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moon or crossed a desert. “I’m here to get my grandpa and take him back home with me.”
    “I’ve been thinking of moving up to Canada myself,” he said.
    “You mean to live?” I asked.
    “Sure.”
    “I don’t think you can. Unless you have relatives up there. Do you?”
    “Nope,” he said.
    “I don’t think they’ll let you in, then, except to visit.”
    “Yeah . . . well, I know people who know people. They’d help me get in.”
    “Unless they’re family-”
    He smiled. “They’d have to catch me crossing the border.”
    “What do you mean?”
    He leaned towards me a little and said quietly, almost as if he thought the brick buildings could hear him, “There are ways to sneak in, you know? Boats go places where they don’t expect you to cross. Or I could probably get through the Rockies. Or I could just go for a visit and stay the rest of my life.”
    “Oh.”
    I wondered if a lot of people were sneaking into my country. With just a little help and a bribe, it really hadn’t been that hard for me to sneak into the U.S., so it probably went both ways.
    “This is a nice city,” I said. “My dad thought it might be really run-down.”
    “Portland’s built on two rivers, which helps with transportation of goods,” he said. “So there are still some jobs.”
    We walked down a tree-lined street with sidewalks made of brick until we came to a large plaza. I saw more MAX tracks on either side of the square and big crowds of people waiting for the trains.
    “In there,” he said, showing me through a double door into a cavelike room. I turned to thank him, but he was gone. I spun around and searched the square. It was like he’d become invisible. I shrugged and went inside. Behind a glass window sat a woman with enormous purple-framed glasses, chewing on an apple and reading an E-ZBook Reader by kerosene l amplight.
    “Excuse me? I’d like to buy a visitor’s pass for the MAX.”
    “For what day?” she asked, looking up from what she was reading.
    “Today.”
    “I’ve sold the allotment.” She flipped through a little file box. “I have one left for tomorrow and twelve for the day after that.”
    “But I don’t have anyplace to stay tonight.”
    “Sorry, but they’re trying to control crowding on the MAX, so I can only sell fifty a day, and I’m sold out.”
    “Where will I go?”
    “There’s a mission by the train station,” she suggested. She gave me directions back to where I’d just come from and reminded me to buy tomorrow’s ticket before I left since she only had the one.
    “How does it work?” I asked, letting her choose some bills.
    “Just have it ready to show the fare inspectors when they get on the train.”
    Maybe I could sneak on with tomorrow’s ticket, I thought.
    “Today’s is orange,” she told me, reading my mind. “You can get on, but they’ll fine you if you’re caught, and if you can’t pay”-she paused, leaning forward for maximum effect-“they’ll arrest you.”
    “Arrest me?”
    “Yep.”
    “Wow. Well . . . thanks for the warning,” I said. I accepted the lavender ticket marked for tomorrow. She’d sounded so dramatic that I wondered if she was just trying to scare me into doing the right thing, but I couldn’t be sure.
    Outside I blinked in the bright sunshine, and my bruised and battered feet begged me not to walk all the way to the shelter. I was so close to getting to my grandpa’s house. I scanned the square for the sunburned guy, hoping he’d have a suggestion, but I couldn’t find him.
    There was a big crowd waiting to get on the MAX, maybe as many as two hundred people. How could the fare inspectors possibly catch me with all those people onboard? I hobbled across the hot bricks to the eastbound platform and stood near the waiting crowd. We could hear the MAX horn long before the train got to us, and we pressed our hot, sweaty bodies into one another, trying to be closest to the edge without being shoved off and run