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the police.
    Justin fumed as he drove his son to the police station.
    “How could you do this?” he kept asking. “Why?”
    “I did it for you,” said Larry, and he tried to explain that he was going to use the money to help buy something for the house.
    This just angered his father further.
    “How can you say you did this for me! I would never condone stealing!”
    Larry thought of the lumber, but his father was so angry that Larry didn’t dare bring it up. To Larry, the only difference between this and the bricks, the mulch, and the lumber was that he had gotten caught.
    And that wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for Glen. At policeheadquarters Larry learned that the man who had stopped to help them align the tread in Salem had recognized the skimobile as one that he had recently returned to the dealer—it had been his machine! He had jotted down the license number on the truck and called the police, who had just taken the robbery report from the dealer. The license number led police directly to Glen Fuller’s door.
    Because of Glen’s previous troubles it was assumed that he had planned and instigated the theft, and that Larry was just an innocent kid who had been drawn along. Larry, of course, knew there was more to it than that, but he kept his mouth shut. The case was handled by a judge who used to live across the street from the Lavins’ old home in Bradford. Larry got a lecture, and the charges against him were dropped. Glen was convicted and received two years’ probation. It soured their friendship for a time. Larry was angry at Glen for being stupid enough to insist upon joyriding all over the place, and for giving his name to the police. Glen was angry because Larry had let him take the whole rap.
    But the most memorable consequence of the incident for Larry was the write-up the crime got in his local newspaper. His name wasn’t in the article because he was a minor, but a local policeman was quoted as saying he doubted that two kids could have pulled off such a professional job by themselves, that someone else must have been behind it.
    Larry liked that—“such a professional job.”
    Larry wrote an account of the skimobile incident for a creative writing class at Exeter. It was the first writing assignment since “My Life as a Pencil” that excited him. He tried to re-create every little detail: cutting through the padlock to break in; Glen starting up a forklift motor all of a sudden as they fumbled through the garage; the ironic way they had gotten caught. He was proud of the story. So he was surprised at the critical reception it got from his teacher. The writing teacher, perhaps alarmed by the evident pleasure his student took in the caper, said something was missing.
    “Haven’t you learned anything from the experience?” he asked Larry when they discussed the paper. “This does nothing more than tell the story, blow by blow. What does it mean to you? What’s the point?”
    Larry didn’t have answers to those questions. He was disappointed by the paper’s reception, but decided against trying to rewrite it. He just accepted a C, and concluded creative writing just wasn’t his thing. He was no good at putting things between the lines.
    *  *  *
    Few of Larry Lavin’s classmates were surprised when he got kicked out of Exeter in his senior year. With his aptitude for pranks and disregard for school rules, it was bound to happen. Housemaster Walker had checked Larry’s room one evening when he wasn’t there, and had spotted the smoking den with its three big fans and waterpipe. The room was chock-full with contraband. Larry had a box of munchies that had been taken from a storage shelter under the cafeteria, and a cassette tape player that belonged to the library, where he worked part-time as one of the terms of his scholarship. Evidence of dope smoking alone meant expulsion.
    Larry’s trouble with the administration was, in its own way, a victory. Dope smoking was so