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said.
    â€œNo, I’m not.”
    â€œSure you are.” He crossed the room and hunkered down at my side. I glanced over at him. Let me be honest here: I was nobody’s ideal boy next door. I was a scrawny, unlovely kid, forever peering out at the world through a pair of lenses so thick that Jeremy had once spent a sunny afternoon trying to ignite ants with them. The changeling, my mother sometimes called me, since I seemed to have surfaced out of somebody else’s gene pool.
    Jeremy, though, was blond and handsome and already broad-shouldered. He was the kind of kid everybody wants to sit with in the lunchroom, quick and friendly and capable of glamorous strokes of kindness. He made such a gesture now, clapping me on the shoulder. “Geez, Si, that’s some weird-looking shit. Wonder how long it’s been here?”
    â€œI dunno,” I said, but I remembered the landlord telling Dad the house was nearly a hundred and fifty years old. And hasn’t had a lick of work since , I’d heard Dad mutter under his breath.
    Jeremy reached for one of the skewers and I felt a little bubble of emotion press against the bottom of my throat. He turned the thing over in his hands and let it drop to the floor. “Beats the hell out of me,” he said.
    â€œYou’re not gonna tell Mom, are you?”
    â€œNah.” He seemed to think a moment. “Course I might use that scalpel to dissect Mr. Fuzzy.” He gazed at me balefully, and then he slapped my shoulder again. “Better treat me right, kid.”
    A moment later I heard the basement door slam behind me.
    I’d been clutching the fork so tightly that it had turned hot in my hand. My knuckles grinned up at me, four bloodless white crescents. I felt so strange that I just let it tumble to the floor. Then I rewrapped the bundle, and shoved it back under the furnace.
    By the time I’d gotten upstairs, I’d put the whole thing out of my mind. Except I hadn’t, not really. I wasn’t thinking about it, not consciously, but it was there all the same, the way all the furniture in a room is still there when you turn out the lights, and you can sense it there in the dark. Or the way pain is always there. Even when they give you something to smooth it out a little, it’s always there, a deep-down ache like jagged rocks under a swift-moving current. It never goes away, pain. It’s like a stone in your pocket.
    The bundle weighed on me in the same way, through the long night after Jeremy finally fell asleep, and the next day, and the night after that as well. So I guess I wasn’t surprised, not really, when I found myself creeping down the basement stairs the next afternoon. Nobody saw me steal up to my room with the bundle. Nobody saw me tuck it under my bed. Mom had cried herself to sleep in front of the TV (she pretended she wasn’t crying, but I knew better) and Dad was already at work. Who knew where Jeremy was?
    Then school started and Mom didn’t cry as often, or she did it when we weren’t around. But neither one of them talked very much, except at dinner Dad always asked Jeremy how freshman football was going. And most nights, just as a joke, Jeremy would start up with one of those crazy stories of his, the minute we turned out the light. He’d pretend there was a vampire in the room or something and he’d thrash around so that I could hear him over the narrow space between our beds. “Ahhh,” he’d say, “Arrggh,” and, in a strangled gasp, “When it finishes with me, Si, it’s coming for you.” I’d hug Mr. Fuzzy tight and tell him not to be afraid, and then Jeremy would unleash that nutty mad scientist laugh.
    â€œC’mon, Si, you know I’m only kidding.”
    One night, he said, “Do you believe in ghosts, Si? Because as old as this house is, I bet a whole shitload of people have died in it.”
    I didn’t answer, but I thought