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about it a lot over the next few days. We’d been in school a couple of weeks at this point. Jeremy had already made a lot of friends. He talked to them on the phone at night. I had a lot of time to think.
    I even asked Dad about it. “Try not to be dense, Si,” he told me. “There’s no such thing as ghosts, everybody knows that. Now chill out, will you, I’m trying to explain something to your brother.”
    So the answer was, no, I didn’t believe in ghosts. But I also thought it might be more complicated than that, that maybe they were like characters in a good book. You aren’t going to run into them at the Wal-Mart, but they seem real all the same. I figured ghosts might be something like that. The way I figured it, they had to be really desperate for something they hadn’t gotten enough of while they were alive, like they were jealous or hungry or something. Otherwise why would they stick around some crummy old cemetery when they could go on to Heaven or whatever? So that’s what I ended up telling Jeremy a few nights later, after I’d finished sorting it all out inside my head.
    â€œHungry?” he said. “Christ, Si, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” He started thrashing around in his bed and making these dumb ghost noises. “Oooooooh,” he said, and, “Ooooooooh, I’m a ghost, give me a steak. Ooooooooh, I want a bowl of Cheerios.”
    I tried to explain that that wasn’t what I meant, but I couldn’t find the words. I was just a kid, after all.
    â€œChrist, Si,” Jeremy said, “don’t tell anybody anything that stupid. It’s like that stupid bear you drag around everywhere, it makes me ashamed to be your brother.”
    I knew he didn’t mean anything by that—Jeremy was always joking around—but it hurt Mr. Fuzzy’s feelings all the same. “Don’t cry, Mr. Fuzzy,” I whispered. “He didn’t mean anything by it.”
    A few days later, Jeremy came home looking troubled. I didn’t think anything about it at first because it hadn’t been a very good day from the start. When Jeremy and I went down to breakfast, we overheard Day saying he was taking Mom’s car in that afternoon, the way they had planned. Mom said something so low that neither one of us could make it out, and then Dad said, “For Christ’s sake, Mariam, there’s plenty of one-car families in the world.” He slammed his way out of the house, and a few seconds later we heard Mom shut the bedroom door with a click. Neither one of us said anything after that except when Jeremy snapped at me because I was so slow getting my lunch. So I knew he was upset and it didn’t surprise me when he came home from football practice that day looking a bit down in the mouth.
    It turned out to be something totally different, though, because as soon as we turned out the light that night, and he knew we were really alone, Jeremy said, “What happened to that bundle of tools, Si?”
    â€œWhat bundle of tools?” I asked.
    â€œThat weird-looking shit you found in the basement last summer,” he said.
    That’s when I remembered that I’d put the bundle under my bed. What a crazy thing to do, I thought, and I was about to say I’d taken them—but Mr. Fuzzy kind of punched me. He was so sensitive, I don’t think he’d really forgiven Jeremy yet.
    I thought it over, and then I said, “Beats me.”
    â€œWell, I went down the basement this afternoon,” Jeremy said, “and they were gone.”
    â€œSo?”
    â€œIt makes me uncomfortable, that’s all.”
    â€œWhy?”
    Jeremy didn’t say anything for a long time. A car went by outside, and the headlights lit everything up for a minute. The shadow of the crap-apple danced on the ceiling like a man made out of bones, and then the night swallowed him up. That one little