And now I actually had a true friend which was Altemonte and I’d thought that I’d finally discovered what my mission was and what my destiny was. I’d thought my mission and my destiny was to find Altemonte and to bring him home with me. But now I knew I’d been wrong. My mission was way harder than that. It turned out that my mission was to find Altemonte and once I’d found him to leave him again.

I knew it, but still I had to try to not know it.

So I was like, Altemonte, you’re just jealous because I live in my own toxic house and I get to run a chain saw by myself. But I knew it wouldn’t work. Altemonte didn’t get jealous, because it’s like he hadn’t heard of jealousy. If a kid tied a string to a horsefly, Altemonte would be the next one to do it only because it looked fascinating, not because he thought it would make him popular. He knew he was flanged, but he had more important things on his mind. Like he said, he was pretty busy.

He sat in my cave and pulled his knees up to his chin. He said, This cave has orcs and goblins probably fighting to the death down in its very bowels at this exact moment. He said, I won’t tell anyone where you went I’ll just say I woke up and you were gone. He said, I’ll hide your knitting.

I said, You can keep my comic books.

He said, I’ll give you my force field.

I said, But you need your force field.

He said, We can share it. And he cut off a big hunk of it for me, and I put the hunk of force field in my pocket for later. It was so honorable that you could almost forget I was going to see him at school and you could almost forget that maybe it was true what he said about the police and about who was in charge. Maybe it was true but we both knew there were more important things in life.

We crawled out of the cave. The sky of Middle-earth or of the World of Two Moons or of home was light and Altemonte and I shook hands as befitted our stations and then I kissed him on the lips. Make haste, he said. The last thing that I saw before I ran was Altemonte tying a knot of joe-pye, marking the tree next to our cave.

I pretty much was flying, past the hollow beech tree, past the duck-shit ditch, sharp turn downhill, no snapping turtle, trees of heaven, acorn-shaking tree below me, then oh. A shadow.