“No, but he was so happy at the shelter. He could have figured that alpacas know how to party.”

“We are not stopping by an alpaca farm,” said Larry.

“Well, Charles Darwin, I don’t see you coming up with a plan,” Clayton spat back. The subsequent silence in the car was so judgmental, Clayton had to fill it. “Hey, I have a question. Do you think an animal can be disappointed in its offspring? Like, say you’re an alpaca, and one of your alpaca honeys pops out a kid, or whatever they call newborn alpacas, and when you see him you can’t help but think, Wow, what a loser. Let’s kick this one apart.”

“If you’re not going to take this seriously, Clay, feel free to leave,” quoth Bev.

“Lions eat their cubs, but I heard that was to force lady lions back into heat,” Clayton persisted.

“I shouldn’t indulge your inane banter, dear Clayton, but the foremost experts in neuroscience have theorized that it is the incredibly advanced prefrontal cortex of Homo sapiens that allows us to predict the future and distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom. An alpaca isn’t capable of the kind of complex reasoning that’s necessary to assign good and bad qualities, so you could say an alpaca is more in tune than we are to the fundamental truth that life is meaningless.”

“Jesus Christ, that’s quite the nihilistic worldview, Richard Dawkins.”

The ferry was departing. The cuddly WASPs on deck became cuddly in miniature as the wake elongated. Bev, blowing her own guilty wake of cigarette smoke out the window, flinched in the driver’s seat. In sympathy, everybody else flinched too.

“Oh no, Laird!” she said. “What if Rex bought a ticket? What if he’s on that ship right now? We’ll never find him.”

“I propose we conduct an inquiry.”

In the ferry office, no one remembered seeing Rex purchasing a fare to Woods Hole. A cashier was confident, though, that when she was outside on her lunch break, a young man very much like the young man in the picture on Bev’s iPhone had rented a bicycle across the street, then pedaled furiously in the direction of Oak Bluffs.

Laird Hunt swore under his breath that if their junior-most counselor Clayton Wheeler called him “Lare Bear” or “the Laremeister,” or once again described his rented room at the Cozy Oyster Bed & Breakfast as “the lair of Laird,” he would knock him on his ass so fast his cells would forget how to Krebs cycle. He had to put up with harassment from the trolls, to an extent, as that was his job, but he certainly shouldn’t have to tolerate it from a peer, not that Clayton, who had recently completed his freshman year at an obviously prestigious but second-tier Ivy, was by any definition of the word his peer. Sure, it couldn’t be daisies as the eldest in a family of adopted children. Still, even if Clayton had been born underweight in Siberia, he nevertheless grew up the son of trial lawyers who threatened kids with cease-and-desists over fan-art illustrations of amusement park mascots, so, regardless of his origins, he was a son of privilege. That was one of the positive things about teaching high school biology. His students were required to address him as “Mr. Hunt.” Occasionally he heard them call him other things when they thought he wasn’t listening, things that rhymed with Hunt, like that denigrating term for the most delicate part of a woman’s anatomy, but he could still take comfort in the illusion of respect.