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walking down alleys and cutting through parks and turning his mile-and-a-half walk into two miles.
    For a few weeks Wes succeeded in not thinking about it too deeply. Izzy would pop into his head and he would shove her roughly aside, or make himself remember one of her unattractive qualities, like her big saliva-spewing laugh. Thoughts of June weresneakier. He would be thinking about something nice, and suddenly she would be there in his head with those wide-apart eyes, and his guts would stir and his mouth would sort of sag open — all before he realized what was happening. To get rid of June thoughts, he would think about his clean garage, and after a while she would go away and the image in his mind would be that of a perfectly clean, gray painted floor.
    It occurred to him on more than one occasion that he might be a little bit crazy. Was he crazy to break up with Izzy? Was he crazy to not ride the bus? Was he crazy to have made the garage as clean and orderly as a hospital surgical unit? Was he any crazier than Jerry, who was planning to become Emperor of the Universe?
    Probably. Mr. Varon would think so.
    But then, Mr. Varon thought everybody was crazy.
    Psych class had sounded really cool when Wes had signed up for it, but Mr. Varon spent most of every period droning on about these old dead guys, as if he was teaching history instead of psychology. Varon would spend thirty minutes going on and on about Sigmund Freud, the supposed father of psychoanalysis, then explain how most of Freud’s theories had been flat-out wrong, leaving everybody puzzling over why, if the guy was so full of it, they had to learn about him at all.
    Where were the rats and the mazes? Where were the cool experiments on other kids? The hypnosis and stuff? How come he left psych every day in a walking coma instead of, well,
psyched
?
    But every so often, Varon came up with something that stuck in Wes’s head. Like his theory about all teenagers being nut jobs.
    The way Varon explained it, something happened to kids around the age of twelve or thirteen. Their brains got these enormous injections of hormones, and everything got all scrambled and short-circuited, producing what he called “irrational behaviors.” Little kids do stupid stuff because they lack information and experience. Teenagers do stupid stuff because their brains are rewiring themselves.
    “If, for example,” said Mr. Varon, “I were to behave the way many of you do, I would quickly lose my job and be diagnosed as schizophrenic, bipolar, antisocial, and a danger to myself and others. In teens, however, such behavior is tolerated. In other words, insane behavior, in a teen, is considered to be perfectly normal.”
    Everybody thought that was pretty funny. Aron Brey raised his hand and said, “I hear voices.”
    “What do they say?” asked Maria Finer.
    “ ‘Kill, kill, kill,’ ” Aron said.
    Mr. Varon did not think that was funny. Actually, neither did anybody else.
    “I’m kidding,” said Aron.
    “Quod erat demonstrandum,”
said Mr. Varon, which confused the entire class full of bipolar schizophrenics, Wes included.
    Still, what Varon said made a weird kind of sense.
    June looked at the caller ID on her ringing cell phone.
Ron and Nancy Preuss.
She answered with a cautious “Hello?”
    “June? Hi, it’s Jerry. Jerry Preuss?”
    It took her a second to connect the voice with a face.
    “Oh. Jerry?”
    “Yeah. How are you doing?”
    “Okay,” she said. How had he gotten her number?
    “I got your number from Naomi Liddell,” Jerry said.
    “Oh.”
Naomi!
“Uh, how’s the campaign going?”
    “Smooth.”
    Smooth?
“Oh. Good.” She could tell he was going to ask her out.
    “I wanted to thank you for your suggestion the other day.”
    Suggestion?
“What suggestion?”
    “You said I should promise people whatever they want.”
    “I was sort of kidding.”
    “Yeah, but it got me thinking. Like, the first thing I have to do is find out what people really