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.

When Lucy covered her mouth with her hand, before she spoke, Elliot and I just assumed she didn’t want us to see her missing teeth. (Fernando wasn’t the one who’d knocked out the girl’s teeth, Elmira had told us; Lucy’s father had done it.) “Don’t talk to me—you don’t even want to look like you know me, or anythin’,” Lucy said into her hand, to the snowshoer and me.

The cops were usually in pairs; Mr. Barlow and I now noticed that two of them were looking at us, or they were checking out someone in our near vicinity. “Don’t look at the cops when they’re lookin’ at you,” we heard Lucy say, but we couldn’t see her, and her voice sounded farther away. The two cops were threading their way through the crowd in our direction, but Elliot and I stopped watching them.

“Do you know that girl?” one of the cops asked the snowshoer and me, when they were suddenly standing in front of us.

“What girl?” I asked, looking all around. As expected, Lucy was nowhere to be seen; she’d slipped away.

“The officer must mean the girl who showed us to our departure platform,” the little English teacher told me patiently—as if he were used to speaking to an inattentive child. “We asked a girl if she knew where the track to Boston was, and she brought us here,” the snowshoer said to the policemen.

“Oh, that girl,” I said, with steadfast indifference.