He had finished a jigsaw of the Monitor and the Merrimac, and snapped and unsnapped a snap-together model of a Cadillac Eldorado, and now he was reading a Doctor Strange comic.

His mother sat down on the side of his bed, and set his soup and crackers on his bedside table. Outside, the sky was dusking up, and there was a smell of eucalyptus from the row of trees which separated their plot from the MacDeans next door.

Susan Fenner said, “How’s it going, tiger?”

Toby smiled. “I guess I’m okay now.”

“You want to talk about it? You didn’t want to talk to Doctor Crowder.”

Toby turned his head away. He knew just what everyone would say if he told them about the man by the school fence. They’d say he had heat stroke, or too many peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. It seemed like every weird thing that ever happened, adults attributed it to something you ate. His mommy waited patiently while he kept his head turned away, but he wished she wouldn’t, because he really didn’t want to tell her what had happened.

Eventually, his mommy took his hand. In a soft voice, she said, “Is it because you don’t think I’ll believe you? Is that it?”

He still didn’t turn back, but he swallowed and said, “A little bit.”

“Well,” she said gently, “you don’t have to. You’re entitled to keep anything private that you want to. But you were real sick at school today, and because I love you, and because I care about you, I’d like to know what it was.”