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refuse to call themselves after their own nation unless they’re feeling threatened.”
    “You must hear them calling themselves American quite a lot then,” his father had said dryly, and the conversation had soured somewhat after that.
    Seth really didn’t understand it. Gudmund was damn near the perfect teen. Popular enough, but not too popular; confident, but not too confident; nice to Seth’s parents, nice to Owen, and always got Seth home by curfew since he’d gotten his car. Like all of Seth’s classmates, he was a bit older, but only by ten months, seventeen to Seth’s sixteen, which was nothing. They ran on the cross-country team together with Monica and H, which couldn’t have been more wholesome. And while it was true that Gudmund’s mother and father were exactly the sort of scary American conservatives that tended to horrify Europeans, even Seth’s own parents had to admit they were pretty nice people one-on-one.
    And though they clearly suspected, his parents had also never found out about any of the trouble he and Gudmund got up to. Not that any of it was actually all that bad. No drugs, and though there was more than occasional drinking, there was definitely no drunk driving. Gudmund was bright and easygoing, and most parents would have been happy to have him around as a friend for their son.
    But not, it seemed, Seth’s mother. She pretended she had some sixth sense about him.
    And maybe she did.
    “You’ve got work tomorrow,” she said now, but he could already tell she was on her way to a yes in the negotiations.
    “Not ’til six,” Seth said, keeping his tone as unargumentative as possible.
    His mother considered. “Fine,” she said curtly. “Now, get up. We need to go.”
    “Close the door,” he called after her, but she was already gone.
    He got up and found a shirt to pull on over his head. An hour sitting through Owen’s torturous clarinet lesson with onion-smelling Miss Baker so his mother could go run furiously along the coastal path in exchange for an evening of freedom which included a stash of beer forgotten by Gudmund’s father (though not behind the wheel of Gudmund’s car; really, they were good kids, which made her suspicions all the more infuriating; Seth almost wanted to do something bad, something really bad, just to show her). But for now, it was a fair enough trade.
    Any chance to get away. Any chance to feel not quite so trapped. Even for a little while.
    He’d take it.
    Five minutes later, he was dressed and in the kitchen. “Hey, Dad,” he said, taking down a box of cereal.
    “Hey, Seth,” his father sighed, intently studying the wooden frame for the new counter, a frame that refused to fit, no matter how much sawing went on.
    “Why don’t you just hire a guy?” Seth asked, stuffing a handful of peanut-butter-flavored granules in his mouth. “Be done in a week.”
    “And what guy would that be?” his father asked distractedly. “There’s peace to be found in doing something for yourself.”
    Seth had heard this sentence many, many times. His father taught English at the small, liberal arts college that gave Halfmarket two-thirds of its population, and these projects – of which there had been more than Seth could count, from the deck at the house in England when he was just a baby, adding a utility room in the garage here, to this kitchen extension his father had insisted on doing himself – were what he swore kept him sane after swapping London for a small coastal American town. The projects all eventually got finished, all eventually pretty well, too, but the peace, perhaps, had less to do with the project than with the medication his father took for his depression. Heavier than the usual antidepressants that some of his friends took, heavy enough to occasionally make his father seem like a ghost in their own house.
    “What have I done wrong now?” his father mumbled, shaking his head in puzzlement at a pile of off-cut timber.
    His mother