“No, trust me, you’ll love it,” Marianne told him at breakfast, when he said he thought the trip was optional. That was the other thing—he hated to have his plans changed, and there was also the matter, arranged yesterday, of some kind of special dinner tonight. “It won’t be all day,” she promised. “I think you’ll love it.” It was true that Marianne had been good to him so far, accommodating. The special dinner suggested that finally, they saw him for the talent he was, though he’d been warned about these kinds of—what did Coach call them?—self-aggrandizing thoughts. Plus she seemed a little stressed, and Davonte figured it wouldn’t cost him much to go along with the group. That’s what Coach was teaching him to do, measure things in terms of costs and benefits, which basically meant pretending things weren’t all about you, just so you could get what you want. He spends a morning ambling around a museum? In return, he gets more attention for his admittedly significant needs.

So here he was, sitting next to a plump woman who looked happy to be going anywhere. She had a little girl’s haircut and wore a T-shirt and green shorts that showed her pale, veiny legs. As soon as the bus got moving she was digging through her purse for a book of poems, all underlined and highlighted and marked with ragged sticky notes. Reading in moving vehicles made Davonte so sick he couldn’t stand the sight of anyone else reading, and he considered how to ask her to please put the book away.

She didn’t read long before she wanted to talk. “The house—the Ca’ d’Zan Mansion,” she pronounced the name slowly. “I’ve heard it’s incredible. But I think our tickets are just for the museum. Too bad. My name is Janine, I think I heard you read last night? From a memoir?” She took out a tin of candies from her purse and offered one.

“Donald Goldston,” he said, shaking her hand and refusing the candy. If he ate so much as a mint he had to write it down and look up the calories later. Too much trouble. “It was fiction, actually. A novel.”

“Sorry. It must have seemed very realistic to me.”