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boys to lie down in sleeping bags and spend the night, which they had donemany times over previous summers. Now when Reggie and James looked at the tree house it was different, and James knew why. It was because Willie would never again reach it. For a second, James’s eyes felt funny, like he might cry, but he coughed and made the feeling go away.
    They knocked on the door, and after a while Mr. Van Allen’s face appeared. After searching above their heads as if expecting a cadre of police officers instead of two twelve-year-old boys, he looked down at them and his expression changed to one of muted pain. Ever since Willie’s accident, Mr. Van Allen seemed disoriented, as if he never knew exactly how he’d found himself standing there at the front door. As dads went, James had always figured Mr. Van Allen was all right, even though he had spent most of his leisure time within a nest of magazines, playing cards, and televised sports, making occasional loud offers to fetch James a can of beer. James had always assumed these offers were jokes, but nevertheless they had made him uncomfortable.
    But that Mr. Van Allen, as intimidating as he had been, was preferable to the unkempt, plodding automaton whose face they only ever saw on the other side of a screen door. Mr. Van Allen had just a little bit of hair around the sides of his head, and these days it stood up in wiry twists. His eyes were red and the skin around them was blue, and it looked like his sockets were sinking slowly into his skull. Mr. Van Allen had always smelledof beer, but now smelled like he bathed in it. He still smiled when he spoke, but his smiles made James and Reggie nervous.
    “Willie’s upstairs, boys,” he said, thumbing open the door lock.
    “Thanks, Mr. Van Allen,” they said, and ran past him as fast as they could.
    Willie’s house was nowhere as big as James’s—few houses in town were—but it was bigger than Reggie’s, and done up nicer. Still there was something about it that felt phony to James, as if the entire home was a scaffold dressed with fancy ornaments that, if you looked close, were not very fancy at all. It smelled harsh, like cleaning chemicals, and was always too hot. James and Reggie hurried to Willie’s room, where they could open a window to escape the suffocation.
    It was strange to have a friend with only one arm. For two weeks after the accident, they weren’t allowed to see Willie. As usual, Reggie had acted like he knew everything. “He could die at any moment,” Reggie had said for over a week. When that proved false, Reggie started saying, “There could be permanent brain damage, you know. He might not be able to talk. Maybe spit will just come pouring out of his mouth whenever he tries.”
    But when Willie had returned home from the hospital, he seemed fine. His skin was paler than before and his hair longer, but he had on a great big grin and brand-new baseball cap. The main difference was that where his left arm used to be was now just a little lump,though it was always hidden inside a sleeve fastened shut with two safety pins. James and Reggie had still never seen it.
    They had been allowed to stay only a few minutes that first time—Mrs. Van Allen had shooed them out, flapping her hands and laughing. Unlike her husband, Mrs. Van Allen had grown cheerier following her son’s accident, though this too troubled James. Why was she working so hard to convince them that everything was wonderful when the contrary evidence was right there in Willie’s stump?
    A couple of weeks later Willie was back running around with James and Reggie, almost like normal. Only now his missing arm caused a curious imbalance, and at seemingly random moments he would holler and fall on his face. He couldn’t play junkball anymore, but actually it worked out perfectly: the boys had always wanted an umpire and Willie had always been the worst player. It wasn’t all his fault—he was the shortest kid in sixth grade and one of