She sat beside him. “Raj, you have to understand that I don’t mean those things. I just wrote them in my journal because writing like that reminds me of someone I miss and it makes me feel a little better. I know that sounds like a lie, but it isn’t.”

He glanced up at her and seemed confused. “The journal on your desk? I wouldn’t look at that. When I went to get the scissors from the sewing box, I saw the letter from my uncle on the bed. I shouldn’t have read it, I know.”

Overwhelmed by an almost narcotic relief, Ruth couldn’t respond.

“What I could do,” he said, “is I could live anywhere. I could live in the barn even, and I could work this farm like my uncle used to. I’ve seen what to do on Lew’s farm, and he said he’d help me. I’m too old to go into a kids’ home or something. I could just get a job right now. I don’t want to go back to London.”

Ruth tentatively put her arm around Raj. “Listen, Haig is—” She stopped herself. “I’m not going to send you anywhere. We’ve both been abandoned by that family, so we’ll make the best of it. And if things don’t work out I’ll chop you up and feed you to Fifty-Three.”

“He’d never eat me,” he said, scratching the young hound’s neck. “I secretly feed him those biscuits you make.”

“What’s wrong with my biscuits?”

“Nothing. Fifty-Three loves them.”

“Fifty-Three eats cow pies.”

“No, they’re nice,” Raj assured her, as they both got up and headed into the house. “They’re just a bit…heavy sometimes.”

“Heavy?”

“Chewy—in a nice way.”

The screen door squealed shut behind them.

Miss Kelly entered the classroom. She welcomed them back and said she hoped they hadn’t turned into little heathens over the summer. This tickled her and she indulged in laughter in just the way she indulged in that single square of Hershey’s chocolate she ate after her peanut butter and jelly sandwich every day at lunch. Annie liked Miss Kelly, who was sweet and hopeless. She was in her mid-thirties and might have been quite nice-looking if she had ever mastered her frizzy brown hair, which attacked her head like some nightmare animal. Then there were those ugly thick glasses, always slipping from her little nose, and that carelessly applied lipstick, ghoulishly staining her teeth, and how thin she was, her pale freckled skin sealed to her bones.

After taking roll, she said, “Well, now, the first thing is that we have a new member of our homeroom, Rajiv, who comes to us by way of India and England.”

Annie felt nervous for Raj, who she could see was shrinking a little under this attention.

“Did I pronounce that right, Rajiv?”