He thought about Junie—the tight fist her hand had made around Midnight’s midsection as Nate read to her. He tried to think about a great project for him and Larry to make for the science fair. The baseball tryouts in April. The tree house they wanted to build, as soon as the weather warmed up, if they could just find the right tree. Dumb things, even: a knock-knock joke his sister loved to tell people but never got right, with the punch line, “Orange you glad I didn’t say banana?” What Larry had told him today: “You know that weird girl, Naomi? She likes you.”

But the picture kept coming back, of the barking dogs. The policeman with the notebook. His mother, shivering in her sweater. His dad and the blood.

To quiet his brain, Nate began to run through the digits of pi, like he and his dad used to do together. He had memorized up to 111 digits now. Picture a good time, he told himself. Picture someplace different from here.

What came to him was the summer before last. He and Larry had spent all of June after school let out riding their bikes up and down the dirt road between their houses, building jumps, having races. Behind the implement shed, they’d built a lean-to clubhouse out of lumber scraps. They’d piled a bunch of old pillows and blankets on the floor, where they’d read Hardy Boys novels from the library on hot afternoons. By mid-July they’d read them all and played enough games of cards and checkers that they were sick of that, too. The days that had once seemed thrillingly long had taken on a sameness. Nate and Larry didn’t use the word “bored,” but they were starting to feel that way.

They were reading a new library book together—The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—when Nate hit on the idea of building a raft. There was no river to float it down, exactly, but the catchment pond at Larry’s ranch was substantial enough to launch a boat on and feel like you were actually going someplace.

Larry’s dad had shown them a bunch of old oil drums. “You kids are welcome to these,” Mr. Kowalski told them. “Just keep out of trouble.”

All one day and most of the next they spent strapping the drums together with heavy rope and twine. Nate made the bowline knots that his dad had taught him, and used wood scraps to make a platform to sit on.