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suggest that they were alike, she seethed, quickening her pace now that he had gone. How dare he say that she had secrets like his! Then she stopped abruptly, struck by what he had actually said.
    Just what
were
Leon Murphy’s secrets?
    Samson emerged from the bushes as she came through the gates. She scooped him up, hugging him fiercely. He leaped out of her arms in protest and ran toward the kitchen, Laura close behind.
    It felt strange arriving home with no bag weighing her down. She wondered if anyone would notice, but no one did. They were all busy with their own projects. Her mother was in the studio working on asculpture for a neighboring town. Her father had an article to finish. Harry was cooking, and Isabella was chopping vegetables.
    “Hello, kiddo,” Isabella called out. “How was the big wide world?”
    “Bad,” said Laura.
    Isabella broke into a high-pitched lament.
    “Not now, Isabella,” grumbled Harry. “I have to concentrate.” He turned to Laura. “We are cooking a farewell feast. We have to go.”
    Now they were leaving, too.
More misery,
she thought, and continued through to the studio. Pushing open the door, she found her mother frowning in concentration over a piece of stone.
    “Hello, honey bear,” she said without looking up. “How was your day?”
    “Bad,” replied Laura.
    “There’s some cake in the cupboard.”
    “I don’t want any cake.”
    “All right. Can you close the door? I don’t want this dust to get everywhere.”
    Laura closed the door and went to her room. She climbed onto the bed and pulled her knees up under her chin. She didn’t want to work on her dragon book anymore; it was tainted now. Every time she lookedat it, she would think of Miss Grisham. But she felt terribly lonely without it. She stared out the window at the dark magnolia. What would she do now?
    Harry and Isabella’s dinner was not a success. Laura’s mother was preoccupied, her father was irritable, and Laura was wretched. Even Isabella didn’t feel like singing. They chomped their way through
canard à l’orange
followed by salad and chocolate mousse as though they were eating baked beans on toast.
    At the end, Harry rose and raised his glass. “Farewell,” he said. “We are already all somewhere else, and it is good to go when the time is right. Thank you for your hospitality. Let us drink to friendship.”
    They all drank, Laura filling her glass with water from the jug on the table. But when she put her glass back down, she felt more miserable than ever. It seemed dreadful to be drinking to something that she did not have. Friends. Real friends, her own age, doing their own thing.
    She slipped off her chair and crept away to bed. Lying there, listening to the wind outside and the branch of the magnolia tree tapping against her window, she thought of Leon. It occurred to Laura that perhaps their strange conversation on the way home had been an attempt at friendship on Leon’s behalf.
    But she didn’t want him as a friend. No one was friends with Leon.
    She pulled the blankets up over her head and cried herself to sleep.

When morning came, Laura refused to get up. When her father quoted more Longfellow at her —“‘Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime’”— she did not say, as she usually did, “What about the women?” Instead, she burst into tears. And when her mother arrived, pulling on the knitted coat she used as a bathrobe, Laura huddled under the comforter and would not come out.
    “What’s the matter, honey bear?” asked her mother, trying to hug her through the covers.
    “Go away.”
    “Are you not feeling well?”
    Laura dug deeper into the bed, clutching the comforter tightly around her. “No, I feel sick.” It was true; her stomach churned every time she thought about having to go back to school.
    “Let me feel your forehead.”
    Laura did not move.
    “Why don’t you come out and we can talk about it?”
    Laura wriggled down until