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Savianos were far from poor. There was “money in the family,” as his father sometimes said.
    “I’m not a teacher, that’s true, but I know a lot,” said Larry.
    “What does Mom say about this?” Nate asked.
    “Oh, you know . . . She didn’t love the idea at first, but I made her see that it could be a very positive experience for you.”
    Nate’s mother lived uptown and had remarried a few years after the divorce. Her husband was a pediatrician, annoyingly known as “Dr. Steve.” They had a baby named Eloise, and though the baby required a lot of attention, Nate’s mother tried very hard to devote whole days to Nate. Once in a while she took him to the movies, or to Chinatown for soup dumplings, which actually had soup inside them. But often she was extremely busy.
    “I wish I could be two places at once,” she said as she fed the baby or made lunch or hurried off to her job as a pastry chef at a French restaurant.
    So when Nate’s father first offered to have Nate live at his apartment during the school week, and stay at his mother’s on weekends, the arrangement seemed like a good idea. The brainstorm about homeschooling had come later and had changed everything even more.
    All around Nate now, kids tossed their backpacks into a pile and skated in the skate park during the narrow slice of time before school began. Nate added his own backpack to the pile and then turned and found himself face to face with TJ Wiles, who used to be his pretty good friend. “Yo, Nate!” said TJ, and the two of them slapped hands. “You’re back?”
    As he asked this, Maxie Roth zoomed over on her board. She had magenta hair and five tiny studs in one earlobe. She was as skinny as a boy, and she dressed like a boy, too, a skater boy, but her face was sharp and delicate. Her skateboard was pink with black stripes. She and Nate had started hanging out a little bit last year. They’d sat together in math class—both of them could do math in their heads superfast, and they both considered themselves skate freaks. Then the school year ended and Maxie had gone away to skate camp, and he hadn’t seen her since then. She looked the same, but a little older, and maybe a little more . . . magenta.
    “Is it true?” she asked Nate. “You’re, like, back?”
    “Nah,” said Nate. “Just taking the skateboard out for a ride.”
    “Oh. Too bad,” said Maxie. “It would’ve been fun to hang in math again,” she said. “It would’ve been, like, fun to the tenth power,” she added.
    “The eleventh power,” he said.
    The other kids were starting to collect their things and head for school. “Hey, Roth; hey, Wiles—come on!” someone called, and TJ hurried off. Maxie gave Nate a crooked smile, pushing a bright piece of hair behind her ear, and then she said, “See you around, Nate,” and was gone, too.
    The cold and crummy little skate park was empty, and Nate felt as if he were the last kid on earth. His backpack was the only one that remained on the ground. Nate picked it up, looped it on, and headed home by himself. He didn’t know why he felt as bad as he did. By the time he arrived at the front door of his apartment building, the streets of the city were quiet, all the kids off in school. All except one.
    “Nathaniel Armstrong Saviano, is that you?” called his father as Nate let himself into the apartment.
    It was, everyone said, an amazing place: enormous, with high ceilings and sunlight everywhere. After his father had come up with the idea of homeschooling Nate, he had added some features to the apartment that made it like a teenaged boy’s dream house. The goal was to turn it into a place where Nate would want to spend all day. For starters, Larry had built an indoor skate park. There was room here to do ollies, heelflips, and half-cabs. It was so much nicer than the skate park across the street from the school, yet without other kids around, it seemed pointless.
    Nate’s father had also installed a