He was glad to see that she appeared to be new to it. She typed a few words into her laptop, and then a few others, until they came up with a website that seemed to specialize in this sort of thing. It was shocking, really, what you could find with a few quick taps of your finger. The offerings were like items in a candy machine—so many choices, each more decadent than the last. Who wanted to watch someone do that? Or that!

“How about this one,” Allison said, but then she looked at Ted’s face, and her own face closed down. She shut the computer, turning the room dark. He could hear her set it on her night table.

“Well, good night,” he’d said, and they’d gone to sleep on the far reaches of the mattress.

His mother used to say that he and Terrance marched to the beat of a different drummer. Another boy might have felt embarrassed to be compared to his disabled brother, but Ted agreed with her. He was never a teenager the way he was supposed to be, had never rebelled against what he already realized was the good life. As a boy he assumed that the four of them—he and Terrance and their parents—would spend their lives together in their house. Well, the five of them, he thought, smiling as he thought of his and Terrance’s imaginary brother, Thomas.

“You okay?” Allison said.

Ted nodded. “Yep.”

Thomas would approve of the petition, he thought—but he wouldn’t settle for the number of signatures Ted had garnered today. Thomas would get everyone in town to sign it. Starting tomorrow Ted would go door-to-door and ask his neighbors directly to support the preservation of their town. He would embody Thomas.

Terrance approached with a cup of cider. He gave it to Ted, then sat on the grass beside him. “It’s not spiky,” he said.

Ted sipped. No. He wouldn’t have minded a spiked one, but oh well. “Thanks, pal.”

Terrance still had his baseball outfit on. Ted had dispensed with his uncomfortable tree costume at Jillian’s behest, but Allison was wearing her cowgirl outfit by design—she got up now, joining Grant at the microphone.

“And now, little lady, if you’ll kindly step up to the parapet, I’ll give you a lesson in marksmanship,” Grant said. He pretended to shoot a bird out of the sky and catch it.

“You couldn’t give me a lesson in long-distance spittin’!” Allison said, hands on hips, and she began singing: “Anything you can do . . .”