“Lose the bra, Elliot,” I said to him when we were changing our clothes for the train.

“I thought you’d never notice,” the snowshoer said.

“I noticed it, too!” Lucy called to us from the living room.

I felt I had failed to be the snowshoer’s good shepherd. At Zim’s memorial, of all occasions, I had failed to watch out for Mr. Barlow. I’d let the little English teacher pick a fight with a couple of Bonesmen in a bra. What a bad soldier I would have been, I was thinking, as the three of us took a taxi to Penn Station.

“Don’t worry—I’m not goin’ all the way to New Hampshire, but I’ll take a ride to Penn Station,” Lucy had told us.

Our taxi driver was a hippie with a dirty-blond beard and a ponytail tied with a red ribbon. His cab was adorned with peace symbols, and he had a GET OUT OF VIETNAM bumper sticker. All the way to Seventh Avenue, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” was playing on the radio—the old Pete Seeger song, but it was the Peter, Paul and Mary version.

I was also thinking I had failed Francine DeCourcey, Zim’s fiancée. I believed I could have comforted her more—I should have tried harder to reach her in her grief. The song just repeated itself. Peter, Paul and Mary just kept singing. Lucy sang along with them. They were asking where the flowers, the young girls, and the soldiers had gone.

Where has the snowshoer gone—where is he going? I was worrying. Peter, Paul and Mary just sang. Our hippie cab driver was singing, too. The young girls in the song would never learn—that was the message.

I just looked at the little English teacher; he was always the smallest person, always stuck in the middle of every backseat. Mr. Barlow was between me and Lucy; he was even smaller than the underage girl beside him. Of course Elliot noticed how I was looking at him. I’m sure it was a desperate look.

“I’m sorry—please don’t worry about me, Adam,” the snowshoer whispered.

It was late afternoon or early evening, and it was a Sunday—Penn Station, as Zim used to say, was a zoo. Yet Lucy knew where to go; the wayward girl led us through the labyrinth. If Buddy had been around, we would never have found her in the swarms of arriving and departing passengers. If there were other runaways—other strays and castoffs of humankind, adrift in Penn Station—the snowshoer and I didn’t see them. We followed Lucy; the girl knew her way around. “Outward-bound, Boston—right?” was all the girl asked us, before leading us to our track. We were waiting for the gate or entranceway to our platform to open; until then, I’d not noticed a police presence in Penn Station. But when we stopped moving—we were just standing with Lucy, and with our fellow travelers to Boston—Mr. Barlow and I began to notice all the cops.