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you?”
    â€œMine only lets me eat sugar cereal on my birthday. They’ll probably be stale by then.” He was quiet for a second, studying my expression. “I’m eight. But I bet you thought I was only seven, right?”
    I shrugged. He was definitely smaller than the average eight-year-old, but he seemed wiser somehow with his silvery gray eyes and that pencil perched behind his ear. “I wasn’t sure how old you were … just like you didn’t know whether I was fourteen or not.” I broke into a sly smile. “Come on, admit it. You were spying last night.”
    Hugh thumped his muffin down on his plate. “All right, all right, I was spying.” He sighed. “I’m usually really good at it.”
    â€œSo it sounds like this is something you do a lot—this spying thing.”
    â€œYeah, but you’re the first person who’s caught me since we moved here,” Hugh boasted. “Hildy’s never caught me. And Mine, she knows that I wander off sometimes, but she doesn’t know exactly what I’m up to.”
    â€œWhat are you up to?” I asked.
    Hugh’s face grew solemn. “There’s a lot of strange stuff going on around this place. I’m trying to figure it out.”
    â€œReally? You mean like those weird things under the sink in my room?”
    Hugh sat up straight. “So you saw the skull?” he asked gleefully. “Were you scared?”
    â€œPetrified,” I said. “Until Hildy came in this morning and explained about her teacher and the art lessons.”
    â€œYeah. Mr. Bonnycastle. He sounds cool. I told Hildy she should put the skull in her museum, but she says it doesn’t really fit with her theme.”
    â€œMuseum? What museum?”
    â€œIt’s in the gym. It’s sort of hard to explain.” Hugh hopped up from the table. “But I can show you if you want.”
    â€œSure,” I said. Then I glanced around the messy kitchen. “Right after we do these dishes.”
    Once we had finished, Hugh led me back through the foyer to the opposite end of the school. But even when I stood in the doorway of what used to be the gym, staring out at the so-called museum, I still didn’t understand. All I could see was a ton of junk spread from one basketball hoop to the other. I gawked up at the narrow balcony that ran around the sides of the sprawling room. In the old days people probably lined up along the railings to look down and watch games, but now even the balcony was jammed with junk.
    â€œWhat is all this stuff?” I whispered.
    â€œIt’s going to be a pearl-button museum,” Hugh said. He had already started down one of the cramped pathways that led through the piles, and I followed slowly along, examining the clutter on either side—rusted machinery with cranks and foot pedals, washtubs full of different kinds of shells, clamming rakes, and sawhorses stacked with old metal signs that said “American Maid Button Manufacturers” and “Style Right Buttons—Jewel of the Mississippi.”
    â€œGosh, my dad would love it here,” I said.
    Hugh seemed surprised. “He would? Mine’s worried. She says people go to museums to see dinosaurs or mummies or planetariums or IMAX movies. Like they’ve got in Chicago.” He stopped next to a burlap bag full of discs that looked like miniature checkers. “She doesn’t think people really care about buttons.”
    I scooped up a handful of the discs. They were white on one side and brown on the other. “Those are button blanks,” Hugh said. He sounded like a tour guide. “That’s what buttons used to look like before they polished off the outside part and drilled in the holes.”
    So these were the missing pieces—the circles that had been punched out of all those shells in the alleyways of Fortune and the little pile of shells in the cabinet upstairs. I