“Gotta go, man,” Larry said. “I’ll catch you later.”

As Junie headed into the long, low elementary building, Nate made his way up the steps to the junior high. He walked down the hall, where on any other day kids would be calling out Hey, Nate and How’s it going? The halls were crowded, as always, but a kind of invisible air pocket seemed to separate him from the throng of others. All around was the sound of laughter and visiting, discussion of last night’s homework and the upcoming baseball tryouts.

“Hey, Pete, I brought my glove,” Nate called to the catcher from last year’s team.

“Later,” the boy said. “Gotta go.”

In homeroom Nate slid into his desk and opened his notebook. He leaned across the row to a girl, Sandra, who used to come over to his house every Tuesday to take piano lessons from his mom. “What’d you get for that word problem? Number twenty-four. That was a killer, huh?”

“I don’t exactly know. Maybe you should ask somebody else.”

He was starting to feel like a character on The Twilight Zone, like his face was covered with horrible green mold and everyone knew it but him. “Hey, Patty,” he said to the girl next to him, “can you show me how you came up with the answer for twenty-four?”

She made the motion of going through her binder, but he could see her skin turn pink. Before she had a chance to give him her excuse, he let her off the hook. “Never mind,” he said.

By fourth period Nate didn’t even try talking to anyone anymore. It was like he wasn’t there.

At lunch he usually ate with Larry and a bunch of other boys, and afterward they’d shoot baskets for a few minutes or maybe, now that tryouts were coming up, go outside and throw around a baseball. But today he moved his tray silently along the cafeteria aisle, picking up a grilled cheese sandwich, a salad, and a cup of chocolate pudding he realized he wasn’t in the mood to touch. He sat by himself at the end of a table. He could feel people looking at him; when he looked back, they turned away.

The memory came to him of Estelle Jonas, who was in his class two years ago. Halfway into sixth grade her father was arrested for having stolen money from the feed store where he worked as cashier. When Estelle came to school the day after he went to jail, it was like she’d come down with a sudden case of leprosy. She’d sat at the end of a table just like this, never taking her eyes off her plate, ignored by everyone—including Nate—until a couple of older girls had approached her.

“So,” Emily Watterson had said, reaching for Estelle’s heart locket, “where’d you get the money for this, anyway? From the money your dad stole down at the feed store?”

“I babysit my cousins,” Estelle told her.