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design a system I could use to beat the races that summer at Saratoga. What I ended up with worked great on paper, netting me a hypothetical fortune on horses I picked from already-run races at Belmont. Unfortunately the first two times I actually went to the track I ended up losing almost a hundred dollars. (Jeremy lost fifty, which had the effect of further dampening his enthusiasm for my hobbies.)
    Then I went through my magic phase, where I pored over about twenty different books on famous magicians and escape artists, trying to learn everything I could about how they were able to do all the things they did. I learned a few tricks, but before I got anywhere near good my mind had already graduated to something else.
    What happened was, the whole idea of creating illusions got me thinking more about reality itself. Because if things can seem so real and not be, you have to start wondering what is real, and when you start getting into that, you find out that most of the things around you are a lot less real than you thought.
    I know that sounds far-fetched when you first hear it, but the more you think about it, the more sense it makes. Take, say, something like a hunk of wood. On the surface level the wood is real enough, and if somebody were to hit you over the head with it, it wouldn’t do you a whole lot of good. But if you trace themakeup of that hunk of wood beyond its molecules and get to the atomic level, you find that what’s actually there is just a bunch of electrons whirling around submicroscopic nuclei—kind of like miniature solar systems consisting mostly of empty space. And here’s where it really starts to hit you. The electrons aren’t things at all—not solid physical things anyway. They’re just energy. So you’re left with nothing solid but the nuclei. And if you study them, the little neutrons and protons, it turns out these little guys are nothing but waves of energy too. So you start with a solid, hurt-your-head-with-it hunk of wood, and in the end you find out it’s nothing but an expression of some kind of energy soup. And this is true of everything you see around you, from a banana peel to somebody’s mother-in-law.
    That’s one of the things that struck me as I’d plunged into the Emerson book that morning. He seemed to know this stuff back when scientists hadn’t even discovered bacteria, let alone the atom. He learned it from studying the ancient Indian holy books. I kept rereading the second stanza of his poem “Brahma,” which is what the Hindus call the soul of the universe:
    Far or forget to me is near;
    Shadow and sunlight are the same;
    The vanished gods to me appear;
    And one to me are shame and fame.
    What he seemed to be saying was, everything is actually one thing—even things that appear to be opposites. And when you see that underlying unity, I guess he was saying you see God. Bo and I’d had plenty of late-night and all-night discussions about this kind of thing—Bo being kind of Eastern in his approachto life, as you might guess—so this wasn’t completely new to me. I thought about it some more and then read the poem through to the end. The next stanza was trickier, and I was wishing Bo was there so I could run it by him.
    They reckon ill who leave me out;
    When me they fly, I am the wings;
    I am the doubter and the doubt,
    And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
    I checked my dictionary and found that the Brahmins were the priestly class in India, but I still couldn’t get the whole thing to come together for me. I read it over two or three more times, still not quite getting all of it, but liking it anyway. Whenever I hit that stanza, I’d smile, thinking about how Ethan would love the part about flying.
    And for the time being at least, I’d pretty much forgotten about the missing clothes.

Four
    Bo called from the country club around noon. He’d turned sixteen in the spring and gotten a