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musician,” said Isabelle. “An entirely too gloomy one.
Chopin
is a proper name. Therefore, it begins with a capital
C
and is followed by a lowercase
h.
”
    And so they continued; by the end, Raymie had written a letter of complaint for Isabelle, detailing how the Golden Glen janitor played the wrong kind of music on the common-room piano. According to Isabelle, the music of Chopin was too mournful, and the janitor needed to stop playing it because the world was mournful enough on its own. The Golden Glen, in particular, was too mournful to be borne, according to Isabelle.
    It was a very long letter.
    And when Raymie was done writing it, Isabelle made Raymie push her wheelchair out of the room and down the hallway and back to the common room, where the floor was just a floor and not a glowing lake, and where there was a wooden box with the word SUGGESTIONS printed on its side in silver stick-on letters.
    “Drop it in,” said Isabelle.
    “Me?” said Raymie.
    “You wrote it, didn’t you?” said Isabelle.
    Raymie put the letter in the box.
    “There,” said Isabelle. “You wanted to do a good deed. You did a good deed.”
    Writing a letter of complaint about mournful music didn’t seem like a good deed at all. It seemed like the opposite of a good deed.
    “Take me back to my room,” said Isabelle. “I’ve had enough.”
    Raymie thought that she had had enough, too. She turned the wheelchair around and headed back to Isabelle’s room.
    “Take my hand!” shouted Alice Nebbley as they made their way down the hallway.
    “Close the door when you leave,” said Isabelle after Raymie had wheeled her into her room. “And do not return. I am not interested in people doing good deeds. Good deeds are pointless, in any case. Nothing changes. Nothing matters.”
    The sun was trying to make its way through the one small window in Isabelle’s room. Raymie stood in the doorway holding Florence close to her chest, as if the book could protect her. Which it couldn’t, of course. She knew that.
    Everything seemed bleak, impossible.
    “Archie, I’m sorry I betrayed you,” said Raymie without really meaning to say it.
    “Yes, well, poor Archie, alas Archie. And alas your betrayal of him,” said Isabelle, “whoever he is.”
    “He’s a cat,” said Raymie.
    Isabelle stared at Raymie with her bright-blue eyes. “Is that why you want to do a good deed, because you betrayed a cat?”
    “No,” said Raymie. “My father left.”
    “And?”
    “I’m working to get him back,” said Raymie.
    “With good deeds?” said Isabelle.
    “Yes,” said Raymie. Maybe it was because of Isabelle’s X-ray vision, or maybe it was because of her lack of sympathy; for some reason, Raymie told Isabelle the truth. “I’m going to win a contest and then I will be famous, and he will see my picture in the paper and he will have to come home.”
    “I see,” said Isabelle.
    Just then, the sun managed to come around the corner of Isabelle’s window and throw itself into a small square of light on the floor. It was very bright. It shimmered. It looked like the window to another universe.
    “Look,” said Raymie. She pointed at the sun patch.
    “I see,” said Isabelle. “I see.”

“Take my hand!” shouted Alice Nebbley as Raymie walked down the hallway.
    Raymie stopped. She listened. She flexed her toes. And then she started walking again. She followed the sound of Alice’s voice.
    Raymie needed to do a good deed, plus she needed to make up for the bad deed she had just done. That meant she had to do the bravest, best deed she could think of, the deed she least wanted to do.
    She had to go into Alice Nebbley’s room and ask her if she wanted to be read to.
    It was a terrifying prospect.
    Raymie looked down at her feet. She made herself put one foot in front of the other. She concentrated on Alice’s voice.
    The voice led her to a door with the number 323 on it, and underneath the number was a white card.
Alice Nebbley
was